Data privacy and security are issues that I, along with the rest of the eScholar team, take very seriously. Recently, Stephanie Simon, education editor at Politico.com, published an article called “Data Mining Your Children”. In the article, Ms. Simon included a statement about eScholar.
The statement reads:
“The data storage and analytics firm eScholar, which sells software to help districts manage records on 20 million students — and stores some of that data on its servers — does not have a posted privacy policy. Spokeswoman Ann Tarasena said the company is working on it. In the meantime, eScholar writes privacy protections into its contracts with districts. It wouldn’t release the contracts — citing privacy concerns.”
I believe there is some ambiguity in the Politico article that may lead to concerns among our customers and their stakeholders. Privacy and security are not topics to be ambiguous about, so here are some facts you should be aware of:
eScholar does not, and never has, accessed or shipped data to our servers without our customer’s authorization and, in those cases, we follow strict policies and procedures, agreed upon in writing with our customers on the handling and use of that data.
Customers that deploy eScholar software on their own agency’s servers can be assured that their data is completely under their agency’s control and is not transported to, or stored on, eScholar servers.
As I stated a few months ago on our blog, eScholar has a firm commitment to data privacy and security. That has not changed, nor will it ever. Read more about eScholar’s privacy policies here.