Speakr Privacy Policy

Thank you for using Speakr. This policy explains how your information, and the information you enter in Speakr is used, and protected.

THE BASICS

1. Definitions

We’ll start by getting a few definitions out of the way that should help you understand this policy.

  • When we say ‘you’, we mean the person reading this policy, with an interest in, and / or registered account, with Speakr;
  • When we say ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘Speakr,’ we’re referring to Speakr Technologies, a limited company registered in Bath, in the United Kingdom.
  • When we say ‘pupil’, we referring to pupils at a school with a registered Speakr account, and by ‘staff’ we mean Teachers, Teaching Assistants, Head Teachers, Special Educational Needs Co-Ordinators (SENCOs).
  • When we say ‘Members’ we mean any user of the Speakr system, whether pupil, staff, or an authorised third party (such as a social worker).
  • When we say ‘school’, we mean a school that has registered to use Speakr.
  • When we say ‘Registered Administrators’ we mean the members of staff at a school who have been nominated by the school as administrators of the Speakr system on a school’s behalf, or who have acted on the school’s behalf to set up the school’s Speakr access.

We provide an online platform that make it easy for pupils to articulate how they feel at school, and help staff to see which pupils need a little help (the ‘Services’). We offer the Services on our website http://speakr.co.uk. In the course of providing the Services, we may collect Personal Information, which means information about staff at a school - derived from email addresses registered with Speakr, but we never collect or share personally identifiable information about pupils. Schools may share personally identifiable details about their pupils, subject to, and in order to comply with, their own policies.

2. Changes

If there are any changes to this Privacy Policy, we’ll post them on the Website and send them to the last email address you gave us. Any changes will be effective as of the date we post on the Website or send the email (or whichever date is later). You may object to any changes within 20 days after they’re posted on our Website or sent to you, in which case none of the proposed changes will be effective with respect to information that we’ve already collected from you, but will apply only to information we collect in the future. We won't treat information of any open account differently from any other open account. If you object to changes in our Privacy Policy, we’ll have to terminate your account. That said, if we ever changed our Privacy Policy to expand our rights to use or disclose Personal Information for marketing purposes, you‘d be able to opt out without termination.

3. Effective Date

This Privacy Policy is effective with respect to any data that we’ve collected, or collect, about and/or from you, from the date your school signed up to the Speakr service.

4. Questions

If you have any questions or comments, please use our contact form to get in touch. You may also contact us by postal mail at:

Speakr Technologies Ltd
Privacy Department
Carpenter House
Broad Quay
Bath
BA1 1UD

YOUR INFORMATION

5. Information we collect

  1. Information You Provide to Us: When a member of school staff registers a school to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, billing details, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Privacy Policy and; following the launch of the paid Speakr service in September 2013 – in our Terms of Use.
  2. School / Class / Group Information: When you add a School, Class, or Group, we have knowledge of this.
  3. Pupil and Staff Information: We have theoretical access to the names and Speakr entries of Pupils, and interactions between Staff and Pupils – these are secured behind layers of physical and technical protection, and encrypted both on our servers and in transit between our servers and the school’s system. We promise never to access this data unless to diagnose and resolve a technical fault, and will never share it unless specifically requested by the school, the pupil or staff member who entered it, or by formal legal request in the relevant legal jurisdiction.
  4. Information from your Use of the Service: We may get information about how and when Pupils and Staff use the Services. This information may include IP address, time, date, browser used, and actions taken by Pupils and Staff within the application.
  5. Cookies: Cookies are strings of code that tell a website owner when you use the website, your browser type and version, operating system, and other similar information. We use third party services (such as Google Analytics) to gather anonymised data about the usage of Speakr services (browser details – like the version of Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox used – are particularly important to help us ensure that we’re offering the best experience across as many browser types as possible). You may turn off cookies that have been placed on your computer by following the instructions on your browser, but if you block our cookies, it may be more difficult (and maybe impossible) to use the Services.
  6. Information from Other Sources: We may get more information about Staff (but never Pupils), like name, age, and participation in social media websites, by searching the Internet or querying third parties (we refer to that information as Supplemental Information). We only collect data that’s publicly available or provided by a third party according to its terms of use.

6. Use and Disclosure of your Personal Information

We may use and disclose your Personal Information only as follows:

  1. To promote use of our Services. For example, if you leave your Personal Information when you visit our Website and don’t sign up for any of the Services, we may send you an email asking whether you want to sign up.
  2. To bill and collect money owed to us. However, in the pilot period (scheduled to last until the start of the 2013-14 academic year, Speakr is offered free of charge to participating schools.
  3. To send System Alert Messages. For example, we may let the Registered Administrators know about temporary or permanent changes to our Services, like planned outages, new features, version updates, releases, abuse warnings, and changes to our Privacy Policy.
  4. To enforce compliance with applicable law. This may include developing tools and algorithms that help us prevent violations.
  5. To provide customer support.
  6. To protect the rights and safety of our Members and third parties, as well as our own.
  7. To meet legal requirements like complying with court orders and valid subpoenas.
  8. To provide information to representatives and advisors, like attorneys and accountants, to help us comply with legal, accounting, or security requirements.
  9. To prosecute and defend a legal case or similar proceeding.
  10. To support and improve the Services we offer. This will be done only when information is entered onto our marketing website: http://speakr.co.uk (never within the secure Speakr application itself), or when volunteered by Members.
  11. To communicate with Registered Administrators about their account for information, not promotional, reasons.
  12. To transfer Member information in the case of a sale, merger, consolidation, or acquisition. In that event, any acquirer will be subject to our obligations under this Privacy Policy.

7. Public Information and Third Parties

  1. Blog. We have public blogs on our Website. Any information a Member includes in a comment on our blog may be read, collected, and used by anyone. If your Personal Information appears on our blogs and you’d like it to be removed, contact us here. If we’re not able to remove your information, we’ll let you know why.
  2. Social Media Widgets. Our Websites include social media features, like the Twitter follow button. These features may collect information about your IP address and which page you’re visiting on our site, and they may set a cookie to make sure the feature functions properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our site. Your interactions with those features are governed by the privacy policies of the companies that provide them.
  3. Links to Third-Party Sites. Our Websites include links to other websites, whose privacy practices may be different from Speakr’s. If you submit Personal Information to any of those sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policy of any Website you visit.

SECURITY

8. Notice of Breach of Security

Despite every effort to ensure that our systems are as secure as possible, nobody is safe from hackers. If a security breach causes an unauthorised intrusion into our system that materially affects a School, Staff, Pupils, or other Members then Speakr will notify the Registered Administrators as soon as possible and later report the action we took in response.

9. Safeguarding Your Information

Speakr is hosted on infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services.

Speakr uses up to 256 bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) session encryption provided by Thawte to secure electronic traffic between Speakr’s systems and school systems over the Internet.

Speakr accounts require a username and password to log in. Members must keep usernames and passwords secure, and never disclose them to a third party. Because the information contained in each School’s Speakr account is so sensitive, account passwords are encrypted, which means we can’t see your passwords. We can’t resend forgotten passwords either. We’ll only reset them.

COMPLIANCE

10. Registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Speakr is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK as a Data Controller. This carries a legal responsibility to comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 in the United Kingdom under the pan-European Data Protection Initiative 1995 (Directive 95/46/EC).

11. Accuracy of Data, Transparency, and Choice

We do our best to keep the data we hold accurate and up to date, to the extent that our Members provide us with the information we need to do that. If key data changes (like a new email address for Registered Administrators), then the relevant Members are responsible for notifying us of those changes, though the Speakr system.

We only store data about our users for as long as it’s reasonably required to fulfill the purposes that gave us the right to access it in the first place. We keep some anonymised data (data that does not have any associated names or text entries by which Pupils of Staff members could be identified) indefinitely, in order to improve usage of Speakr, assist in academic research into child wellbeing, and for other reasons explained in this policy.

We’ll give Members access to any Personal Information about them that we hold within 30 days of any request for that information you make by emailing admin@speakr.co.uk. Unless it’s prohibited by law, we’ll remove any Personal Information about a Member from our servers at that Member’s request.