In ClassDojo’s first week in 2011, we were really excited to see 80 teachers use ClassDojo in their classrooms (you know who you are!). Today, we’re humbled to see how this community has grown to millions more in over 100 countries. Teachers, parents, and students everywhere use ClassDojo to build stronger relationships with each other. This is the heart of our mission. ****
Of course, these relationships require trust. So, today we’re announcing two updates.
First, we’re making some wonderful updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to better protect you. We believe the new policies better protect our community, and are also some of the friendliest and safest policies in education.
We hope you’ll read our new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy; here are some of the things we’ve clarified and updated:
3-Step Student Data Protection Policy: along with our COPPA-compliant signup process, we’re taking three big steps to protect all students:
1) Minimal information: we only collect minimal information from students.
2) 1-year deletion policy: there are no permanent records on ClassDojo. We delete students’ feedback points after 12 months, unless parents or students save them.
3) Deleting inactive accounts: student accounts expire after 1 year if they are inactive. This means we don’t keep any lingering student accounts, unless students are actually using them!
We really believe this 3-step policy protects students better than ever before.
No advertising: we’ve made it clear that we will not sell or rent any personal information to any third-parties for any reason – period.
Complete transparency: we’ve provided clear explanations of what information we receive, how we use it to provide the ClassDojo service. We work with other services who help us provide ClassDojo – for example, SendGrid helps us send you emails – and we’ve included information about these other services here. Furthermore, we’ve posted our policies on GitHub here, a site that lets you track how they’ve changed – so you’ll be able to see how they evolve over time.
You’re in control: parents and teachers can review and remove their information at any time. Parents can also always review their children’s personal information on ClassDojo, and request that it is deleted at any time.
Plain English: we’ve simplified the legal terms in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We know legal language can still be a chore – so we’ve added a ‘plain English’ explanation to every section to help.
Adopting DOE guidance: Based on the U.S. Department of Education’s recent guidance, we’ve clarified our Terms of Service significantly to help schools comply with FERPA.
Second – and even more exciting – we’re announcing our brand new, beautiful ‘Privacy Center’! This will give you a simple, clear overview of how ClassDojo protects your privacy and security. What’s more, you’ll find a bunch of helpful resources there that you can share with teachers, administrators and parents. We think this is a wonderful resource for you – feel free to share it with people you think need to know about it.
We hope this helps! We’re honored that tens of millions of you trust ClassDojo to be a part of your lives every day. Your trust means everything to us, and we promise we’ll always work as hard as we can to earn and keep it. That’s why we’ve created some of the friendliest, safest, and most transparent policies in education, and that’s why we’ll always do more to help. If you ever have any questions, drop us a line here – we’re here for you, and we’d love to help!
Finally: thank you for being part of this wonderful community. We’re excited to work with you to build stronger relationships between every teacher, parent and student in the world. The best is yet to come!
Cheers,
The ClassDojo Team