Privacy Policy

Overview

Interdisciplinary Curriculum is an educational platform designed for students and teachers. We are committed to protecting your privacy and handling your data responsibly.

Information We Collect

Account Information

• Email address (required for account creation)
• Name (optional, for personalization)
• Role (student, teacher, or parent)
• Birth year and month, if you sign up yourself. We use it to confirm you are at least 13 (18 for parent and teacher accounts) and to know when a student turns 18.
• School name (optional, for teacher verification)

If your school set up your account through its learning system or single sign-on, we receive the identifier, name, role, and email address your school's system sends. We do not ask for a birth date.

Learning Data

• Quiz attempts and scores
• Course progress and reading sessions
• Time spent on content (active and total duration)
• Student notes and reflection responses
• Game session progress in our interactive learning games
• Video watch milestones — when you watch a curated video in our embedded player, we record only that you crossed 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95% of the video, to award Library Credit. We do not record your playback position, pauses, or anything else about how you watch.
• Video engagement and feedback — which curated videos you open or click out to YouTube, and any optional feedback you choose to submit (a rating, whether the video helped with the course, a suggested course pairing).

Technical Data

• Browser type and version
• Device information
• IP address, for security and, when a parent gives consent, as part of the consent record

How We Use Your Information

• To provide and improve our educational services
• To track your learning progress across courses
• To verify teacher accounts
• To communicate important updates about the platform
• To ensure platform security and prevent abuse

Data Protection

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data:

• Encrypted data transmission (HTTPS)
• Secure password hashing
• Regular security audits
• Teachers see only students in their own classes, and parents see only their linked children. Everything else is restricted to the platform operator.

YouTube, Google, and Us — Both Directions

Our curated video library plays YouTube videos inside our pages using YouTube's privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie.com) — the most private embed YouTube offers, which does not use YouTube cookies to personalize advertising based on your visit here. But the obvious deserves stating plainly: when you press play, you are watching a YouTube video, and playback happens on Google's infrastructure under Google's privacy policy. Playback data — what played, for how long, your IP address — flows to Google, just as it would if you watched on YouTube directly. Our own records stay separate: we log only our watch milestones, we never receive your Google identity, and Google never receives our records. If you prefer not to interact with Google at all, every video card links directly to YouTube so the choice of how — and whether — to watch stays yours.

Transparency cuts both ways, so here is the other direction of our Google relationship: we use Google's generative AI tools ourselves. Some illustrations, infographics, slide decks, and audio companions in our courses were produced with the help of Google's NotebookLM and similar tools, using our own human-authored course material as the source. In that exchange, we — the platform, never you — shared our content with Google under those tools' terms, and received generated study aids in return. No student data, account data, or tracking data has ever been part of that exchange, and AI-assisted media on this platform is disclosed as such where it appears.

Our Position on AI

AI is changing how people find answers, and it makes the fast answer easier than the considered one. For a platform whose purpose is teaching people how to think, that matters. We believe the outcomes that count should remain human-led, and we design our policies to be rules we would accept from any seat at the table — the student's, the parent's, or our own — with trade-offs resolved in the student's favor.

We also use AI tools ourselves, openly and hands-on (see the section above), because sound judgment about these systems comes from direct experience with them, not from hype or from fear at a distance. Our role is to be a trusted resource for the genuine pursuit of knowledge: rigorous, human-authored material at minimal cost, offered with respect for every student and parent as an individual — never as data to be monetized.

Data Retention

We keep each kind of information only as long as we need it. Learning and activity records (watch milestones, video engagement and feedback, reading sessions, quiz attempts, game sessions, notes, and page visits) show your progress and award credit. We delete them automatically 5 years after your last activity or sign-in.

Account information (email, name, birth year and month, role) is needed to sign you in and apply the age rules below. We keep it while your account is active and delete it 30 days after you ask us to. If an account has no activity or sign-in for 9 years, we delete it.

When an account is deleted, we keep four kinds of records without your identity: proof that a parent gave consent, completed continuing-education records, purchase records, and security logs. In each, we remove your account id or replace it with a one-way code that cannot be turned back into your name or email, and we erase the IP address and browser details. We delete these records 9 years after they were created.

Student Privacy (FERPA Compliance)

We are committed to protecting student educational records in accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Student data is only accessible to authorized teachers and administrators.

Children's Privacy (COPPA)

Children under 13 cannot create an account on their own. When anyone signs up, we ask for a birth year and month. If the answer is under 13, we do not create the account, and if sign-up started with Google or an email link, we delete the new account right away. A child under 13 can use the platform only through a school that sets up access, and only for school purposes. We use a child's information only to provide the educational service.

Students aged 13 to 17 can create an account, cannot make purchases, and can link to a parent's or guardian's account. When a parent pays for a subscription, we record the payment as that parent's consent for each linked child.

A parent or guardian can ask us at any time to review a child's information, stop collecting it, or delete the child's account and data, using the contact details below.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access your personal data
• Correct inaccurate data
• Request account deletion and associated data removal
• Download and export all your data (profile, quiz attempts, reading sessions, notes, reflections, video watch milestones, video engagement, and video feedback)
• Opt out of non-essential communications

You can exercise your data export and deletion rights directly from your student dashboard. Parents and guardians of students under 18 can make these requests for a linked child by contacting us.

Cookies & Local Storage

This site uses a small number of first-party cookies that are strictly necessary for the platform to function. We do not use any third-party tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or analytics cookies.

Cookies We Set

• Session cookies — Maintain your login session. Removed when you sign out or your session expires.
• Progress cookie — After you sign in, we store your account id in a cookie so your progress saves reliably. We no longer set it for visitors who are not signed in; one set earlier expires within a year.

What We Do Not Use

• No third-party advertising or remarketing cookies
• No cross-site tracking
• No cookie-based analytics — our web analytics are fully cookieless

You can clear cookies at any time through your browser settings. Clearing cookies signs you out; your progress stays in your account.

Third-Party Services

These services process data only to run the platform for us. We do not sell, rent, or share personal information with anyone for their own purposes, including advertising.

We use the following third-party services:

• Supabase - Authentication and database hosting
• Vercel - Website hosting and cookieless web analytics
• Stripe - Payment processing (Stripe receives what payments require — card details never touch our servers)
• Google OAuth - Optional sign-in method
• YouTube (privacy-enhanced embeds) - Curated video playback; see the YouTube section above
• Umami (self-hosted) - Cookieless, anonymized page analytics running on our own infrastructure
• Clever and ClassLink - Sign-in, only if your school uses them
• Your school's learning management system - Only if your school connects it

Vercel Web Analytics collects aggregate traffic data (page views, visitor counts) without using cookies or collecting personal information. No data is shared with advertisers or other third parties.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, please contact us through the platform or reach out to your school administrator.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify users of any significant changes via email or platform notification.