Privacy Policy

TSI Hub is the classroom portal built by the Tech in Schools Initiative (“TSI,” “we,” “our”) so students and teachers can find their apps, files, books, and announcements in one place. This policy explains, in plain language, what information TSI Hub collects, why we collect it, and how we protect it.

Information We Collect

TSI Hub is designed to collect the minimum information needed to run a classroom portal:

• Name — so a user’s teacher, classmates, or school admin can identify them within the hub.
• Email address — used to sign in, verify the account, and send account-related messages (password resets, invitations, etc.).
• School — a free-text field a user enters when they create an account, used to group users by school.
• Grade level — collected for student accounts only, used to tailor which classes and resources are relevant.
• Role — whether the account belongs to a student, teacher, or school administrator, which determines what the account can see and do.
• Activity logs — TSI Hub records when a user clicks a link, views a resource, or downloads a file. These logs are tied to an account and a timestamp so teachers and administrators can see which resources are actually being used.

We do not ask for or knowingly collect phone numbers, home addresses, government ID numbers, or payment information through TSI Hub.

How We Use It

• To create and secure a user’s account and let them sign in.
• To connect students to the correct classes, apps, files, books, and announcements.
• To let teachers and school administrators see who is using which resources, so they can support their students.
• To operate, maintain, and improve TSI Hub (for example, understanding which features are used and which are not).
• To communicate with users about their account, such as sign-in confirmations or password resets.

We do not use the information collected through TSI Hub for advertising, and we do not sell it.

Legal Basis / Educational Purpose

TSI Hub is provided to schools and their students strictly for an educational purpose: giving students and teachers a single place to reach the classroom apps, files, and materials a school has chosen to use. Information is collected only as needed to provide that service to the school that has agreed to use TSI Hub, consistent with the school’s own responsibilities under applicable education-privacy laws (including, for New York schools, Education Law 2-d). TSI Hub does not independently market to students or use their data for any purpose unrelated to providing the service.

Data Sharing

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes. To operate TSI Hub, we rely on a small number of service providers (“subprocessors”) who process data on our behalf, under our direction:

• MongoDB Atlas — hosts the application database.
• DigitalOcean Spaces — stores uploaded files and resources.
• Resend — delivers transactional email (verification, password reset, and similar account messages).
• Google — provides optional OAuth sign-in, so a user can sign in with an existing Google account instead of a password.

These providers are hosted in the United States and are contractually or by policy restricted from using TSI Hub data for their own purposes. A more detailed look at these providers is available on our Security & Data Handling page. We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the safety of students or staff.

Data Retention

We keep account information for as long as a school and its students are actively using TSI Hub. When a school ends its use of TSI Hub, or when an administrator requests deletion of a user’s account, we work to delete or de-identify the associated personal data within a reasonable period, except where we need to retain limited records to meet legal, security, or accounting obligations. Activity logs are retained only as long as they remain useful for the purposes above and are deleted or de-identified on a similar schedule.

Your Rights

Users, parents, and school administrators may:

• Ask to see what information TSI Hub has on file for a given account.
• Ask us to correct inaccurate information (for example, a misspelled school name or an outdated grade level).
• Ask us to delete an account and its associated personal data, subject to the retention exceptions noted above.

Because TSI Hub accounts are created and managed through a school, we generally ask that these requests be routed through the school’s administrator so we can verify who is authorized to make the request — but we are glad to help directly if that is not practical. See Parents’ Bill of Rights for more on how parents specifically can exercise these rights for a student.

Children’s Privacy

TSI Hub is used by K-12 students, including students under the age of 13. We rely on each participating school to obtain any consent required under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and comparable state laws before enrolling a student under 13, consistent with the school-official / school-consent model those laws provide for for education-focused services used within a school setting. We collect only the information described above from student accounts, and it is used solely to provide the classroom-portal service to the school.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or requests related to the information above, can be sent to TSI at privacy@mytsi.org.