Blocksmith/STEM Forged Privacy Policy

At Blocksmith, Inc we value and respect your privacy when you access our website or use our services.

Blocksmith, Inc does business as "STEM Forged" and for the purposes of this agreement we will use the name "Blocksmith" to describe any relationship you have with us.

In summary, we try to collect only the absolute minimal data necessary to run our services and, if requested by you, to enable additional features. If you belong to an organization like a school or a business, they might require additional information.

We are not in this business to make money from your data. Furthermore, we try to lay out our monetization strategy as clearly as possible to back up this claim.

This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what data we collect, why we collect it, and what we do with it. It will also describe the choices you can make about the way we collect and use your personal data. Please take the time to read it carefully, and if you have any questions, please contact us at support@blocksmithxr.com. You will be asked to agree to the policy before you can use our services.

Information we get from your use of our services:

Account information

Information you give us. Use of our services requires you to sign up for a Blocksmith Account. When you do, we’ll ask you only for a username and email address. In certain instances of the Blocksmith system, for example but not limited to school or business domains, you may be able to choose an option to not use an email address, but instead name a guardian for your account.

You can also voluntarily upload a user photo, which is publicly viewable. Anything you create with Blocksmith could be publicly viewable depending on the option you choose for publishing.

If you comment on other experiences, we will store this information as well.

Device information

Starting with version 2.1.4, we collect no device-specific information (such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number). 2.1.4 is fully gdpr and coppa compliant.

Starting with version 3.0, we will collect some information for the basic use of Unity Analytics and Ads in our mobile viewers (iOS and Android) that are NOT licensed to a Pro school or business domain. Note due to the nature of analytic plugins, basic anonymous device information will be collected for all license types at app start before we have a chance to switch them off.

Our integration in 3.0 will be fully gdpr compliant and provide all opt-out mechanisms that Unity provides. Unfortunately, this integration is necessary for our core business case of monetizing the free app versions with ads and in-app-purchases but we implement it as minimally and with all the necessary opt-out options as we do not need nor want your information for anything else.

Unity and our internal implementation are the only analytic systems we use in our apps

With 3.0, we will also use the internal crash log mechanisms Unity provides, which are fully anonymous.

With 6.3, we will be using Unity Ads on iOS and Android. Premium users will not see ads nor get tracked additionally to what is stated above. For users deciding to use our apps “Free with ads”, Unity’s privacy policy can be found here: https://unity3d.com/legal/privacy-policy

Log information

When you use our services or view content provided by Blocksmith, we maintain a standard server log of all the events going on in our system, which can include

  • Details of how you used our service, such as your search queries
  • Internet protocol address
  • Cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Blocksmith Account

We are not mining these logs for any data and we are subsequently not connecting any of this data with your account.

We offer you access to your viewing/editing history for your convenience. We might implement a recommendation module and tie it to your account as a convenience feature at one point as well as a “social timeline” where you can see what other creators are producing and will provide upfront communication about this when it gets implemented as well as provide you with a detailed set of opt-in/-out options.

Version numbers

Certain services include a version number. This number and information about your installation may be sent to Blocksmith when you interact with our services, so we can identify what you used to create your content and make sure it is compatible with other versions. This will also be used to provide update information.

Local storage

We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.

Cookies and similar technologies

We are using cookies to enable certain features on our site, mainly related to your account information.

For premium users, we will not show ads and not allow ad cookies to be placed. If you are logged in with a premium account and see ads, please contact us at support@blocksmithxr.com.

If you are located in a country covered by GDPR, you are opted out of analytic and interest-based cookies by default.

You can manage your cookie settings here: https://www.blocksmithxr.com/cookies

Information you give us access to

Some users who are instructors or are using our instructor services can voluntarily connect their Google Calendars with our scheduling system. That way upcoming instruction events can be added to their Google Calendars and modified in case of a schedule change.

We use this connection solely for the purpose of adding/modifying schedule specific information with those calendars.

How we use information we collect

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Blocksmith and our users. We also use this information to offer you a history of what you viewed.

For premium users, we use information we collect to run the service as you would expect it to run.

We may use the name you provide for your Blocksmith Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Blocksmith Account. We may show other users your publicly visible Blocksmith Profile information, such as your username and photo.

We may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Blocksmith (such as reviews and comments you post) in our services. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Blocksmith Account.

When you contact Blocksmith, we keep a record of your communication to help solve any issues you might be facing. We may use your email address to inform you about our services, such as letting you know about upcoming changes or improvements. We provide you with detailed settings regarding email communication in your account settings.

We use information collected from cookies and other technologies, like pixel tags, to improve your user experience and the overall quality of our services.

We reserve the right to deploy technology to detect fraudulent or abusive use of our services and if there is reasonable suspicion, to have a Blocksmith administrator look at content and media files you upload and use in Blocksmith experiences. Please note that we at Blocksmith as well as the organizations we serve have zero tolerance for fraud or any form of abuse, as clearly stated in our TOS. A parent, school or business administrator requesting us to look at files constitutes “reasonable suspicion”. Also note that school and business administrators have similar capabilities within their domains.

Free users might be ads on certain pages, your information can be used to personalize those ads. We also might use your information to improve our own ad marketing.

We use Google Analytics' 3rd-party audience data such as age, gender, and interests to better understand the behavior of our customers. Every user can opt out of this here: https://www.blocksmithxr.com/cookies

We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.

Information you share

Many of our services let you share information with others. Remember that when you share information publicly, it may be indexable by search engines. Our services provide you with different options on sharing and removing your content.

Accessing and updating your personal information

Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it – unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes. When updating your personal information, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can act on your request.

We may reject requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort (for example, developing a new system or fundamentally changing an existing practice), risk the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup systems).

Where we can provide information access and correction, we will do so for free, except where it would require a disproportionate effort. We aim to maintain our services in a manner that protects information from accidental or malicious destruction. Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.

We strive to be GDPR compliant with both your options to request data profiles as well as a full deletion of your account and all activity. Please note that your progress in “Quests” might be deemed a legitimate business use case for schools who are using our services and might need to report attendance and completion rates as part of their business. This might lead to a situation where you can’t fully delete your data before explicit permission from that organization. We will inform you about that both upfront and at the time of deletion.

You can manage your cookie settings here: https://www.blocksmithxr.com/cookies

Information we share

We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Blocksmith unless one of the following circumstances applies:

With your consent

We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Blocksmith when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.

For legal reasons

We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Blocksmith if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

  • meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
  • enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
  • detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
  • protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Blocksmith, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.

We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example, we may share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services.

If Blocksmith is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Information security

What we do to protect Blocksmith and our users from unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of information we hold:

  • We encrypt many of our services using SSL.
  • We review our information collection, storage and processing practices, including physical security measures, to guard against unauthorized access to systems.
  • We restrict access to personal information to Blocksmith employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.

When this Privacy Policy applies

Our Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Blocksmith and its affiliates, including services Blocksmith provides on mobile devices, and services offered on other sites (such as our advertising services), but excludes services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy.

Our Privacy Policy does not apply to services offered by other companies or individuals, including sites that may include Blocksmith services, or other sites linked from our services. Our Privacy Policy does not cover the information practices of other companies and organizations who advertise our services, and who may use cookies, pixel tags and other technologies to serve and offer relevant ads.

Compliance

We regularly review our compliance with our Privacy Policy. When we receive formal written complaints, we will contact the person who made the complaint to follow up. We work with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of personal data that we cannot resolve with our users directly.

Changes

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We will post any privacy policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of privacy policy changes). We will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.