Please read the following to learn more about our Privacy Policy. By visiting or using the Website or Services in any manner, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined in this Privacy Policy, and you hereby consent that we will collect, use, and share your information in the following ways.
This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of personally identifiable information (“Personal Information”) that we gather when you are accessing or using our Services. This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that we do not own or control, or to individuals that we do not employ or manage.
If you are not of legal age to form a binding contract (in many jurisdictions, this age is 18), you may only use the Services and disclose information to us with your parent’s or legal guardian’s express consent. Review this Privacy Policy with your parent or legal guardian to make sure you understand it.
We only collect Personal Information through the Services from a child under 13 where that student’s school, district, and/or teacher has agreed (via the terms described in the Terms and Conditions) to obtain parental consent for that child to use the Services and disclose Personal Information to us or where the parent or legal guardian of a child has signed up or been invited to sign up or approve the child to use the Services.
If you are a student under 13, please do not send any Personal Information about yourself to us if your school, district, and/or teacher has not obtained this prior consent from your parent or guardian or if your parent or guardian has not signed you up and given their approval for you to use the Service, and please do not send any Personal Information other than what we request from you in connection with the Services.
If we learn we have collected Personal Information from a student under 13 without parental consent being obtained by his or her parent, guardian, school, district, and/or teacher, or if we learn a student under 13 has provided us personal information beyond what we request from him or her, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a student under 13 may have provided us personal information in violation of this paragraph, please contact us at privacy@bsd.education.
When we use the term “Personal Information” in this Privacy Policy, we are referring to personally identifiable information of individual, non-children (i.e., adult) registrants of the Services. References to “Children’s Personal Information” only apply to personally identifiable information collected from users who have registered for the Services as minor students (i.e., students under the age of 13). General references to “information” apply to all users.
We gather various types of Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information from our users, as explained more fully below. We may use this Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information to personalize and improve our services for educational purposes, to allow our users to set up a user account and profile, to contact users, to fulfill your requests for certain products and services, to analyze how users utilize the Services, and as otherwise set forth in this Privacy Policy. We may share certain types of Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information with third parties, as described below.
A. Information You Provide to Us:
We receive and store any information you knowingly provide to us. For example, we collect Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information, such as your name, email address, school affiliation and picture (if provided).
If you provide your third-party account login credentials to us, you understand some content and/or information in those accounts (“Third Party Account Information”) may be transmitted into your account with us if you authorize such transmissions, and that Third Party Account Information transmitted to our Services is covered by this Privacy Policy. You can choose not to provide us with certain information, but then you may not be able to register with us or to take advantage of some of our features.
When using Google, Microsoft or other Third Party Accounts to sign into your BSD account we use only basic information from the Third Party about your user profile: Third Party Account ID, email address, name and profile picture. Teachers may also opt in to grant BSD Online additional access to Third Party Account data (e.g. Google Classrooms). This will involve the teacher being prompted for additional consent to access the relevant data. BSD’s use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
The Children’s Personal Information you provide shall only be used for creating your individual account (which will identify you within the user group(s) for which you have been granted an access code (“Limited Access Group”)), and for sending you notifications. You may modify or remove your Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information identified below at any time by logging into your account and accessing features to edit your profile and/or account information. Please note that your school and/or district, can view all activity and content associated with your student account, including your Children’s Personal Information.
If you have provided us Personal Information with a means of contacting you, we may use such means to communicate with you. For example, we may send you promotional offers on behalf of BSD or communicate with you about your use of the Services. Also, we may receive a confirmation when you open a message from us. This confirmation helps us make our communications with you more relevant and improve our services. If you do not want to receive communications from us, please do not opt in to such communications or indicate your preference by sending us an email to this effect with your username information to privacy@bsd.education.
B. Information Collected Automatically:
Whenever you interact with our Services, we automatically receive and record information on our server logs from your browser including your IP address, “cookie” information, and the page you requested. “Cookies” are identifiers we transfer to your computer or mobile device that allow us to recognize your browser or mobile device and tell us how and when pages and features in our Services are visited and by how many people. You may be able to change the preferences on your browser or mobile device to prevent or limit your computer or device acceptance of cookies, but this may prevent you from taking advantage of some of our features. Our analytics vendors partners may also transmit cookies to your computer or device, when you click on pages that appear on the Services.
When we collect usage information (such as the numbers and frequency of visitors to the Website), we only use this data in aggregate form, and not in a manner that would identify any user personally. For example, this aggregate data tells us how often users use parts of the Services, so that we can make the Services as effective as possible for as many users as possible. We may also provide this aggregate information to our partners; our partners may use such information to understand how often and in what ways people use our Services, so that they, too, can provide you with an optimal experience. We do not disclose aggregate information to a partner in a manner that would identify you personally.
We neither rent nor sell your Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information in personally identifiable form to anyone. We share your Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information with third parties as described in Section II and in this Section:
A. Affiliated Businesses and Third Party Websites We Do Not Control: In certain situations, businesses or third party websites we’re affiliated with may sell items or provide services to you through the Services (either alone or jointly with us). You can recognize when an affiliated business is associated with such a transaction or service, and we will share your Personal Information with that affiliated business only to the extent that it is related to such transaction or service. If you are a student/child user, we will not share your Children’s Personal Information in connection with any commercial third party transaction or service. One such service may include the ability for you to automatically transmit Third Party Account Information to your Services profile or to automatically transmit information in your Services profile to your third party account. For adult users, we have no control over the policies and practices of third party websites or businesses as to privacy or anything else, so if you choose to take part in any transaction or service relating to an affiliated website or business, please review all such business’ or websites’ policies.
B. Agents: We employ other companies and people to perform tasks on our behalf and need to share your information with them to provide educational products or services to you. Unless we tell you differently, our agents do not have any right to use the Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information we share with them beyond what is necessary to assist us. We also take steps to ensure that they agree to protect the Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information shared with them.
C. Any content you upload to or make public through your public user profile, along with any Personal Information or (if applicable) Children’s Personal Information or content that you voluntarily disclose online in a manner other users can view (on discussion boards, in messages and chat areas, etc.) becomes publicly available, and can be collected and used by others. We do not control the policies and practices of any other third party site or service that are available to adult users.
D. Business Transfers: We may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, customer information is typically one of the business assets that would be transferred. Also, if we (or our assets) are acquired, or if we go out of business, enter bankruptcy, or go through some other change of control, Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information would be one of the assets transferred to or acquired by a third party, if permitted by applicable law.
E. Protection of BSD and Others: We reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information that we reasonably believe is necessary to comply with law or court order; enforce or apply our conditions of use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of BSD, our employees, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
F. With Your Consent: Except as set forth above, you will be notified when your Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information may be shared with third parties in personally identifiable form, and will be able to prevent the sharing of this information. In the case of Children’s Personal Information, we will first obtain the prior verifiable consent of a parent or legal guardian, or require that the teacher/school do so.
Your account is protected by a password for your privacy and security. If you access your account via a third party site or service, you may have additional or different sign-on protections via that third party site or service. You must prevent unauthorized access to your account and Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information by selecting and protecting your password and/or other sign-on mechanism appropriately and limiting access to your computer or device and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your account.
We use industry-standard security techniques to protect the privacy of your account and other Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information we hold in our records. While we may provide encryption technologies and use other reasonable precautions to protect confidential information and provide suitable security, we cannot guarantee complete security. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors, may compromise the security of user information at any time.
BSD domains have SSL encryption fully implemented across all domains that all users interact with. This protects content being transmitted between servers from being read or edited by third parties.
The Services may contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and/or practices on other sites. When following a link to another site you should read that site’s privacy policy.
We recognize that, with the greatest available protections, data breach incidents remain a possibility. We therefore follow a formal process for the identification, response, cessation and notification of any such a data breach. Our data breach policy and process is updated regularly to conform with international law, regulation and best practice. The specifics of our data breach policy can be accessed and read here.
Through your account settings, you may access, and, in some cases, edit or delete the following information you’ve provided to us:
name and password
email address
user profile information
content in your account
The information you can view, update, and delete may change as the Services change. If you have any questions about viewing or updating information we have on file about you, please contact us at privacy@bsd.education.
If you would like to request that Children’s Personal Information regarding your child be updated or deleted (or, if you are a teacher, a child that is in your class) by the Services, or if you wish to request that we discontinue the further collection nor use of Children’s Personal Information, please contact us at privacy@bsd.education. A minor student’s participation in our Services, and the ability of a minor student to access the Services, will not be conditioned on that student providing more Children’s Personal Information than is reasonably necessary for that participation or access. We will respond to a request made pursuant to this section within 30 days of our receipt of such request.
Student accounts can be deleted at any time by school administrators or by the students themselves. In addition,
educators or school administrators can request that any account be deactivated or deleted at any time which can be carried out within 24 hours.
At the point of deactivation and deletion student information is immediately anonymized and purged. Anonymization and purge of student data will be carried out within a month of deactivation and deletion to allow for completion of any educationally necessary consultation processes with schools.
To request removal of your Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information from our public forums, contact us at privacy@bsd.education. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your information, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.
You can always opt not to disclose information to us, but keep in mind some information may be needed to register with us or to take advantage of some of our features.
You may be able to add, update, or delete information as explained in Section V above. When you update information, however, we may maintain a copy of the unrevised information in our records. [You may delete your account using the options provided in your profile whereupon all data associated with your account will be deleted within 30 days.]
Please note that some information may remain in our records after your deletion of such information from your account. We may use any aggregated data derived from or incorporating your Personal Information and Children’s Personal Information after you update or delete it, but not in a manner that would identify you personally.
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used. If we make changes in the way we use Personal Information or Children’s Personal Information, we will notify you by posting an announcement on our Website or sending you a message, and if necessary, obtain the prior verifiable consent of a parent or legal guardian. You are bound by any changes to the Privacy Policy when you use the Services after such changes have been first posted.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding our privacy policies, please send us a detailed message to privacy@bsd.education, and we will try to resolve your concerns.
BSD Education
15/F, 88 Commercial Building,
28-34 Wing Lok Street,
Sheung Wan,
Hong Kong
Effective Date: 1 January 2018