Amira's Privacy Commitement

We understand the responsibility to protect privacy that comes with serving your students, schools and community.    

Amira is purpose-built and carefully designed to protect student data and privacy.  Student privacy is foundational to our work of helping every student become a proficient reader.

We want to clearly reaffirm our commitments:

We collect as little student data as our mission allows.

We only collect the data essential for Amira’s reading acceleration mission.  We do not collect or store data about a student’s family, address, SSN, or other PII.  We do not generate or store biometric identifiers or voiceprints.

We do not share, sell, or otherwise use student data other than to fulfill our core mission.

We only share data when we have a formal data sharing agreement.  We only do data sharing agreements with your School District and sometimes your State Education agency.  No one else – ever.  We have ironclad contractual agreements that forbid us from sharing student information.

We store data only as long as a School District specifies.

Amira believes any data generated in our software belongs to the School District with whom we contract.  We store data respecting the policies and guidance of the District.

Amira rigorously adheres to all federal and state privacy requirements.

All student data is governed by a district-controlled Data Privacy Agreement and is fully compliant with FERPA, COPPA, and more than 40 state privacy laws, including California’s SOPIPA and New York’s Ed Law §2-d.

We do not utilize public AI models.

Your data never enters public AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other third-party foundation models.  Student identifiable data never leaves Amira’s control.  No student data, including voice recordings, is used to train public AI models.

We never use student data for marketing purposes – either ours or for others. Amira does not listen passively.     

‍Amira is not Siri or Alexa. The software never listens to or records audio unless a student is logged in and actively engaged.

 A student can take the Amira Assessment without ever creating a digital footprint.

Amira provides a paper & pencil test that generates no digital footprint whatsoever other than aggregate scores..

A student can take the Amira Assessment without ever creating audio.

Amira provides a Non-verbal assessment that collects no audio.  In this form, Amira is no different than all other assessments students have taken for decades on computers. This option is only available for students that have accommodations. 

A student’s audio can be hidden and rendered inaccessible.

If a District desires, we can block anyone from listening to the audio of the student reading, even teachers.  This is a configuration we can “turn on” via request.

A student’s assessment audio can be deleted as soon as scored.

While a student must be scored and this requires us to evaluate the reading audio, we can delete the audio as soon as it is scored.  This usually occurs within minutes and never takes more than the same day by midnight.  This is a configuration we can turn on via request. Logically it is impossible for us to score an assessment without creating audio to run through the Amira scoring engine. If no audio is desired, a paper pencil or Non-verbal assessment can be used (see above).

 A student’s tutoring audio can NEVER be stored.

Since we do not need to score tutoring sessions, we do not need to persist tutoring audio at all.  This is a configuration we can turn on via request.  With this configuration on, tutoring audio is ephemeral.

When audio is stored, it is encrypted and stored without student identifiers.

Amira only persists audio in encrypted form.   The files storing audio, even if somehow magically unencrypted, do not store any information about the student.  The file is associated only with a numeric id that is almost impossible to match back to a specific student.

Amira has never had a breach.

Amira provides every conceivable privacy option for assessing students – from an approach that generates no digital footprint other than a score, to an approach that assesses without audio inputs, to an approach that collects audio but discards it almost immediately to a form that collects audio but hides it from everyone to an approach that collects audio and stores it securely and without sharing.

Sincerely,

The Amira Learning Team