Bookji Privacy Policy

LAST UPDATED: 10/20/2024

Welcome to Bookji. A modern and fun way to get your students excited about books and reading. Bookji is a social reading platform that emphasizes collaboration with peers, emoji integration, and geographical awareness to better captivate young readers with books. Bookji will help create an environment and culture where students see themselves, their classmates, friends and teachers as readers.

Bookji harnesses the most powerful tool to excite kids about reading—peer influence. On Bookji, classmates and friends can create book posts and share book-related content.

Bookji and Student Privacy

We value the privacy of all of our users and we know you care about your privacy and the privacy of your students, so we created this Privacy Policy. It explains the information we collect from users and how and when we disclose or use it. By accessing or using the Bookji website, services, software, applications, and/or content made available by Bookji, you are consenting to collection and use of your information as outlined in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies to our collection and use of data collected from schools, teachers, and students.

Protecting your privacy is fundamental to our mission and business. The following summarizes our promises to you with regard to student data:

• We use the personal information we collect from students only to provide you and your student’s access to the Bookji Service and its features as outlined in our Terms of Service.
• We do not use student personal information for advertising or marketing.
• We will never show a students information outside of their school.
• We never directly show third party ads in Bookji.
• We believe that schools should have control over their student data.
• We employ industry-standard network security and encryption technology to protect student data.
• We are transparent about our practices and will notify you if things change.
• We never display or allow third-party ads, share student data for advertising purposes, or allow data collection by third party advertisers or data brokers from students.

We have built a safe online platform to support, promote and foster independent reading activities of children of all ages. Because our users include children who are 12 and younger, we take extra precautions to keepall Bookji users safe and protected. Our information practices are designed to comply with the United States Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Our Privacy Policy will help you understand the different measures we take to help create a safe and fun digital platform for kids.

Registration

Bookji does not allow students to register without a unique eight digit class code, which needs to be provided by their teacher or school administrator. By providing a student with a class code, we are assuming, and you represent and warrant, that you have the authority to provide consent on behalf of the student’s parents, and for us to collect information from students for the purpose of providing the Services to you as described in our Terms of Service. Do not provide a class code to a student prior to receiving written consent from the parent.

Information We Collect

In providing our Services, we collect the following information:

• Profile Information:
  • Teachers, Librarians, and School Administrators: We collect first and last names, email addresses, usernames, passwords, an associated emoji avatar or profile image, and information about the classes they teach.
  • Students: We collect first and last names (last name can be an initial), an optional email address, username, password, an emoji avatar, age category (12 and under, 13 and over, or unset), grade level, and class enrollment.
• Lexile Levels:
  • If provided by a teacher or student, we may store a student's Lexile reading level.
• User Book Information:
  • Bookji stores a variety of information about books the user interacts with while using the application. We store information such as which books users have read, are reading now, books they add to their 'reading list', book reactions with emojis, their favorite books, and books they are willing to share with others in their school. This information is only provided to users with the student’s school, and if the user marks their profile as private, this information is hidden from all users, except their teachers and school administrators.
  • Information about book interactions, such as clicks on books or emoji-based searches, is recorded for analytics purposes within the school's account. This data is accessible only to the student’s teachers and school administrators if the user has set their profile to private.
  • We ensure that no student information is shared outside their school.
• Use of Service Information:
  • We collect data on how the Services are used, including general location (based on IP address or GPS), session duration, content viewed, and actions taken while using the Services.
• Device Information:
  • We gather information about the user’s device, such as device type, browser version, operating system, IP address, and referring URL. This data is collected automatically when the Services are accessed to help diagnose problems, manage our Services, and provide support.
• Cookies & Beacons:
  • Cookies: We use cookies to improve security, keep user sessions, facilitate navigation, personalize your experience, and understand usage patterns. This information helps us continually enhance the Services' functionality and design.
  • Google Analytics: We use pixel tags (web beacons and clear GIFs) through Google Analytics to track navigation patterns within the Services, such as clicked links and accessed content.
  • We do not use cookies, pixel tags, or other technologies to track user activity on third-party services.

Data Collection - Embedded YouTube Videos

Bookji offers educational video content through embedded YouTube video players with the following considerations:

• Child-Directed Service Registration: Bookji is registered as a child-directed service with YouTube to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the following ways.
  • Data Collection Restrictions: When a site is designated as child-directed, YouTube imposes stricter limits on data collection. This means that any videos embedded on the site that are marked as "Made for Kids" will follow specific data privacy rules, such as not collecting personal information from users under the age of 13 without parental consent. By registering the site, you ensure that YouTube recognizes it as a child-focused platform, leading to reduced data collection practices suitable for children.
  • No Targeted Advertising: For child-directed sites, YouTube disables personalized advertising for users viewing embedded videos, even if those users are not logged into a YouTube account. This helps comply with COPPA's rules against serving targeted ads to children, which require explicit parental consent.
  • Enhanced Privacy Controls: YouTube adjusts its features for child-directed content to minimize data collection and behavioral tracking, such as disabling comments, live chats, and notifications. Registering the site helps ensure that YouTube automatically applies these restrictions to align with COPPA requirements.
  • Automatic Default to "Made for Kids" Settings: When embedding videos on a child-directed site, YouTube may apply the "Made for Kids" settings by default, ensuring compliance without the need for additional configuration. This reduces the risk of non-compliance by automatically treating content appropriately for young audiences.
• Privacy-Friendly Embedding: We use the www.youtube-nocookie.com domain for embedding YouTube videos. This approach limits tracking by preventing cookies from being set on the user’s device until they interact with the video (e.g., by clicking "Play"). While this reduces initial tracking, YouTube may still collect data and set cookies if the user engages with the content.
• Age Settings: Within Bookji, teachers can set a student's age category to 12 and under, 13 and above, or leave it as unset. Bookji defaults to showing only 'Made for Kids' videos to comply with COPPA and maintain a safer online environment for younger students. Additionally, students can not set their own age, they can only be set by a teacher or school adminitrator.
  • For Students 12 and Under and Unset Ages: If a student’s age is either set to 12 and under or left unset (the default) by the teacher, we will only embed videos designated as 'Made for Kids' by YouTube. These videos comply with COPPA requirements, meaning YouTube limits the collection of personal data and does not use the data for targeted advertising or behavioral tracking.
  • For Students 13 and Above: When a student's age is set to 13 or above, we may embed YouTube videos that are not 'Made for Kids.' YouTube may collect standard usage data for these videos, which could include viewing behavior, device information, and interactions with the content. This data may be used in accordance with YouTube's privacy practices, including personalized advertising and analytics. We encourage teachers, students and parents to review YouTube's data practices. Our use of such videos is intended to enhance educational content and support the learning experience.

Data Collection - Embedded Audio Players

Bookji offers teachers the ability to host educational audio content on a Google Drive associated with their school's Google Workspace account, and to have Bookji show to students an embedded Google drive audio player to play the video with the following considerations:

• School-Level Control: Schools have the following choices regarding the display of embedded audio players:
  • Disable Embedded Players: Schools can choose to completely disable the display of embedded audio players for all students.
  • Age-Restricted Embedded Players: Schools can restrict the display of embedded audio players to only those students whose teachers have indicated they are 13 years of age or older.
  • Certified Embedded Players: Schools can allow the display of embedded audio players for all students, but require teachers to certify, at the time of creating the audio file link, that the audio file linked to is hosted on the school's COPPA-compliant Google Drive account within the school's Google Workspace for Education domain. This certification includes confirmation that the school has obtained the necessary parental consents for any students under 13 whose personal information might be included in the audio files, or captured by the embedded audio player.
• Data Collection by Google: If the school enables embedded audio players to be shown, please be aware that Google, the provider of the embedded player technology, may collect certain usage data, such as IP addresses and access times. We encourage you to review Google's privacy policy for more information about their data collection practices.
• Our Commitment: We do not collect any personal information from students in connection with the embedded audio player functionality. Our role is to provide the technology platform; the school is responsible for managing the audio content and ensuring compliance with COPPA.

How Do We Use Your Information?

The information we collect is used to deliver educational services, improve our software, and customize the learning experience for each student. We may use aggregated data for analytics purposes to enhance the platform but will not use any personal data for behavioral advertising. Any usage of data will be strictly for educational purposes.

More specifically, we use information about you for the following general purposes:

• To register accounts and students.
• To fulfill user requests and manage accounts.
• To understand how users engage with Bookji, personalize their experience (e.g., displaying the user’s name on their profile), and improve the platform.
• To enhance customer service by diagnosing problems, troubleshooting issues, and providing maintenance and support.
• To communicate with users and send notifications regarding platform activities.
• To respond to questions and comments.
• To prevent potentially prohibited or illegal activities and enforce our Terms of Service.
• To allow teachers to monitor students' reading activities, view reactions and comments on books, and support instructional needs.
• As otherwise described at the time of data collection.

The profile name of a student will not appear to anyone outside of the student’s school.

We may share information with service providers who assist us in operating our platform, provided that they adhere to similar privacy and security obligations. We may also share data with schools for reporting and educational purposes. We do not sell or rent any personal information to third parties, and we require third-party service providers to only use the data for our specified purposes.

We may disclose information to a third party in the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets or stock (including in bankruptcy or similar proceedings).

We may use and disclose information as we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public and government authorities, including public and government authorities outside your country of residence; (d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations or those of any of our affiliates; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, and/or that of our affiliates, you or others; and (g) to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

We may use and disclose information that does not identify or otherwise directly relate to an individual for any purpose, subject to any restrictions imposed by applicable law.

How Do We Protect Your Information?

Bookji has gone to great lengths to keep your information safe. We employ industry-standard security measures, including encryption, firewalls, and secure server environments to protect against unauthorized access or data breaches. We have implemented both technical and organizational measures designed to secure your information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration or disclosure. These include, but are not limited to:

• Our data is stored on secure servers and we use industry standards to protect against hacking.
• We use SSL to encrypt all and any personal information whenever it is transmitted over the wire.
• We encrypt at rest all user passwords.
• Our Production server environment is located in a private network and fully isolated from other company systems.
• Our Production server is fully redundant and backed up nightly.

Unfortunately, no data transmission or storage system can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. If you have reason to believe the security of your account has been compromised, please immediately notify us in accordance with the “Contact Us” section below.

If you communicate with us by email, please do not include confidential or private information. By sending sensitive or confidential email messages or information which are not encrypted you accept the risk of such uncertainty and possible lack of confidentiality over the Internet.

Also, Bookji does not encourage minors to make personal information publicly available.

Third party services

This Privacy Policy does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information, or other practices of any third parties, including any third party operating any site or service to which the Bookji Services link. The inclusion of a link on the Services does not imply endorsement of the linked site or service.

If there is a breach or suspected breach of data,

• the affected parties will be notified within 72 hours;
• the school administrators and/or teachers will be notified by email or phone if the school or teacher account or any related student accounts are affected;
• the appropriate person in the school or school district who has purchased the valid school-wide or district-wide subscription will be notified by email or phone if the users from this school or school district are affected.
• we will provide a plan for how to stop any further beaches and a summary of the data we believe was breached.

Your Right to Access Information

You are entitled to see the information held about you. If you wish to do this, please contact us using information at the end of this page. We may require you to provide verification of your identity and to pay an administration fee to provide a copy of the information we hold. Please note that, in certain circumstances, we may withhold access to your information where we have the right to do so under current data protection legislation.

Updating Your Information & Decommissioning

Parents and schools have the right to access and review the personal information collected from students. You may review, correct, update or change your Personal Information, or those of your student's at any time by accessing your account on gobookji.com. If you would like us to delete your record in our system, please contact us using th Contact Us information at the end of this page and we will accommodate your request, if we do not have any legal obligation to retain the record.

After the product is no longer in use by the school, we will:

• delete all students’ personally identifiable information we hold within 1 year.
• upon request, as explained in our Terms of Services, we will delete students’ personally identifiable information within 5 days from our website.

Upon request by the school, we can transfer any students’ personally identifiable information we held to the school or its designated third party. A school can request such a transfer not more than once a year.

Our Policy Towards Minors

As stated in our Terms of Service, minors are only allowed to use our Website and Services with their legal representative’s consent. Bookji strictly adheres to the Family Education Rights Protection Act of 1974 (FERPA). FERPA protects the privacy of students' data by specifying how and with whom schools can share information from these records.

We agree that students’ personally identifiable information stays under the direct control of the school. We will not use personally identifiable information in student records to engage in targeted advertising. Nor will we use any information in the student record for any purpose other than those required or specifically permitted by our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Services.

If a legal representative becomes aware that his / her represented minor has provided us with Personal Information without their consent, he or she should contact us at support@gobookji.com. We will delete such information from our files within 5 working days.

Disclosing Information

We may disclose Personal Information if we have to comply with legal obligations or to law enforcement requests, to protect and defend our rights and property or the safety of other users, and with your permission.

If we are involved in a change in control, merger, acquisition, reorganization, receivership, bankruptcy, transition of Services to another provider, or any similar transaction, your information may be transferred or sold as permitted by law and/or contract.

Updates to this Privacy Policy

This policy may be amended from time to time. If we make significant changes to the Privacy Policy we will:

• place an updated version on this page, and/or update the Privacy Policy issue date;
• notify our primary contacts at your school via email, provided we have a valid email address, or through the platform itself.

The “Last Updated” legend at the top of this page indicates when this Privacy Policy was last revised. Your use of the Services following these changes means that you accept the revised Privacy Policy.

Jurisdiction and Applicable Law

This policy and all matters arising out of or related to this policy shall be governed by the substantive laws of the State of Colorado, USA, without regards to conflicts of laws and principles thereof.

Any controversy, claim or dispute between you and Bookji arising out of or relating to this policy shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the State of Colorado, USA.

Your Consent

By using Bookji, you expressly consent to our Privacy policy.

Contact us

If you would like to contact us with questions or feedback, please contact us at:

For inquiries related to other operators collecting data through our platform, please contact us, and we will respond on their behalf.