SCHOLASTIC KIDS PRIVACY POLICY

Last Updated and Effective as of: December 31, 2019

Scholastic Inc. (“Scholastic”, “we,” “us” or “our”) is committed to providing children with innovative online literacy resources and protecting children’s online safety and privacy. To that end, we have designed our sites and apps for children to minimize the collection of personal information and maximize user engagement in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"), a U.S. law designed to protect the online privacy of children. This Scholastic Kids Privacy Policy describes how we collect and use personal information, as defined under COPPA (“Kids’ Personal Information”), on our Sites directed to children under the age of 13 situated in the United States (our "Kids Sites ").

Our primary Kids Site is kids.scholastic.com. Our mobile applications (“apps”) for kids are also Kids Sites, and covered by this policy.

Scholastic’s educational software products licensed to educational institutions are covered by the Scholastic Education Technology Products Privacy Policy, not this policy.

Definitions

"Kid" or "child" means a user under the age of 13.
"Parent" means a kid's parent or legal guardian.
“Sites” mean web sites, mobile applications (or apps) or other online services operated by Scholastic Inc. and/or its affiliates. “Sites” does not include our educational technology products licensed to educational institutions and educators.

Activities on our Kids Sites

Children do not have to give us more information than reasonably necessary to use our Kids Sites. Activities on our Kids Sites include virtual worlds, games, polls/multiple choice quizzes, filtered chat, filtered story-telling, tracking reading minutes, Kids accounts and friending. Accounts are not required to use our Kids Sites, but some features are only available with registration (such as community tools), and some features may be enhanced with registration (such as games).

Information Kids May Submit

Email Addresses: To register for an account, a child picks an anonymous user name from a list, creates a password, and enters an email address. We send the child one email to confirm registration. Then we hash the email address to make it unreadable (that is, we change it into a series of values instead of text). After that, the email address is used only to help the child retrieve or re-set their account, using the same hashing process to match the hashed email address against our records. If the child’s account is found, we send instructions in a one-time email to the matched address.

Email addresses may also be collected for customer service, e-cards or other content-sharing tools, or for parental consent or notification. See also Parental Consent and Retention and Deletion.

Community Features: Community features require registration. All content kids give us for public posting, such as in chats, forums, commenting tools or writing activities, is filtered or moderated to remove inappropriate content and Kids Personal Information before it is made public. Our Kids Sites may allow kids to “friend” each other, so kids can see each other’s game progress and postings, but kids cannot see each other’s Personal information or send each other private messages.

Geo-location: Our Kids Sites may collect general geo-location information (but no more specific than city or zip code), such as in a library look-up tool. That general geo-location information is not stored with any other information about the user.

Date of Birth: We may collect birth date from children for purposes of age-screening. We do not keep birth date after the age-screening process.

Information We Collect Automatically

When children visit our Kids Sites, anonymous, aggregate, and de-identified information may be collected automatically. We use this information to make our Kids Sites more interesting and useful to children and for various purposes related to our business, including maintaining, securing and analyzing our Kids Sites.

Information collected automatically includes:

• Internet protocol (IP) address – a string of numbers assigned to a computer when it connects to the internet
• General geo-location information (derived from IP address and no more specific than zip code)
• Navigation information – what users do on our Site, sometimes where they came from
• General systems, browser, domain and service provider information

The technology used to automatically collect this information includes:

• Cookies: Cookies are small data files sent by a web site or app to be saved on a user's computer or device. Cookies can help us recognize a user and save their preferences for when they return to our Kids Site, and also help with age-screening tools.
• Local storage: Local storage or local shared objects, such as "Flash cookies," may be stored on a computer or device through a media player or other software installed on that computer or device. Local storage and local shared objects help us recognize users when they come back. They are often used in activities like games, to store scores or progress.
• Pixel tags: A pixel tag (also known as a "clear GIF" or "web beacon") is a tiny image that can be placed on a Web page or in emails to users, to tell us when a user has displayed that page or opened those emails.

These tools may allow us to assign a unique number to our child users, but this number will not be used to track child users across different, unaffiliated web sites.

Most browsers can be set to detect or reject browser cookies. You may be able to change settings in your device or browser to reject local storage or local shared objects. Some parts of our Kids Sites may be harder to use or may not work at all if cookies, local storage or local shared objects are rejected.

For more information about cookies, go to https://www.allaboutcookies.org/.

For more information about local shared objects and how to manage them, go to: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html

How We Use Kids’ Personal Information

We may use and share Kids’ Personal Information: (1) to provide our services to a child (such as the games and activities your child would like to play); (2) to comply with the law (such as when we use Kids’ Personal Information for record-keeping to satisfy legal and compliance obligations); (3) in accordance with valid consent (where a parent has provided consent for their child); and (4) as necessary for business interests (such as when we collect and use a child's data in support of internal operations, taking into account the impact on the child's privacy).

Service Providers

We use the services of other companies to help us run our Kids Sites. This means that some information we collect on Kids Sites may be collected or accessed by those service providers. Our service providers can only use Kids’ Personal Information to do the tasks we hire them to do, in the ways we allow them to, such as enabling registration, maintaining accounts, fulfilling account requests, and customer service. Our service providers cannot use Kids Personal Information for any other reason, and we require them to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of Kids’ Personal Information.

Behaviorally Targeted Advertising

Our Kids Sites do not track kids to serve them behaviorally targeted advertisements (also known as retargeting or online behavioral advertising), or to allow others to do so.

Special Circumstances for Information Sharing

We reserve the right to share or disclose information, including Kids’ Personal Information, collected from a child:

• As permitted or required by applicable law, such as to maintain the safety and integrity of a Kids Site; to enforce terms of use; to protect the child or our or others' rights, property or safety; to take precautions against other liability; or when we believe release is required to comply with federal, state or local law (such as cooperating with a judicial process or law enforcement investigation).
• In connection with a corporate change or dissolution, including for example a merger, acquisition, reorganization, consolidation, bankruptcy, liquidation, sale of assets, wind-down of business or related due diligence. To the extent required by law, we will get parental consent before sharing children's Kids’ Personal Information under such circumstances, and will obtain the agreement of any applicable third party to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of that Kids’ Personal Information.

Security

Our Kids Sites maintain reasonable technical and organizational standards to help ensure that Kids’ Personal Information is secure, including encryption. However, no Internet site or service can guarantee 100% security, so it is possible that someone could unlawfully access Kids’ Personal Information despite our efforts.

Parental Consent

When we knowingly collect Kids’ Personal Information from a child, we ask the child's parent for consent before we collect it, unless the request falls within an exception under COPPA, such as where we use an email address to respond directly to a one-time request from the child or for password retrieval or reset. We let parents know about such collection as required or permitted by law.

When prior parental consent is required, we ask for it in ways allowed by COPPA. For example, if Kids’ Personal Information will be used only by us, we may ask for the parent's consent by email. While we do not currently, and do not expect to, use Kids’ Personal Information in this manner, if Kids’ Personal Information would be disclosed on the Kids Site or shared with a third party besides a service provider, we would obtain a higher level of consent from the parent, such as by a form to be returned via U.S. mail or electronic scan, or consent obtained in connection with a credit card purchase.

Parental Choices and Controls

If you are a parent of one of our child users, you can ask us to:

• Allow you to review your child’s Kids’ Personal Information
• Deactivate your child's Kids Site account
• Revoke any consent you have given for your child
• Delete Kids’ Personal Information your child has given us
• Stop collecting Kids’ Personal Information from your child

To make these requests, or if you have any other questions about our Kids Sites or our policies or practices regarding the collection, use, sharing or disclosure of Kids’ Personal Information, you may contact us at:

Scholastic Inc. (attn: Kids Online/eScholastic)
557 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
U.S.A.
Phone: 1-800-SCHOLASTIC
Email – Customer Service: [email protected]
Email – Privacy: [email protected]

Parents may also print, complete and return this letter to the specified address.

We may require additional information to identify your child’s account or to verify your identity and relationship with the child.

Retention and Deletion

If we do collect Kids’ Personal Information, we keep that information for a reasonable amount of time to perform the task for which we collected it, unless otherwise requested by a child’s parent. We reserve the right to keep certain information necessary for record-keeping to the extent permitted and/or required by law, including any statutory retention requirements. When deleted, Kids’ Personal Information is deleted securely. In some cases we may de-identify Kids’ Personal Information instead of deleting it.

Other Web Sites, Apps and Services

Our Kids Sites may contain links to third party web sites, apps or other online services that we consider appropriate. We do not operate those other sites, and the privacy policies found on those sites (not this Scholastic Kids Privacy Policy) cover the collection and use of information there.

We recommend reading the privacy policies of each web site visited after leaving our Kids Sites, to learn about how information is treated by others.

We encourage parents and teachers to talk with their children and students about how to be safe online. For more information on protecting your child online, please visit OnGuard Online.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This privacy policy may be changed. For material changes, we will try to notify parents of child users in any way the law allows, and we may ask for parental consent to any new privacy policy. We may also post notice on this Site when changes are made, unless otherwise required by applicable law.

SPECIFIC DISCLOSURES FOR CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS

If you are a resident of California, under 18, and a registered user of the Services, you may ask us to remove content or information that you have posted to the Services by writing to [email protected]. Please include a description of the content you would like removed, and if possible, the URL for the site and the name of the feature where the content was posted. Please note that your request does not ensure complete or comprehensive removal of the content or information, as, for example, some of your content may have been reposted by another user.

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”), California residents have the right to know what Personal Information has been collected from them in the last 12 months and to ask for it to be deleted. To find out more about the CCPA, or to exercise CCPA rights, please see the California Consumer Privacy Act section of our general scholastic.com privacy policy.

Also under the CCPA, parent or guardian permission is required to sell Kids Personal Information. We do not sell Kids Personal Information. We also do not give Kids Personal Information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes.

DATA PROCESSING IN THE UNITED STATES

Information provided to or collected by us on our Kids Sites is transmitted to us and processed in the United States and other countries, either by us or our service providers on our behalf, and will be protected subject to this Privacy Policy and applicable laws, which may not be as protective as the laws in other countries.

This Privacy Policy replaces our former privacy policy, which you can find here.