EMC Math Privacy Policy
Effective July 1, 2026
EMC Math is operated by Essential Math Concepts. This policy explains what EMC Math collects, what it does with it, what it never does, and who to contact.
EMC Math is used by schools and school districts. A district signs an agreement with us before any of its data reaches us. Where that agreement says something different from this policy, the agreement governs.
Summary
EMC Math is a mathematics program for classrooms. A student opens the work their teacher has assigned, answers the problems, and their teacher sees the results.
We do not store student names. We do not store email addresses. We do not store district student numbers. We do not sell data, we do not advertise, and we do not build profiles of students for any purpose beyond showing a teacher how their own class is doing.
How students and teachers sign in
EMC Math issues no username and no password to any student.
Where a district keeps its students' work with us, a student or teacher reaches EMC Math in one of two ways. The first is from a Canvas course, by opening an EMC Math assignment. The second is from Clever, by opening the EMC Math tile. In both cases their own school system has already established who they are, and it passes that to us. We issue no username and no password to a teacher on this arrangement either.
Where a school holds the version of EMC Math that identifies no student to us, its teachers sign in with a password we issue for that school, and a teacher hands out an access code for each activity. A student joins with that code and tells us nothing about themselves. Teachers who reach EMC Math from a content partner's platform arrive on a short-lived signed link from that platform.
A small number of administrator accounts are issued a password by us, at a district's request, so that an administrator who uses neither Canvas nor Clever can read their reports.
What we collect
Identifiers. We store the identifier that the school's own system issues. From Canvas this is the launch subject identifier. From Clever it is the Clever user identifier. Neither carries a name and neither resolves to a person without the district's own system.
A hashed student number. Where a district sends a student number, we store a keyed one-way hash of it and never the number itself. The hash uses HMAC-SHA256 with a secret held only on our server. The number cannot be recovered from the hash. The hash serves one purpose, which is to ensure that a student who reaches EMC Math through both Canvas and Clever counts as one student rather than two.
Student work. The answers a student gives to math problems, whether each answer was correct, and which problems they have opened. This is the record a teacher reads.
Class and school information. The name of the school, the name and code of the class, and the identifiers the district's system uses for schools, courses and sections. These describe the institution rather than a person. Some districts include a teacher's surname within the class name they send us. In that case the surname is held within the stored class name.
Technical records. A session token, which the application holds in the browser and sends in a request header. It is signed rather than encrypted, so anyone holding it can read what it carries. It carries no student number and is never written to our database. On a Canvas launch it carries the display name Canvas supplied, which travels only to that person's own browser. On a Clever sign-in it carries no name at all. Server logs, which include IP addresses and are held for security monitoring and for limiting repeated sign-in attempts. These logs are not stored against a student's work.
Cookies. EMC Math sets three cookies. Each belongs to one of its applications and remembers the display size a person has chosen there. None carries an identifier, and each lasts until the person closes their browser. The session is not a cookie.
What we never store
No table in EMC Math has a column for any of the following, and we test this automatically against our own database structure.
A student's name. A student's email address. A teacher's email address. A school administrator's email address. A district student number or staff number in its original form. Date of birth, gender, race, ethnicity, or any other demographic field. Parent or guardian information. Grades from the district's system. Disability status. Free or reduced lunch status. Home address. Phone number. Photographs. Biometric data. Anything a student searches for.
Student names in class lists
A teacher opening their own class list sees their students' names. Those names are read from Canvas or from Clever at that moment, travel in the response to that request, and are displayed to that teacher. They are not written to our database and are not retained after the request completes.
A teacher needs to tell one student's work from another's, and this design meets that need without storing names.
Anonymous practice with an access code
A student who joins with an access code is not identified to us at all. Their school sends us no identifier for them, and we ask them for nothing.
We store a random token for their device, a label the service assigns by join order, which reads as Student 1, Student 2 and so on, and the time they joined. For each problem we store which problem it was, how many of its parts were answered correctly, and how many parts it had.
We do not store what the student wrote. Their answers are checked on their own device and only the count of correct parts reaches us.
A teacher sees one row for each device that joined, carrying its label, the time it joined, and how many problems it has fully correct. A teacher cannot see what a student wrote, and nothing in the record tells a teacher, or us, which student is which.
An access code works for twelve hours, and a teacher may turn it off sooner. The practice records themselves are kept until the district's data is deleted, as set out under Data retention below.
What we do with it
We use what we collect to operate the service. That means showing a student the work assigned to them, saving their answers so they can stop and come back, showing a teacher how their own class is doing, and showing a school or district administrator how their schools are doing.
We also use information about how the tools are used, with no link to any individual, to identify problems and improve the content.
We use it for no other purpose.
What we never do
We do not sell personal information, and we never have.
We do not use student data for advertising, and we display no advertising.
We do not build profiles of students for any purpose other than their own learning in this program.
We do not use student data to train artificial intelligence models. EMC Math contains no AI features.
We do not disclose student data to anyone outside the service providers listed below, except where a district instructs us to or where the law requires it. If we receive a legally authorized request for a district's data, we will notify the district promptly unless the law forbids us from doing so.
Service providers
EMC Math uses two service providers, both located in the United States.
Amazon Web Services provides the computers and storage the service runs on. All data remains in one United States region.
Clever handles sign-in and class lists for districts that use Clever. Clever holds this information on the district's behalf and passes it to us when a teacher opens a class.
No other third party receives district data. EMC Math uses no analytics service, no advertising network, no error reporting service and no payment processor. The applications load no fonts, scripts or stylesheets from any third party.
We notify districts at least 30 days before adding a service provider.
Where the data is stored
All EMC Math data is stored and processed in the United States. We use one Amazon Web Services region in Northern Virginia, and no data is processed or stored outside the continental United States.
Data retention
EMC Math does not carry a district's data from one school year to the next. A school year's work belongs to that year, and no report spans two years.
A district's data is deleted at the end of its contract year, and the district is offered a download of it first. A district may ask us to delete its data at any time, and we act on that request within 30 days.
Where a student leaves a class, we mark their membership of that class as ended rather than erasing the work they have already done, so that their teacher's record of the term remains complete.
Children under 13
EMC Math is used in classrooms with children under 13, under the school official exception. The school or district provides consent on behalf of parents, for educational purposes only, which is what the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows. We act as a school official with a legitimate educational interest, under the district's direction.
We do not collect personal information from children directly, and we never ask a child for information about themselves. Everything we hold about a student came from their district.
Access, correction and deletion rights
The district is the right place to start. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, educational records belong to the district, and a parent's rights to see, correct or remove them are exercised through the district rather than through us. We support districts in meeting those requests.
A district administrator may ask us at any time to show what we hold for their district, to correct it, or to delete it.
Security
We describe our security practices in a separate security policy. In short, all traffic is encrypted, data at rest is encrypted, access follows least privilege, the database is not reachable from the internet, and backups are taken hourly and verified.
If we confirm a breach affecting a district's data, we notify that district within 72 hours.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that affects how district data is handled, we will notify the districts we work with in writing before the change takes effect. The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.
Contact
Essential Math Concepts 518 N Tracy Ave Bozeman, MT 59715 support@essential-math-concepts.com
Districts with a signed agreement should also use the contacts named in that agreement.