Student Privacy (COPPA)

Scienteer Paperless Online Science Fair Project Management System Student Privacy

Scienteer is committed to protecting the privacy of children who use our website and science fair project management tool. This Children’s Online Privacy Policy explains our information collection, disclosure, and parental consent practices with respect to information provided by children under the age of 13 (“child” or “children”). This policy is in accordance with the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”), and outlines our practices in the United States and Latin America regarding children’s personal information. For more information about COPPA and general tips about protecting children’s online privacy, please visit http://www.onguardonline.gov/articles/0031-protecting-your-childs-privacy-online

Scienteer's full privacy policy can be found at http://scienteer.com/privacy

1. The Information We Collect From Children, How We Use It, and How and When We Communicate With Parents

Scienteer offers to its users an online paperless science fair management application, targeted for students, schools, teachers, mentors and science fair staff. Our site helps students register and manage their research and helps teachers, mentors and fair personnel to track and provide assistance to their students for their science fair competitions. Below we summarize potential instances of collection and outline how and when we will provide parental notice and/or seek parental consent. In any instance that we collect personal information from a child, we will retain that information only so long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the activity request or allow the child to continue to have access to his/her account, and ensure the security of our users and our services, or as required by law. In the event we discover we have collected information from a child in a manner inconsistent with COPPA’s requirements, we will either delete the information or immediately seek the parent’s consent for that collection.

Registration

Children can register under their school and teacher for participation in the science fair competitions. During the registration process, we ask the child to provide certain information for notification, advancement tracking, competition participation, user account management, safety and security purposes, and registration of required paperwork. The child’s user account information will be kept from year to year so that the student maintains access until it is terminated by a Parent, Teacher, School or Science Fair Official. This information may include:

A parent or guardian’s email address, the child’s name, the child’s e-mail, ethnicity, gender, the child’s member or account username, and password. We also ask for birth dates to validate their ages. We will not require a child to provide more information than is reasonably necessary in order to participate in the science fair competitions.

About the collection of parent email address: Consistent with the requirements of COPPA, on any child-targeted site or application, or in any instance where we ask for age and determine the user is age 12 or under, we will ask for a parent or guardian email address or written permission before we collect any personal information from the child. If you believe your child is participating in an activity that collects personal information and you or another parent/guardian have NOT received an email or notification providing notice or seeking your consent, please feel free to contact us at privacy@scienteer.com. We will not use these parent or children’s emails to market to the parent or child, they will be for notification and verification purposes only.

About Verifiable Parental Consent:

Email Consent. To collect personal information from a child, COPPA requires that we first seek a parent or guardian’s consent by email. In the email we will explain what information we are collecting, how we plan to use it, how the parent can provide consent, and how the parent can revoke consent. If we do not receive parental consent within a reasonable time, we will delete the parent contact information and any other information collected from the child in connection with that activity.

Written Consent. If a parent or guardian can’t be reached by e-mail, the child will bring home a set of forms for the parent to sign. The child will bring the signed forms back to his/her school and the child’s teacher will verify the information and that consent has been given. In the forms packet we will explain what information we are collecting, how we plan to use it, and how the parent can revoke consent. If we do not receive parental consent within a reasonable time, we will delete the parent contact information and any other information collected from the child in connection with that activity.

Notifications

From time to time a child may receive e-mail notifications or reminders from Scienteer that something in his/her account or research project needs attention.

Persistent Identifiers

When children interact with Scienteer, certain information may automatically be collected, both to make our sites and applications more interesting and useful to children and for various purposes related to our business. Examples include the type of computer operating system, the child’s IP address or mobile device identifier, the web browser, the frequency with which the child visits various parts of our sites or applications, and information regarding the online or mobile service provider. This information is collected using technologies such as cookies, flash cookies, web beacons, and other unique identifiers. This information may be collected by Scienteer or by a third party. This data is principally used for internal purposes only, in order to:

• provide children with access to features on our site
• customize content and improve our sites and applications
• conduct research and analysis to address the performance of our site and application
• generate anonymous reporting for use by Scienteer

Please contact us at the mailing address, email, or phone number below with questions about the operators’ privacy policies and collection and use practices:

Scienteer Technologies Corporation
1724 Windy Walk Cove
Spicewood, TX 78669
United States of America

Phone: (512) 284-4810
Email: privacy@scienteer.com

2. Who will have access to my child’s information?

• The child’s school science fair coordinator, teacher and/or mentor, and specific fair staff required for competition processes such as fair directors, judges and safety/regulatory review boards, scholarships, or awards associated directly with the child’s affiliated science fair competition and the child’s research project.
• We may disclose personal information if permitted or required by law, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena. To the extent permitted by applicable law, we also may disclose personal information collected from children (i) in response to a law enforcement or public agency’s (including schools or children services) request; (ii) if we believe disclosure may prevent the instigation of a crime, facilitate an investigation related to public safety or protect the safety of a child using our sites or applications; (iii) to protect the security or integrity of our sites, applications, and other technology, as well as the technology of our service providers; or (iv) enable us to take precautions against liability.
• No third party (other than those listed above) will ever be provided with any personally identifiable information.

3. Parental Choices and Controls

At any time, parents can refuse to permit us to collect further personal information from their children in association with a particular account, and can request that we delete from our records the personal information we have collected in connection with that account. Please keep in mind that a request to delete records will lead to a termination of the accounts, memberships, and competition entry.

Where a child has registered for a scienteer.com account, we use two methods to allow parents to access, change, or delete the personally identifiable information that we have collected from their children:

1. Parents make the request to their child’s teacher
2. Parents can contact scienteer.com directly to request access to, change, or delete their child’s personal information by sending an email to us at support@scienteer.com

Last Edited on 2017-10-18