Privacy Program

A coordinated effort to evaluate edtech tools, protect child and student privacy, and build in safety and security from the start.

The Common Sense Privacy Program evaluates privacy policies so that parents and teachers can make smart choices about the learning tools they use with their children and students, and so that schools and districts can participate in improving the technology used in K–12 classrooms. Today, with the involvement of over 250 schools and districts, we are working in collaboration with product developers to bring greater transparency to privacy policies across the board. In 2019, we also released our second groundbreaking State of EdTech Privacy Report. This report, together with our privacy policy evaluations for popular products, takes a crucial step towards understanding what promises companies make about protecting privacy.

Privacy Evaluations

Common Sense evaluates popular edtech apps using a broad range of legal requirements and best practices for data privacy. We focus on the core concerns of safety, privacy, security, and compliance.

Explore evaluations

Information Security Primer

Great for district and school technology leaders, this toolkit is for those looking to learn more about evaluating the information security practices of educational software.

Read the primer

Privacy Questions

Make sense of a vendor's terms of service with this question set that helps educators and administrators come to decisions based on their specific school and district policies.

See the questions

Our Impact

40% of vendors evaluated updated their terms

Driving Change

40% of the vendors evaluated in our initial cohort updated their terms, their application, or both.

Participants and Counting

Take a look at our growing list of participating schools and districts.

Find the Right Resources for You

I represent a district or school I'm a teacher, parent, or advocate I'm an edtech software vendor