We are parents and educators, as well as founders of an online education company. Like you, we are disturbed when we see examples of how quality education can be eroded at the hands of marketing and profit-making.
At NoodleTools, we respect the online privacy rights of our children. We also have the broader mission of protecting the work and authorship of any and every student on the NoodleTools platform.
The recent changes to the Federal Trade Commission’s “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” (COPPA) aims to further protect children’s privacy and safety online. COPPA prevents any collection or distribution of personally identifiable information from children under 13 without explicit parental permission.
Our commitment to every NoodleTools student, parent, and teacher is the following:
- NoodleTools students and educators are the OWNERS of their own work.
- We do not collect ANY personally identifiable information from children under 13.
- No student, teacher or other user of NoodleTools will ever be exposed to any third-party advertisements on our site. Period.
- There are absolutely no cookies, web bugs, or collection/tracking by third parties of anyone’s personal user information on NoodleTools.
At NoodleTools, our goal is to not only protect your children and students’ privacy, but also to simplify things all around. We do not collect any personally identifiable information from children under 13.
Here are some quick ways for you to protect and support the online rights of your children and students:
- Check a company’s Privacy Policy on their site to understand COPPA compliancy statements. Read the NoodleTools privacy policy here.
- If a web-based company states that it requires parental permission as part of COPPA compliancy, it’s likely collecting, tracking, and/or providing to third parties some form of personally identifiable information from children under 13.
- Get proactive and be informed:
- Cookies aren’t just for eating. Find out about how they can affect your child’s online usage by reading this article.
- Download Ghostery. This is a service that provides you with a list of trackers that are haunting behind the scenes of your favorite online site.
- View the source of a webpage and do your own detective work:
- Open the educational product website you want to check:
- Right click and select “view source.” An HTML version of the page source appears.
- Click “edit” and then “find.” Or hit “Ctrl F” to bring up the “find” field.
- Type in “.gif” and look at the highlighted places.
- If you see references to QuantServe, ScoreCard Research, or other such tracking services, your friendly educational website is gathering and tracking information.
- Open the educational product website you want to check:
