Privacy Policy

What is a privacy policy? It’s a notice, legally binding, about how we use personal information collected on Greater Good in Education. The information below outlines what information is collected, how we may use that information, the persons to whom the personal information may be disclosed, and the security measures taken to protect the personal information.

At Greater Good in Education we take the privacy of our users very seriously. Please read this Privacy Policy to learn more about how we treat personally identifiable information. We provide this Privacy Policy because you have a right to know what information we collect, how it is protected and used, and the circumstances under which it may be disclosed. If you have comments, suggestions, questions, or concerns about our Privacy Policy, please contact us via email at ggsceducation[at]berkeley.edu.

While there are no official standards governing privacy practices on the Internet, we follow the principles supported by the Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Information Practices Principles, currently available here.

This policy covers Greater Good in Education’s treatment of personally identifiable information that we obtain when you visit our website or register as a member. We regard personally identifiable information as information that someone can use to identify or contact you in person, such as real name, telephone number, birth date, email address, or physical mailing address. Information that we use internally to identify you as a member in our system, such as your selected username, is not considered personally identifiable information.

This policy does not cover the privacy practices of third parties that we do not own or control, such as our partners and advertisers. In addition, we may provide links to other services and on occasion to other sites that may interest you. All of these sites operate independently of Greater Good in Education and they have their own privacy or security practices. For your best on-line experience, we encourage you to review their policies before submitting any personal information to them.

Information Submitted During A Transaction. During a payment transaction (for example, when you make a donation to Greater Good in Education through this website), we collect information including your name, email address, telephone number, and credit card information. This information is collected and used to process your payment transaction, and also for shipping any gifts to you.

Information Submitted During Registration. If you become a registered user, and create a user profile, we request information such as your email address (to enable the administration of website features) and zip code (to understand and improve the reach of our website).

Children. As explained further in our Terms and Conditions, currently available here, you must be 18 years of age or older to use our website. Therefore, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information about children. If you believe that we have information from or about anyone under 13 years of age, please notify us by email at ggsceducation [at] Berkeley.edu.

Social Security Number. We do not ask for or require your social security number to use any of our services or to access any part of our site.

Log Files. Similar to many websites, we gather certain anonymous, non-personal information automatically and store it in web server log files. This information includes Internet protocol addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), site entry/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information to improve our site, analyze trends, administer the site, track users’ movements around the site, and gather aggregate information about our user base as a whole. Aggregate information is data we collect about a group or category of services or members from which individual member identities have been removed, and therefore does not include your personally identifiable information.

Cookies. A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for record-keeping purposes. It can also help us understand how our site visitors click to our site, and what pages they view during their visit. Similar to many websites, we store an encrypted cookie on your computer so we can remember you when you come back to our website without requiring you to log-in every time. Cookies also allow us to track and understand the interests of our users to enhance the overall experience on our site.

You can set your web browser software to disable cookies. To do so, please refer to the help section of your specific browser for more information on how to manage or disable cookies. If you disable cookies, you may still view our site, but some areas of our site will not work properly.

Some of our business partners and other third parties, such as advertisers, may also set and access their own cookies on our site. We have no access to or control over these cookies, and, as noted above, this privacy policy does not govern the use of cookies by our business partners or advertisers. Such third parties’ use of cookies is subject to their own privacy policies, which may differ from this one. Such third parties do not have access to our cookies.

To view or change your cookie consent choice, access the GGIE cookie declaration.

We use emails and/or prominent notifications on our website as our primary means to inform our members of important service and promotional announcements.

We may use your email address to deliver important system-related announcements. Example system-related announcements include: email verification, important security or server maintenance updates, or policy changes. These service-related announcements are considered a fundamental part of our service, and members cannot opt-out of these email announcements.

In order to improve the experience for our members, we will offer you the ability to sign up for optional email communications, such as updates from periodic (typically monthly) newsletters, or invitations to subscriber events. These communications are enhancements to our service and are entirely optional. We will ask for your consent before sending you promotional communications, and will make it easy for you to unsubscribe from these communications, either through the emails or through your member profile.

Identification Of Authors By Username. Greater Good in Education offers opportunities for members to comment on content found in Greater Good in Education and engage in dialogue with other users. This means that to some extent we depend on the contributions and actions of our members to improve the quality of the site experience. When you make a contribution to the site, you will be identified by your username as the author of that contribution. In these circumstances, we will only identify you by your username. Other than the username which can be entirely made up, in using our service, you are not required to provide or publicize any personally identifiable information in connection with your contributions and actions on our website.

Site Statistics. As noted above, we may use information collected from our web log files to calculate and publish anonymous, non-personal, aggregate statistics that we believe our community is interested in viewing. For example, we may track and publish the total number of users who have viewed a particular web page. We publish this data in aggregate form only, and do not disclose or report any personally identifiable information.

As noted above, we use information gathered from log files and cookies to improve our site, analyze trends, administer the site, track users’ movements around the site, and to gather aggregate information about our user base as a whole. This data may be used for internal analysis and scientific research purposes. We publish this data in aggregate form only, and do not disclose or report any personally identifiable information.

Public Messages. Some of our features allow you to communicate with other members by posting public messages (specifically comments on the Practices offered on the website). Please be aware that what you write in these public messages can be viewed, collected, or used by anyone who visits our website. We are not responsible for any personally identifiable information that you submit or permit others to submit through public messages.

Sharing, Renting, And Selling Information We Collect. Occasionally we may share anonymous, non-personal, aggregate information about our user base with partners, and we may publish these aggregate usage statistics on one of our websites for the interest of our users. We will not tie this shared or published data to personally identifiable information.

Linked Services. In some cases, we allow you to access or link to other web services through our website. We make it easy for you to determine when you are accessing or linking to these other web services through or website. In all of these cases, our partners may choose to collect your personal information as they deem appropriate. As noted above, we are not responsible for or in control of how our partners collect, use, or disclose your information obtained through these linked services. We encourage you to be aware when you are using these partner services and, for your best on-line experience, we encourage you to review their policies before submitting any personal information to them.

With UC Berkeley Analysts. We may share information with UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students, working on our behalf and under confidentiality agreements, to help us analyze data for the sake of our continuous improvement and to answer scientific questions central to our mission of promoting science-based practices in schools. Any research that involves personally identifying information will be governed by the Human Research Protection Program.

Legal Requirements. We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our website.

Acquisition or Other Transfer. If Greater Good in Education is acquired by another organization, all of our assets, including member information, may be transferred to the acquiring organization. At that time, your member information, including personally identifiable information, may become subject to the acquiring company’s privacy policy. In addition, in the event that we must liquidate our assets due to bankruptcy or other event, we will consider our subscriber and membership information, including personally identifiable information, as a unique asset subject to sale or other transfer. Before we transfer your information under any of these scenarios, we will notify you either by email or by posting a notice on our site, and we will remind you of your ability to add, edit or delete your personally identifiable information from your member profile in advance of any such transfer.

We have implemented a variety of commercially standard encryption and security technologies and procedures to protect information, including your personal information, stored in our computer systems from unauthorized access. Please be aware that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, thus we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, but we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

We also maintain standard physical and electronic procedural safeguards that limit access to your personally identifiable information to our employees (or people working on our behalf and under confidentiality agreements) who, through the course of standard business activities, need to access your personally identifiable information.

Receiving Communications. If you subscribe to any optional promotional communications, you will be able to unsubscribe from them through your member profile or through the emails we send you.

Canadian citizens, except under circumstances defined by law, are entitled to access their own personally identifiable information collected by Greater Good in Education by writing to ggsceducation[at]berkeley.edu. We may ask you to pay an administrative fee for accessing or copying your information, but will inform you of the anticipated charges and confirm that you want us to proceed before processing your request. If you believe that the personally identifiable information about you that we have collected is incomplete or inaccurate, we will correct the information upon verification of the omission or error and of the identity of the person requesting the change.

Greater Good in Education is intended for and directed to users in the United States. If you are accessing Greater Good in Education from the European Union, Asia, or any other region with laws or regulations governing personal data collection, use and disclosure that differ from United States laws, please be advised that through your continued use of Greater Good in Education, which is governed by U.S. law, this Privacy Notice and our Terms and Conditions, you are transferring your personal information to the United States and you consent to that transfer.

Greater Good in Education is evolving and developing. From time to time, we will review and make changes to our privacy policy. When we do so, we will notify you either by email or place a prominent notice on our website. The most recent version of our privacy policy is always available from a link on our homepage. We encourage you to visit this site frequently to stay up to date on our current policy.

In general, we ask you to please be excellent to each other. Here’s more detail on what that means:

We want comments and that are brave, hopeful, intelligent, thoughtful, informative, funny, and/or passionate. In other words, we want words that will carry the conversation forward and help make Greater Good in Education a community in which people are constantly trying to bring out the best in each other. Here are specific kinds of writing that we especially like:

Greater Good in Education is a moderated community. That means, in part, that we may delete or seek (with the commenter’s permission) to edit certain kinds of comments. What kinds of comments will draw this kind of attention?