About this policy

This Privacy Policy is adapted from the Creative Commons Sharealike licensed privacy policy of Automattic — the company that runs the open source blog platform WordPress — as they have a well-earned reputation for looking out for users but also the resources to cover the legal bases appropriately.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

You can contact us if you have questions.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

  • Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a Wiki Education Dashboard account to provide an email address along with a name and a Wikipedia username–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information — like a bio and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create an account.
  • Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or bio. Your public profile information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
  • Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us – a seat in a course, for example – you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information. This information is typically retained by the third-party payment processing service.
  • Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content (such as a course description and timeline). For example, if you have a course page that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet.
  • Communications with Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our staff about a support question, post a question about your site in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, or otherwise, we may store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you create or make changes to your dashboard.wikiedu.org course page.
  • Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform–in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site (e.g., [Wikipedia username] created “[title of course]” at [time/date]). We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
  • Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (when, for example, you post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
  • Stored Information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of a rare mineral.
  • Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Wiki Education uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, when you create or log into your Dashboard account via your Wikipedia account, we will receive information from that service, including permission to make edits on your behalf, via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your course page and track the contributions of your students;
  • To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their courses more efficiently;
  • To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  • To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Wiki Education and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  • To communicate with you, for example through an email, about programs offered by Wiki Education and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Wiki Education and our programs (which you can unsubscribe from at any time); and
  • To personalize your experience using our Services, target our messages to groups of our users (for example, those who study a particular topic area, or have worked with us for a certain length of time), and serve relevant content.

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that: (1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information. We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

  • Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  • Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, payment providers you use for your ecommerce operations, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, and data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services), those that assist us with our communication efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific target group or improving our email campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and those who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
  • Legal and Regulatory Requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Wiki Education, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of organization assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our organization by another organization, or in the unlikely event that Wiki Education closes down, user information could be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorize us to do so, such as the social media services that you connect to your site through our Publicize feature.
  • Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
  • Published Support Requests: If you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly. That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on your course page, and any edits you make on Wikipedia, are all available to others. Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Wiki Educations’s websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for one to several months. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Wiki Education’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites. The deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, and profile information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.
  • Limit Access to Information on Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features (like adding a location to a photograph, for example).
  • Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, Wiki Education does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Wiki Education’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Wiki Education’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us. EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because Wiki Education’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

  • In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield; or
  • In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Third Party Software and Services

If you’d like to use third party services to communicate with us, such as Slack, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. For example, some third party services may request or require access to your (yours, your visitors’, or customers’) data, for example, via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third party service or grant access, your data will handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about collection, use, and sharing of information, which you should review before using the software or services.

Privacy Policy Changes

Wiki Education may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, most likely to keep up with changes to the Automattic Privacy Policy from which it is derived. Wiki Education encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and in some cases we may provide additional notice such as sending you a notification through email or your dashboard. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy. That’s it! Thanks for reading.

  • 2019-10-08 — Replaced previous Privacy Policy, based on an earlier version of the Automattic policy, with one based on the latest, post-GDPR version.