FERPA Statement & Data Privacy Policy for Cursive Technology, Inc.
Updated: Aug 26, 2024
Cursive Technology, Inc., a service provider for educational institutions and learners, (hereby the “company,” “we,” or “Cursive”) with a public web presence at http://www.cursivetechnology.com, values the privacy of our visitors and the writers, students, faculty, and teachers who use our tools (hereby referred to as “services”).
At Cursive we believe in transparency and integrity, while valuing your desire for privacy. As you review our policies, please note that our goal is to foster trust and confidence in writing, to do so, we focus on authentication and the writing process. To be effective, this requires us to collect data other than the final written product. The personally identifiable information (PII) we collect is appropriately safe-guarded and protected to ensure your privacy and to meet the obligations which we’ve outlined below.
Below you will find information on the nature of the data we collect, our pledge to protect your privacy, statements about activities which we do not engage, information about our security measures, and your rights as a user of our service.
If you have additional questions or require more information about our Privacy Policy, do not hesitate to contact us info@cursivetechnology.com.
Before we get started, it’s important to tell you about the things we do not do. We do not:
- Sell user data.
- Share user data with 3rd parties beyond the methods described below.
- Collect personally identifiable information (PII) beyond that needed for authorized educational/school purposes, or as authorized by the parent/student.
- Use or disclose student information or PII for behavioral targeting of advertisements to students.
- Build a personal profile of a student other than for supporting authorized educational/school purposes or as authorized by the parent/student.
- Make material changes to this Privacy Policies or Terms of Use without first providing prominent notice to the users and/or account holder(s) upon login or via their host educational institution (e.g., notification may be provided through the institution/agency, or to the parent/student).
- Prevent users from being able to opt-out of the service in the event we change our data usage policy in a way that is inconsistent with terms you were initially provided.
- Make material changes to other policies or practices governing the use of PII that are inconsistent with contractual requirements.
- Knowingly retain Student PII beyond the time period required to support the authorized educational/school purposes, or as authorized by the parent/student.
This FERPA Statement & Privacy Policy applies only to our online activities and is valid for visitors to our service with regards to the information that they shared and/or collect in Cursive’s application. This policy is not applicable to any information collected offline or via channels other than the services.
FERPA and Children’s Digital Information
As a tech-enabled education tool, this service is provided at the direction of schools and in accordance with our contract with the School for Educational/School purposes.
We encourage parents and guardians to observe, participate in, and/or monitor and guide their student’s online activity.
Cursive does not knowingly collect any Personal Identifiable Information from children under the age of 13 without appropriate consent. If you think that your child provided this kind of information on our website without consent, we strongly encourage you to contact us immediately and we will do our best efforts to promptly remove such information from our records.
Pursuant to the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) we do not disclose personally identifiable information from student records. This information is available only to the student user, the activity/assignment creator (teacher), and the school through a specific, secure integration.
We do reserve the right to utilize collected data to advance research and improve the services provided to educational institutions who adopt our service and for the overall improvement of our services.
Consent and Changes to the Privacy Policy
By using our application, you hereby consent to our FERPA Statement & Privacy Policy and agree to these terms.
This privacy policy will evolve along with our services, as such, we will alert our clients and users in the event of a material change and seek explicit consent to the new terms before implementing the change. For organizations, we will communicate material changes in accordance to our contractual obligations (e.g. in writing); for individual users we will seek your consent through the user interface of our service. In the event that you do not accept the new terms, PII will be processed under the previously agreed to privacy policy version.
Information Collected or Received
The personal information that you are asked to provide, and the reasons why you are asked to provide it, will be made clear to you at the point we ask you to provide your personal information.
Personally identifiable information sent to or collected by the service includes:
- Key press data: this data is generated by using a keyboard to interact with a text editor collected for the service and is classified as biometric (in some jurisdictions this may be categorized as “PII” in its raw format). This data is the minimum dataset for Cursive to provide its service. Derived and calculated values may be available to you as the user or to officials at your educational organizations based on their roles for any activity you have completed.
- Educational data: text submitted by the user to classroom activities and exercises, including but not limited to essays, forum discussions, and short answers (“writing”).
- (Browser Extension users not connected through institutional integration) Email address: for users opting to use our service directly through a browser extension or to manage their account, email may be collected through the authentication service.
If you contact us directly, we may receive additional information about you such as your name, email address, phone number, the contents of the message and/or attachments you may send us, and any other information you may choose to provide.
All data is securely collected, received, transferred and stored using encryption technologies, our security program is reasonably designed to protect the security, confidentiality, and integrity of Student PII against risk, theft, or unauthorized access.
How we use information
We use the information we collect in various ways, including to:
- Provide, operate, and maintain our website
- Improve, personalize, and expand our website
- Understand and analyze how users use our website
- Develop new products, services, features, and functionality offered for free or through purchase of services
- Communicate, either directly or through one of our partners, including for customer service, to provide you with updates and other information relating to the website, and for marketing and promotional purposes
- Send emails
- Find and prevent fraud
- Verify authorship
Business Continuity
Cursive will allow a successor entity to maintain the Student PII, in the case of our merger or acquisition by another entity, provided the successor entity is subject to these same commitments for the previously collected Student PII.
Log Files
Cursive follows a standard procedure of using log files. These files log visitors when they visit websites. All hosting companies do this as part of hosting services’ analytics. The information collected by log files include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date and time stamp, referring/exit pages, and possibly the number of clicks. These are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable. The purpose of the information is for analyzing trends, administering the site, tracking users’ movement on the website, and gathering demographic information.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Like any other website, Cursive may use ‘cookies’. These cookies store information including visitors’ preferences, and the pages on the website that the visitor accessed or visited. The information is used to optimize the users’ experience by customizing our web page content based on visitors’ browser type and/or other information.
Third Party Privacy Policies
Cursive’s Privacy Policy does not apply to other advertisers or websites. Thus, we are advising you to consult the respective Privacy Policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information. It may include their practices and instructions about how to opt-out of certain options.
You can choose to disable cookies through your individual browser options. To know more detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers, it can be found at the browsers’ respective websites.
Authorized partners of Cursive, who may receive access to data in order to perform services associated with core business operations, are obligated to follow these same commitments for the given Student PII and as are outlined in the principles of the Student Privacy Pledge as outlined at studentprivacypledge.org.
CCPA Privacy Rights (Do Not Sell My Personal Information)
Under the CCPA, among other rights, California consumers have the right to:
Request that a business that collects a consumer’s personal data disclose the categories and specific pieces of personal data that a business has collected about consumers.
Request that a business delete any personal data about the consumer that a business has collected.
Request that a business that sells a consumer’s personal data, not sell the consumer’s personal data.
If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us.
GDPR Data Protection Rights
We would like to make sure you are fully aware of all of your data protection rights. Every user is entitled to the following:
The right to access – You have the right to request copies of your personal data. We may charge you a small fee for this service.
The right to rectification – You have the right to request that we correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request that we complete the information you believe is incomplete.
The right to erasure – You have the right to request that we erase your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to data portability – You have the right to request that we transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.
If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us (info at cursivetechnology dot com).
Security
Security and privacy are interlinked and rely on a strong shared foundation of policies and business practices. Our complete security statement can be found at https://cursivetechnology.com/security/.
In summary, Cursive technical and business operations enforce a “policy of least privilege” ensuring that access to sensitive information or business systems are restricted by role. Our system and cybersecurity policies leverage best in class services and industry standards to safeguard student information and code. This includes multi-factor authentication for end-point and account protection, a deployment strategy with dedicated change management responsibilities for Cursive employees, and appropriately strong encryption for sensitive data and information throughout our technology services and in transit to and from customer sites.
Limited Use
The use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.