A section of the Easel Privacy Policy
Scope. This section applies to student accounts created inside Easel Classroom by a teacher at a school that has signed a data privacy agreement with Easel and authorized Easel to provide the service (“Student Accounts”). It controls over any other part of this Privacy Policy for Student Accounts. Teacher accounts are general accounts covered by the rest of this policy, except that any student information a teacher uploads is handled under this section. A school official’s administrator role, used only to accept Easel’s legal documents, holds no student information.
Who we are. Easel Software, Inc., 1111B S Governors Ave #87412, Dover, DE 19904, privacy@easel.com, (978) 584-8844, is the only operator that collects or maintains personal information from Student Accounts.
How Student Accounts are created and authorized. Easel’s general services are intended for adults, and Easel does not knowingly create a general account for anyone under 18. Students use Easel only through a Student Account that a teacher creates, from the school’s roster, after the school or district has signed a data privacy agreement with Easel and an authorized school official has completed Easel’s School Authorization Form and received Easel’s Direct Notice to Schools. Under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Federal Trade Commission guidance, a school may authorize Easel to collect personal information from students, including students under 13, on parents’ behalf when the information is used only for the school’s educational purposes. Easel relies on that authorization. Parents should direct questions and requests to the school.
What we collect from Student Accounts. The student’s school-issued email address, first name and last name, as rostered by the teacher (Easel accepts only addresses on the school’s verified email domains); the class the student is in; a password the student chooses (stored hashed); the design projects, project names and toolpath files the student creates, together with comments and proposed changes the student posts on projects inside the Classroom; records of fabrication jobs the student sends to the school’s equipment; and technical data (IP address, browser and device type, timestamps) generated automatically when the service is used. The email address is used only to sign in: we never send email to a student and never share the address. We do not collect from Student Accounts: date of birth, grade level, student ID number, phone number, postal address, photographs, precise geolocation, payment information, or demographic, assessment, attendance, health or special-education information.
How we use it. Solely to provide Easel Classroom to the school (creating the account, storing and displaying the student’s work to the student, the teacher and — only for projects the student shares — classmates in the same Classroom, generating toolpaths and running jobs on the school’s equipment) and to secure and maintain the service. We do not track or analyze what individual students do, and we do not use Student Account information for advertising, marketing, profiling, product analytics, or training artificial-intelligence models. We may compute de-identified, aggregate counts (for example, the number of active Classrooms) inside our own systems; no such count identifies a student. We do not condition a student’s use of the service on providing more information than is reasonably necessary.
Who can see it. A student’s full name is visible only to the student’s teacher and school. Classmates in the same Classroom see the student’s first name and last initial, and can see a project and its comments only if the student has turned on collaboration for that project. Nothing is visible outside the Classroom: Student Accounts have no public profile and cannot publish to Easel’s public gallery or share work outside the Classroom.
Persistent identifiers. Student Accounts use only the session identifiers strictly necessary to keep a student signed in and to protect the security of the service. No analytics, advertising or tracking identifiers are set on Student Accounts. Google reCAPTCHA, which protects sign-in with email and password against automated abuse, and Google Fonts are the only outside services contacted from student pages; each receives the IP address and browser information of the device, used solely to support the internal operations of the service, and none of the account, roster or project information we store.
Disclosure and our service providers. We disclose Student Account information only to (a) the student’s teacher and school, which own and control it; (b) our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (Amazon EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront and AWS WAF), which stores and processes the service for us in United States data centers and is bound by written agreement to process the information only to provide services to Easel and to protect it; and (c) as required by law or to protect the safety of a student. Our current list of service providers with access to Student Account information is: Amazon Web Services. Outside services contacted from student pages that receive IP address and browser information only: Google reCAPTCHA; Google Fonts. We will announce any change to this list to authorized schools at least 30 days before it takes effect. We plan to offer, in a later release, sign-in with a student’s Google Classroom account as an alternative to email and password; that option will not be enabled for a school until the school has been notified and has authorized it. We do not sell Student Account information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Retention and deletion (Easel’s written Student Data Retention Policy). We keep Student Account information only as long as needed to provide the service to the school.
| Information | Why we collect it | Business need to keep it | When it is deleted |
|---|---|---|---|
| School email address, first and last name, class, account ID, hashed password | To create the account and let the student sign in | Only while the student belongs to an active Classroom | Within 60 days after the last Classroom the student belongs to is archived, after the school withdraws its authorization, or after the school asks us to delete it, whichever comes first. A Classroom with no sign-in for 12 months is archived automatically. |
| Projects, project names, toolpaths, in-Classroom comments and proposed changes, fabrication job records | To store and display the student’s work and run the school’s equipment | While the student and teacher are using the work | Same as above. |
| Server logs (IP address, browser, timestamps, account ID) | To deliver, secure and troubleshoot the service | A short window for security investigation and debugging | Automatically after 90 days. |
| Backups | Service continuity | Restore after a failure | Backups expire within 35 days; data deleted from the live system is gone from all backups within 35 days. |
| Classroom set-up information for a school that has not completed authorization (the official’s name and school email; the empty Classroom) | To send the official the School Authorization Form | Only while authorization is pending | 90 days after the Classroom was set up, if the school has not completed authorization. |
| School authorization records, notice versions, request and deletion logs (the official’s and teacher’s names and account IDs; no student content) | To show that the school authorized collection and that requests were honored | To demonstrate compliance to schools and regulators | Life of the relationship with the school plus 3 years. |
We do not retain Student Account information indefinitely and do not keep it for any purpose other than those above. We keep no de-identified copies of student work; we may keep de-identified aggregate counts.
Parents’ rights. A parent may, through the student’s school, review the personal information we hold about the student, have it corrected or deleted, and refuse to permit further collection or use (which closes the Student Account). The school submits the request to privacy@easel.com; we respond within the time our agreement with the school requires and in no event later than 45 days, and complete deletion within 60 days.
Security. We maintain a written information security program with administrative, technical and physical safeguards appropriate to student information, including encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access with multi-factor authentication, staff training, and an annual risk assessment, and we require our service providers to do the same. If a security breach affects Student Account information, we notify the school within 72 hours of confirming it, or sooner where state law requires.
Changes. We will not apply a material change in how we collect, use or disclose Student Account information to an existing school until we have notified the school’s authorized official at least 30 days in advance and the school has re-authorized.