K-12 Student Data Privacy Statement

ETS processes K-12 Student Data as a “data processor” or “service provider” to your school in order to provide the services to you and your school, pursuant to our contracts with your school and applicable laws. For information on your school's privacy policies, please contact the administration.

ETS does not collect, maintain, use or disclose K-12 Student Data other than as needed for authorized educational/school purposes, or as appropriately authorized by a school, parent, or student. In particular, ETS does not:

• Use any K-12 Student Data for targeted advertising
• Create K-12 Student profiles for advertising or for any other purpose that is not required for educational purposes
• Sell K-12 Student Data or otherwise disclose the K-12 Student Data to any third party unless (i) such third parties are data processors acting on our behalf, (ii) the disclosure is required by law or otherwise legally permitted, or (iii) the disclosure is made at the request of the school, the student or the parent for educational purposes.

When you use the ETS K-12 Products, we use your personal information as needed to:

• Provide you with the products, content or services selected by you, your instructors or your school and for related activities, such as customer service and technical support
• Understand how you use our products, content and services, including to create de-identified datasets for analytics and product development purposes, and
• Assure academic integrity, such as in connection with investigations and anti-plagiarism programs, and
• Manage our everyday business needs, such as website administration, business continuity and disaster recovery, security and fraud prevention, corporate governance, reporting and legal compliance.

We will only use K-12 Student Data for other purposes with the consent of your school and (if applicable) you or your parents. For example, we may invite students to participate in research projects. Information about the specific project will be included in the request for consent. The personal information used for research is not used in an identifiable manner. ETS will not (and will not permit any third party to) associate individually identifying information with research data. Our research results do not contain any identifiable data, and research data are not used to target or profile individuals. Learn more about ETS Research.

All K-12 Student Data may be disclosed to your school (including to your instructors and school administrators). Your instructors generally have access to your K-12 Student Data, including the information generated by your use of the products for a class, and we may provide other information to your school as needed to investigate possible academic fraud or cheating. Your school uses the K-12 Student Data in accordance with its own privacy policies.

We may disclose K-12 Student Data to our affiliates, which only use the K-12 Student Data for the purposes listed above, and with our service providers, who are bound by law or contract to protect the K-12 Student Data and only use it as needed to provide the services requested. We will also disclose K-12 Student Data when required by law, such as in response to a subpoena, including to law enforcement agencies and courts in the United States and other countries where we operate.

We may also disclose K-12 Student Data as authorized by you, your school or your parent, such as if you instruct us to deliver your student transcript to an authorized recipient.

In the event of any merger, acquisition or similar transaction involving ETS’ business or assets, ETS may transfer K-12 Student Data to another entity, provided the successor entity is subject to these same commitments for the previously collected student Personal Information. 

Please note that we may publish reports or create products that contain de-identified, aggregated or statistical data, such as benchmarking reports that reveal how students generally engage with our platforms. These reports and products do not contain any information that would enable the recipient to identify, locate or contact you or your school.

We may also use de-identified data for product development, testing or innovation. For example, we may use analytics on de-identified datasets to understand how individuals interact with our products and content, such as to assess student engagement and to infer skills. These data will have all direct and indirect identifiers removed, including name, student ID numbers, GUIDs, dates of birth, location data, and school ID. ETS shall not attempt to re-identify any de-identified data and shall prohibit any recipients of the de-identified data from trying to re-identify individuals.

ETS provides primary and middle school parents and teachers with the ability to download certain apps that they and their children or students can use for educational purposes, such as to improve reading fluency. Some of these “K-8 Apps” are intended for use by children under 13 years of age.

ETS may collect the child's first name or nickname, age or grade in school, and basic demographic data from the parent or guardian when the child’s account is created within the K-8 Apps. When the child uses the K-8 App, ETS collects audio recordings of the child's voice when the child reads passages (or a transcript of the recording), the child's responses to questions that test skills such as reading comprehension and other data relating to the child's use of the app, such as how long the child spends using the app. Our K-8 Apps do not collect any other Personal Information from children under 13, and they do not use cookies or other data-collection technologies.

ETS anonymizes the information collected by its K-8 Apps and uses the information for research purposes. ETS does not maintain identifiable data about children under 13, and children cannot make their own data publicly available via the apps. ETS does not (and will not permit any third party to) associate identifying information with research data.

Parents and teachers can review and delete the child's information at any time in the K-8 App. Parents and teachers can restrict ETS' collection of additional information at any time by deleting the app.

ETS protects K-12 Student Data at all times using appropriate security measures, including encryption, and disclosing the information only to third parties that are capable of and contractually obligated to maintaining its confidentiality and security.

ETS does not retain K-12 Student Data longer than needed to fulfill the educational purposes for which it was collected.  We will also delete K-12 Student Data upon request of the school or (if feasible) the applicable parent or student.

ETS’ affiliate Mastery Transcript Consortium® has publicly committed to comply with all of the requirements of the K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy.