Your privacy and safety online are very important to us. To protect your privacy, we limit what we collect and what we publish on the website. Although, as a nonprofit educational institution, we are technically exempt from the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we are voluntarily following its rules about data collection from children under 13.
We follow industry standards to maintain the security of our web server. However, we cannot absolutely guarantee that malicious third parties will be unable to break into our database. This privacy policy explains how our authorized staff and contractors will use your information.
You can program in NetsBlox without providing us with any personally identifiable information at all. Without creating an account, you can still save projects on your own computer and not on our cloud. However, some of the collaboration capabilities require account creation to be able to invite and share projects with other users. You can also, without providing any personally identifiable information, download our example projects, libraries, and other public media.
If you wish to save the projects you create on our cloud server, then you must create an account on this site so that your storage is separate from other people's storage. When you create an account, we collect your email address or, if you are under 13, your parent's or guardian's email address. We use your address for three purposes:
We do not use your address for any other purpose. You will never receive marketing emails of any kind through this site, neither from us nor from third parties.
We do not share your address with anyone else, except for research institutions conducting educational research that have already received consent from the users with data they would like to access. The only exception is that we might be compelled by legal subpoena to provide information to police agencies or courts.
We ask for your month and year of birth when you sign up in order to decide whether to ask for your own email address or your parent's email address. But this partial birthdate information is never sent to our server; it is used only on your computer during the signup dialog.
You can save projects on our server for your personal use, or you can explicitly choose to share a project with the other users of this site.
Projects that you choose to share are available for anyone to examine. We may examine shared projects for research purposes. We urge you strongly not to include personally identifying information in your shared projects! For example, if you post a project that says "today is my birthday" you are telling the entire world your date of birth, which is a very important piece of personally identifying information.
If we are notified by a third party that your shared project includes their copyrighted content (such as a musical performance), we are required by law to investigate, and may revoke the shared status of that project.
If you contact us by email, we save your email address and whatever other information you include in your message long enough to respond to you, which might take some time if your message is a bug report. We then delete your email.
This site is hosted at the Vanderbilt University, Department of Computer Science. This web server collects the following information: Internet Protocol (IP) address of computer being used; web pages requested; referring web page; browser used; date and time; and statistics identifying particular IP addresses from which our websites are accessed. We do not associate this data to individual user identities. The editor also reports some usage metrics.
This information is used to improve the technical quality of the site, and may be used for investigation of deliberate attempts to deny the use of our site to others. We do not log personally identifiable information, except that your IP address may indicate your Internet service provider and your general geographic area.
If you delete your account on our site, we will delete all the information associated with that account, including your email and your saved projects.
If you are the parent of a child with an account on this site and would like us to remove the account, please contact us, and include in your message your child's account name, the email address associated with the account, and a way to contact you offline (to prevent forgeries).
The netsblox.org site is maintained by
Akos Ledeczi
akos.ledeczi@vanderbilt.edu