Last Modified: July 13, 2023
Along is a free, web-based, digital reflection tool designed to make it easier for educators to help each student feel seen and understood. Along has been developed to facilitate meaningful, one-on-one relationships between educators and students through research-informed resources and efficient communication (e.g., asynchronous text, video and/or other supported methods of communication).
Gradient Learning (formerly T.L.P. Education) (“Gradient Learning”, "we", "us" and "our"), a California nonprofit public benefit organization and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is dedicated to helping all students feel encouraged and inspired. With support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, Gradient Learning offers Along as a free service to educators and students.
As with all modern online tools, we work with “Service Providers” to operate, protect, and improve Along. These trusted vendors help us and Partner Schools with a variety of tasks, ranging from web hosting and analytics to software engineering and managing technical support tickets. In order to enable our Service Providers to perform these functions we may need to provide them with access to personally identifiable user (student, teacher, and parent) information stored in the systems for Along. For example, we securely store Along data in databases managed by Amazon Web Services.
We are responsible for making sure these vendors are trustworthy and we take this responsibility seriously. First, we apply the following controls to any Service Provider that may have access to personal information as part of their work for us:
- We contractually prohibit these Service Providers from selling personal information and require them to implement reasonable and robust privacy security controls.
- We take steps to limit the Service Provider’s access to only the information it needs to provide services to us.
- Where possible, we will use privacy-protective measures to minimize information shared with Service Providers, such as masking personal identifiers like student or teacher names.
Second, we want to be transparent about who we may need to share personally identifying information with as part of operating Along, and so have provided the list of technical Service Providers that directly support Along, including what data we share with them or they provide to us, the services they provide for Along, and links to their respective privacy policies.
Finally, please note a few types of third-party services that we have not added to this list:
- Like any other organization, we use “IT” business services such as Gmail, Salesforce, and Slack to operate our organization. These services may incidentally contain personal information (e.g., email address or contact handle) and we apply the Service Provider restrictions described above, but have not included a detailed list of these IT business services below.
- Our resource library may include links out to third-party content. These websites open in a separate browser window and are not included in the list below.
We will update the list below from time to time. If you have any questions, please contact us at privacy@along.org. You can also learn more in the Along Privacy Policy.
Technical Service Providers
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Name of Service Provider with Link to Privacy Policy |
Service |
Details |
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Hosts databases and servers that power and backup Along; also provides email service and analytics support. |
We store the full Along content and traffic data on AWS servers (all personal information written to disk is encrypted). We use Amazon Simple Email Service to send emails to users and provide analytics. |
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Augments the user experience in easily customizable ways to better support user onboarding and feature adoption. |
Appcues triggers customizable experiences in the UI based on non-personally identifiable information such as prior usage of specific features (e.g. show a reminder if a user hasn’t yet sent a reflection). |
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Used to serve https://comealong.statuspage.io/ to notify users about the service outages. |
Atlassian will receive the IP address and traffic data of any visitors to the status page. Visitors who choose to subscribe to updates via email or text. |
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Hosts the public website (www.along.org) on the wpvip.com enterprise agile content platform. |
Automattic will receive the IP address and traffic data of any visitors to the Along public website. |
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Provides software engineering, technical, and operational support for Along. |
Authorized CZI staff have access to the full Along content and traffic data in the course of providing engineering, technical, and operational support to the Along. |
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Online appointment scheduling with members of our technical support and school and teacher success teams. |
Calendly is a calendar add-on that receives user emails when users sign up for appointments. |
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Provides monitoring for reliability and performance of the Along service and infrastructure. |
Datadog monitors errors and resource usage. No personally identifiable information is transmitted to Datadog. |
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ELT tool for ingesting data from third party platforms into a warehouse. |
Fivetran is used for piping email campaign data from Mailchimp into Snowflake and receives the same information as Mailchimp. |
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Used to understand the effectiveness of the Along marketing site. |
Google Analytics and Google Optimize are used to compare visitors on the marketing site and let educators know about Along. These services do not collect personally identifiable information about visitors, including student visitors to the websites. |
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Used to dynamically trigger firing of tags without code changes. |
Google Tag Manager receives data in standard HTTP request logs, all of which is deleted within 14 days of being received. Google Tag Manager does not collect, retain, or share any information about visitors, including student visitors to the websites. |
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Provides single-sign-on (SSO) authentication for Along users. |
For SSO, Google sends Along authentication tokens, email addresses, and name, but not account passwords. Along does not share any information back with Google for this service. |
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Hosts the web servers for Along. |
The full Along content and traffic data is stored with Heroku. |
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Enables customer support for Along to evaluate the quality of their responses to requests from users (e.g. students and educators). |
Through Zendesk, MaestroQA receives the email addresses of individuals submitting requests, the content of the requests itself (e.g. bug reports, any other help center request, and data pull requests from educators and schools), including attachments. |
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Email service for sending emails to educators, school officials, and everyone who requests to receive information from us. |
Mailchimp receives names and email addresses of email recipients and the content of the emails, and provides analytics. |
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Microsoft Office 365 (Azure AD Seamless Single Sign-On) |
Provides single-sign-on (SSO) authentication for Along users. |
For SSO, Microsoft sends Along an authentication token, email addresses, and name, but not account passwords. Along does not share any information back with Microsoft for this service. |
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Used to manage cookie consent for the public website (www.along.org). |
OneTrust receives the IP address of the visitor to the website and stores the user’s preferences in a cookie on their local device. For known students who have previously logged into the Along application on the same device, OneTrust is not loaded and receives no information because all non-essential tracking is turned off and cannot be turned on. |
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Runs various data reports on data previously captured in Along, uploaded data, and data from third party integrations so we can improve the tool. |
Periscope has access to the full Along content and traffic data in our data warehouse (Snowflake) in order to run data reports. All connections between Periscope and Snowflake are encrypted. |
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Houses and tracks partnership agreements, points of contact and other coordination information. |
Salesforce receives the names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers of school and district officials, as well as active and prospective Along users (educators only, not students). |
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Tool for standardizing data collection for analytics. |
Segment receives event data based on user actions taken on Along. |
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Serves as a data warehouse that powers Along. |
The full Along content and off-Platform data collected from schools is stored on Snowflake’s servers (data is always encrypted). |
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Used to group users into different experiences for feature deployment and verification. |
Split is used to track which type of experience(s) the Along application should use and to provide data analysis based on non-personally identifiable information of user events. |
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Create and send surveys for educators and students, with the intent of improving Along through teacher and student feedback. |
SurveyMonkey receives the email addresses of educators and students submitting feedback, the content of the survey feedback requests (e.g. improvements, feature requests and suggestions etc.), and the responses provided. |
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Hosts videos on the public website and help center. |
Wistia receives IP address and video usage data for the public videos explaining what Along is and how it works. |
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Enables customer support for Along in response to requests and supports management of Help Center content. |
Zendesk receives the email addresses of individuals submitting requests, the content of the requests itself (e.g. bug reports, any other help center or support request, and any response sent back. |
