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Student Data Privacy & the Onyx Membership

Protecting Student Privacy

We've been thrilled to see tens of thousands of students and teachers using EasyVirtualChoir to continue rehearsals and performances! In the US alone, thousands of schools across hundreds of school districts have been using our service after security and privacy reviews by their IT departments. Some key factors in their evaluation included:

  1. Site uses https to ensure security.
  2. Site uses Google and Microsoft privacy terms. In addition to their policies, we've created these additional security & privacy features:
  3. Users may choose to unlist (or hide) their songs, profiles and groups so they are not surfaced on the site.
  4. Song owners can unlist their songs so they can only be accessed by those given the specific URL.
  5. Song owners have the option to hide their song's member list, so no one can see the names of the participants.
  6. Song owners have the option to turn off the remix function, so no one can make a copy of the song.
  7. Song owners have the option to hide peer tracks for their song, so only selected tracks are visible to participants when they record.
  8. Users have the option to record audio-only tracks without showing their faces.
  9. Users may delete their own video or audio tracks.
  10. Song owners may delete their songs from the system.

For more, see our privacy statements at https://blog.easyvirtualchoir.com/updates/privacy.

We've also worked with several district-level IT departments by completing security reviews & questionnaires when necessary. If your district has a standard security questionnaire for its software vendors, email it to us at info@easyvirtualchoir.com.

The Onyx Membership

While EasyVirtualChoir's existing data protection policies are satisfactory for a majority of schools, some schools who want to use the service have had additional regulatory challenges from their state's student data privacy laws (notably NDPA and Edlaw-2D). As a result, some schools have requested us to sign separate legal agreements with their school. This presents additional legal risk that stretches beyond our capacity and expertise at this point.

However, we're happy to announce that we have a solution for these schools--the Onyx membership--that we believe will completely support and enable schools and teachers to use EVC in compliance with NDPA, EdLaw-2D, and other related requirements. This membership will allow teachers to set up songs where students may join anonymously (no school login required!). You can think of it like setting up a Google doc that any student may edit anonymously so long as they have the secret link. This way, the aforementioned privacy laws would no longer apply since no student PII data is shared with us.

If you'd like to learn more about our Onyx membership and how to enroll, email us at info@easyvirtualchoir.com!