Hoot Reading Website Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 23, 2023

Hoot Reading, Inc. (“Hoot Reading,” “we,” “us”), owns and operates the website available at https://www.hootreading.com (the “Website”). This Privacy Policy is intended to inform our visitors (“Users,” “you,” “your”) about how we may collect, use, and disclose your Personal Identifiable Information which we collect on or through the Website (“personal information,” “PII”). It also describes your choices regarding use, access, and changes to your personal information.

By accessing or using our Website, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not access or use the Websites.

Information We Collect:

We only collect information about an individual with the individual’s knowledge and consent, except as otherwise indicated in this Privacy Policy. Generally, this means we collect personal information directly from Users using the Website. Occasionally, we may collect personal information from third party sources, but only with the knowledge and consent of the individual or where otherwise authorized by law.

If you contact us with a question about our education services, we will ask for your first and last name and your email address, and optionally, your phone number, which we use to respond to your inquiry.

If you contact us because you are interested in our education services for your education institution or youth serving organization, we will ask you for your name, email, phone number, organization or institution name, the size of your organization or institution, and your role with the organization or institution. For security reasons, we reserve the right to verify your role with the organization or institution you identified via email, phone, or another reliable method.

If you contact us because you are interested in employment, including contract agreements as a teacher, we will ask you for your name, email, phone number, resume, and background check results. We may also request biographical information and a profile photo.

To subscribe to our blog posts, we will ask for your first and last name, and your email address.

Personal information may also be collected from any communications you engage in with us through email, phone calls, chats, or other channels of communication.

If you choose to sign up for a free trial of our education services, we will ask for the following information:

Parents or guardians also have the option to provide us with additional information about their child, including their self identified pronouns, reading level, or any learning challenges that may be helpful to their teacher(s). We use this information to deliver the learning experience for the student. Each parent or guardian who provides information about a child (as the case may be) is responsible for and confirms that they have authority to provide that information to us.

In the event you choose to purchase access to our education services for your student or child, you will be charged the amount set out in your Registration, Order Form or Master Service Agreement (“MSA”) (as the case may be) and required to provide certain personal information and your credit card (or other form of payment) information. Hoot Reading may use third party providers to help operate and process these online purchases. Such third party providers may have their own terms of use and privacy policy. Hoot Reading does not collect or store the full details of your payment method, however, the last four digits and expiration date may be provided by the payment processor for reference when communicating with you and for reminders of when payment details must be updated. Any fees that Hoot Reading may charge you for the Services, are due immediately and final, unless otherwise specified with your Registration, Order Form or MSA (as the case may be).

We may also collect personal information for other purposes where we have a legal duty or right to do so.

A Note About Children:

Our Website is intended for a general audience and not for children under the age of 13 or otherwise under the age of consent in your country. If we learn that we have inadvertently collected Personal Information from a child on our Website, we will take steps to promptly delete it.

Usage Information and Cookies:

When you access our Website, our servers automatically collect the Internet Protocol (“IP”) address associated with your browser. We may also collect additional information such as your device ID, browser type and version, operating system, language, country, the areas of the Website you visit most often, as well as, whether or not you open our emails and click or clicked through them. We use this information to administer the Website, diagnose technical problems, measure and track traffic, and to better understand how our website is being used. This information is analyzed as aggregated trends to help us improve our Website, and with your consent, for remarketing purposes after you have visited our Website or seen our ads. We do not attempt to re-identify anonymous information.

To collect this information, we use the following tracking technologies:

Cookies. Cookies are small data files sent by a website and stored on the computer or device at the request of that site. Cookies store information related to a user’s browser to enable us to recognize the browser on return visits and to remember your preferences.

Tracking technologies: We may use tracking technologies to collect information about your use of our website, including the pages you visit and the content you view. This includes the full URL clickstream, including the date and time of your interaction, time spent, response times, browsing activity (including scroll positions, clicks, mouse movements), search queries, and the URL of the website you visited immediately beforehand. We use clickstream data to better understand your needs and preferences and the performance of the website so that we can improve the Website experience.

By using Hoot Reading, you agree to the use of these technologies.

Third Party Cookies:

We use third-party service providers to assist us in collecting and analyzing usage information. Most browsers can be set to detect browser cookies and to let a user reject them, but refusing cookies may make it difficult to use certain areas of the Website. A list of companies that use cookies on our Website, the services they provide, and information on how you may opt out of certain cookies is included in our Cookie Notice. To learn more about browser cookies, including how to manage or delete them, refer to the Tools, Help or similar section of your web browser.

When you use the Internet, we or our third party partners, as well as certain companies not affiliated with us, including ad networks, web analytics companies and social networking platforms may use technologies, such as those described above, to collect information about your online activities over time and across our and other websites. We and they may use this information to measure the effectiveness of our advertising and to target advertisements for products and services that may interest you. In addition to the tracking technologies described above, other companies may also use clear GIFs and other tracking technologies.

As with many organizations, we do not honor “Do Not Track” signals transmitted by web browsers as there is no industry standard for implementing such programs. To find out more about “Do Not Track”, please visit http://allaboutdnt.com.

For more information about third-party advertisers and how to prevent them from using your information, visit the NAI’s consumer website at http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices, http://www.aboutads.info/choices, or http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk. If you do want to opt out using these tools, you need to opt out separately for each of your devices and for each web browser (such as Chrome, Edge Firefox, Safari or others) that you use on each device.

How We Use and Disclose Personal information:

We do not access or disclose your Personal information except as described in this Privacy Policy or in the following circumstances:

We may also use or disclose personal information for other purposes where we have a legal duty or right to do so.

We may create deidentified data from User information by removing, obfuscating and/or otherwise altering the Personal Information. We may use deidentified data for legally permissible purposes.

Accuracy and Completeness of Personal Information:
We make every reasonable effort to ensure that personal information is accurate and complete. This may involve requesting further information or updates from you. We rely on you to notify us if there is a change to your personal information that may affect your relationship with Hoot Reading.

How You May Modify Your Personal Information:
At any time, you may access, change, or delete your Personal Information by contacting us at help@hootreading.com or 1(833)456-HOOT (4668). We may take steps to verify your identity before fulfilling your request.

Third Parties:
For more information on the cookies and analytics that we use, see the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy of the third parties in our Cookie Notice.

We may engage with third party partners to facilitate our delivery of the Website and to provide certain features on our behalf, such as data hosting, analytics, content delivery, maintenance, email and marketing management, job applications, security, and similar functions. These third parties may require a limited amount of information, including Personal Information, in order to deliver their services.

If we transfer personal information that we collect or that you provide as described in this Privacy Policy to third party service providers, those service providers will be contractually obligated to use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them, and to process the personal information with the same standards set out in this Privacy Policy.

We may also share aggregated demographic information that is not linked or linkable to personal information with our partners.

Social Media Applications and Links:

Our Website contains links to third party websites, including social networking websites. We also include applications that allow you to log onto third party social networking websites to share, comment, or recommend content. The social network sharing applications may provide information to the associated social network or third party about your interactions with our Website, even if you do not click on or otherwise interact with the application. Information is transmitted from your browser and may include an identifier assigned by the social network or third party, information about your browser type, operating system, device type, IP address, and the URL of the web page where the application appears. The fact that we link to a website or include an application is not an endorsement or representation of an affiliation with that website. We do not control third party websites or their privacy practices. These other websites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you. Other sites follow different rules regarding the use or disclosure of the personal information you submit to them. If you use social networking tools or visit social networking websites, we encourage you to read their privacy policies or statements of the other websites you visit.

Security:

We maintain commercially reasonable physical, technical, and administrative safeguards to protect the security, integrity and availability of your Personal Information. We host Personal Information in secure, third-party cloud-based environments that use firewalls, encryption of Personal Information in transit and at rest, and other industry-standard technologies in an effort to prevent interference or access from outside intruders. The Internet, however, is not perfectly secure. We are prepared to take appropriate and timely steps in the event of any incidents involving personal information in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

Data Retention:

We retain personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was provided, and as permissible under applicable law, including as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, comply with applicable industry standards, and protect the security of our Website.

At any time, Users may submit a written request to have their or their student or child’s personal information deleted. We will comply with such written requests within thirty (30) days, subject to a legal requirement for us to retain personal information for a longer period of time.

We do retain non-Personal Information, including aggregated, de-identified data for legally permissible purposes.

Opt-Out Policy:

We may send emails to parents with information about our services that we believe may be of interest in accordance with applicable laws, including Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. You may opt out of receiving marketing email messages by contacting us at help@hootreading.com or by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link found at the bottom of every marketing email that we send. We do not send email messages on behalf of third parties.

Additional Information for Users from the European Union and the United Kingdom
When we provide Services to you, we operate in the capacity of a “data controller” under applicable EU and UK law. In those circumstances, our processing of your personal information is governed by this Privacy Policy as well as our Terms of Service. In some cases, we will ask for your consent so that we may process your personal information. In other circumstances, we may rely on a different lawful basis, as explained in the section, “How we Use and Disclose Your Personal Information.” Where our lawful basis is our legitimate interest, a balancing test is available upon request.

Storage of Personal Information:

If you are located outside of the United States, please be aware that your information will be transferred to, processed and maintained in the United States.

By submitting your Personal Information, you acknowledge that we may transfer, process and store your information in the manner described in this Privacy Policy. Wherever the information is, it will be treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws. When information is stored or processed outside of your jurisdiction, it may be subject to the laws of and be accessible by legal authorities in such other jurisdiction. However, this does not change our commitments to safeguard your privacy and we will comply with all applicable laws relating to the cross-border data disclosure of your Personal Information. In the absence of an adequate decision regarding the safe processing of your Personal Information where required, we will implement Standard Contractual Clauses in our agreement with you and with our third parties, or rely on such other transfer mechanisms to ensure that the transfer of your personal information outside of your country is lawful. You may request details of the transfer mechanisms that we rely on to transfer personal information outside of your country by emailing us at help@hootreading.com.

Additional Data Rights:

Please note that the rules in your country may provide you with additional rights or may limit these rights. In all cases, our provision of the rights will comply with the applicable laws.

Any personal information we hold will be made available to the applicable Customer or User upon request, provided that it has not been earlier deleted pursuant to the terms of this Privacy Policy.

If you are based in the EU or UK, for example, you may have the right to access, update or correct your Personal Information, to request deletion of such Personal Information, and to object to certain processing, including that related to marketing, to receive a machine-readable copy of the personal information concerning you that you provided to us or request us to transfer such data to an applicable third party in certain circumstances.

In addition, where you provided your consent so that we might process your Personal Information, you may withdraw your consent by contacting us using the details provided in the “Contact” section, subject to any legal requirements. You may also restrict how we use your Personal Information while a complaint is being investigated. However, if consent is withdrawn, we may not be able to provide the Services.

Your exercise of these rights is subject to certain exemptions to safeguard the public interest (for example, the prevention or detection of crime) and our interests (such as the maintenance of legal privilege). To exercise your rights, please contact us using the information in the “Contact” section below.

Updates to This Policy:

As our Website evolves, we may make changes to this Privacy Policy. We will alert you to changes by providing notice within the Website or otherwise as required by law. Your continued use of the Services is your consent to the most recent version of the Policy.

The “effective date” at the top of this policy indicates when the latest revisions and updates became, or will become, effective. Please check back frequently for the most recent version.

Contact:

If you have any concerns or complaints about how we handle your personal information, or if you have questions regarding this Privacy Policy, please contact us at:

210-1600 Kenaston Blvd. Unit 340, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3P 0Y4
legal@hootreading.com
+1(833)789-HOOT(4668)

You may also ask questions or file complaints related to this privacy policy and practices, by contacting the iKeepSafe Safe Harbor program dedicated consumer complaint email address, COPPAPrivacy@ikeepsafe.org.

You may also have a right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Please contact us for the information for the relevant authority.

Definitions:

Personal Information – information that identifies, describes, or relates to an identified or identifiable individual, or data that is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.