Privacy Policy
To find out more about COPPA, please visit: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-reform-proceedings/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule
Please read through our Privacy Policy and take the time to talk with your child about the importance of Internet safety. While the Internet allows us to provide wide and affordable access to rich educational experiences for young writers, as well as a platform to share their unique voices and stories, not everyone on the Internet has good intentions. Remember to stay involved with your children’s activity at Society of Young Inklings and any other sites they visit as they explore the World Wide Web.
Registration and Account Information
Society of Young Inklings does not allow children 13 years of age and younger to register for any courses or mentorships or to submit any information or writing through our forms without the supervision of a parent or guardian. If you are 13 years of age or younger, you may not register for any programs or complete any forms on our site on your own. We do not require nor collect email addresses for children.
However, we do require a valid email address for a parent or guardian as part of registration or form submission. All communication between Society of Young Inklings and students is handled through this parent/guardian email address. The types of email communication we send include answers to your questions, notifications about courses and mentorships and your child’s on-site activities, and for internal marketing research purposes. At the time of registration, parents/guardians can additionally opt-in or opt-out of receiving email notifications for offers, discounts, or promotions from Society of Young Inklings, our sponsors, or 3rd party partners that support our site.
IP Information
When you visit a website, your Internet Protocol (IP) address is automatically shared with the site. Other information such as the site you linked to our site from, what type of browser you are using, and your general region could also be shared. Like many sites on the internet, we use Google Analytics to keep track of this information to help us better understand how our users are engaging with our site in order to continually improve the Society of Young Inklings experience. Google Analytics does not share your information with other third parties.
We use cookies during your visit. A cookie is small amount of data that is transferred to your browser by a web server and can only be read by the server that gave it to you. It functions as your identification card and enables us to record your passwords, purchases, and preferences. It cannot be executed as code or deliver viruses. Most browsers are initially set to accept cookies. You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether or not to accept it. (For some web pages that require an authorization, cookies are not optional. Users choosing not to accept cookies will probably not be able to access those pages.)
Other Information We Collect
Young writers have the option to submit stories, book recommendations, or other writing for publication on our blog. In order to credit young authors, parents/guardians may submit their child’s first and last name, age, and/or a city and state to accompany the publication. Parents/guardians are welcome to submit the writing under a pen name and without other personal or identifying information for their child, as long as the form is accompanied by a valid parent/guardian email address.
Young authors also have the option to share writing with their mentors and peers in mentorships and courses. We use Google Docs to privately share documents among these mentor-monitored groups. Our staff members and board members also randomly monitor group conversations and shared documents.
Online mentorships and course meetings are facilitated through Google Hangouts or Zoom meetings. In order to access these sessions, parents/guardians must create an account with one of these third-party providers. Parents/guardians must be present to log in for each session, and must remain present and available to their child throughout the session. Young writers ages 13 and under may not use any personal accounts for their Society of Young Inklings mentorship or class sessions. Society of Young Inklings administrative staff and/or board members are invited to all sessions and may drop in from time to time to supervise and support mentors and mentees.
Disclosing Information
We may disclose Personal Information if we have to comply with legal obligations or to law enforcement requests, to protect and defend our rights and property or the safety of other users, and with your permission.
If we are involved in a change in control, merger, acquisition, reorganization, receivership, bankruptcy, transition of Services to another provider, or any similar transaction, your information may be transferred or sold as permitted by law and/or contract. We will use reasonable efforts to notify you before information about you is transferred and if the policies of the acquiring company are different so you can select to continue or discontinue the service.
Third Party Affiliations and Links
Many of Society of Young Inklings’ resources are offered free of charge for use to kids, their educators, and parents. We support the operations, development, and activities of the platform through mission aligned sponsorships, third party partners, and grants and an e-commerce component that provides the option to purchase books from our site, to our adult users. While we may use information collected on the site to enable book related discovery and promotion from our sponsors, we DO NOT SHARE, SELL, RENT or TRADE THE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION OF OUR USERS WITH ANY THIRD PARTIES, without obtaining the users’ explicit consent. Our website may also contain links to sponsor products or services that offer writing related support material, content, teacher’s guides, book widgets, author interviews, book trailers, and such. While we take great caution and screen the material, we are not responsible for the practices and privacy policy of other sites. Please read and be familiar with their practices, as we only have control and cover the use of Information we gather on younginklings.org. You assume sole responsibility for your use of any third party links and sites.
We may use multi-media, audio, and high quality videos to introduce and excite our users to explore new resources, book titles, and authors. We closely curate and select any multi-media content for safety and suitability, whether they are chosen by our editors or offered by our sponsors. We do not disclose Personal Information to Third Party hosting sites, but you should be aware that any information that you disclose once you access other websites is not subject to this Privacy Policy.
In order to support the operations of the site and to develop and include all the features, we also provide links for adults to purchase books from third party providers, who in return pay us a small affiliate fee. We may also aggregate and share or sell anonymous data, including but not limited to, ratings and reviews. We do not share or sell any personally identifiable information with a third party without explicit permission.
Removing Your Information:
If you would like to review, updatem or remove your personal information or your child’s information from our database, contact us right away at info@younginklings.org. All student writing published on our blog is published under a first-printing license only and the copyright belongs to the young writer. Should you want to remove writing published on the blog, please notify us via email. We will confirm receipt of your request and will remove the writing within 5 days. Should you not receive confirmation of our receipt of your request, we have unfortunately not received your email for some reason. Please call us at 650-735-1408.
Other information:
We reserve the right to update this policy when we deem necessary. You will be notified of any changes to this Privacy Policy by the publication of a revised policy on this page. It is your responsibility to check back to this page from time to time to ensure that you are up to date on any modifications. If we make a material change to this policy we will contact you by email before the changes become effective to seek your consent.
Society of Young Inklings, Inc. was founded by Naomi Kinsman and is a 501c3 organization. You can contact our board of directors and staff by email (info@younginklings.org) or writing to us at PO Box 26914, San Jose, CA 95159. Any use of the words “us,” “we,” “our,” “Society of Young Inklings,” and “younginklings.org” in this Privacy Policy refers to Society of Young Inklings, Inc.
