Student Data Privacy Notice - Official Zac Northup

1. You are in charge

The parent or guardian is the account holder. You buy the subscription, add each student, and decide whether a student gets their own sign-in.
Parental consent. By creating a Pharos Terminal account and adding a student, you confirm that you are that student's parent or legal guardian, and you consent to the collection and use of your student's information described here. For a student under 13, this is the consent the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires. Students cannot create their own accounts. Before a student can be added, the parent or guardian creates the account and completes a paid checkout with a payment card, and only the parent can add a student or set up a student's sign-in. During the founding beta, families we invite can register without a payment card; the parent or guardian still creates the account, and every other protection in this notice applies. You can withdraw consent at any time by turning off or removing your student's sign-in, or by asking us to delete your student's records.
You can see everything your student does. Anything a student logs appears in your parent tracker, marked as logged by that student.

2. What we collect about your student

What	Why
First name or nickname, and grade	to set up the student and fit lessons to their grade
Optional sign-in: a username you choose and a password	so the student can work on their own. No email address is needed. The password is stored only in scrambled (hashed) form.
Lessons completed, dates, hours, subjects, West Virginia Academic Standards tags and your notes	to keep your records and build the year-end portfolio
Work samples and files you or your student upload (photos, PDFs, documents, Reality Writes! manuscripts)	to keep the student's work with their records and add it to the portfolio
Reality Writes! module sign-offs	to track progress through the course
Settings such as yearly hour goals	to show progress against your goals

What we do not collect: a student's last name, birthdate, email address, home address or phone number. The name field rejects full names and email addresses. Please don't put sensitive personal details in notes or uploads. Photos you upload are stored privately, but only you decide what they show.

3. Where it is kept

Student records are stored only in private Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage in the United States, in an individual private folder for each family. No folder is shared, and records are not mixed between families.
They are kept apart from the servers that host this website. The website holds your parent account, your subscription and billing, and a random ID that links your account to your family's folder. It does not hold your student's records.
Files are encrypted in storage, public access to the storage is blocked, and connections use HTTPS.
Access is limited by design. When you or your student sign in, the system issues a short-lived pass that opens only your family's folder. A student's pass opens only that student's own records.

We use industry-standard safeguards, but no online system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your student's information, we will notify you as the law requires.

4. How we use it, and how we don't

We use student information only to provide Pharos Terminal and Reality Writes! to your family: to show lessons, keep records, build portfolios and give support when you ask for it.

We do not:

sell student information to data brokers or anyone else;
show ads in Pharos Terminal or use student information for advertising;
build profiles of students for any purpose other than your family's own records;
send your student's records or work to AI tools;
share student information, except with AWS to store it, when the law requires it, or when you ask us to.

Pharos Terminal app pages do not load advertising or analytics tags.

5. Who can see it

You, and any student you set up, each seeing only what their sign-in allows.
Zac Northup, only when needed to provide support you request, fix a problem, or meet a legal obligation.
AWS stores the data for us as our service provider.

If you share a portfolio with an evaluator, a Hope Scholarship reviewer or anyone else, what you share is in your hands from then on.

6. Your rights and choices

Review and download your records, work samples and portfolios at any time, from your account.
Correct anything in the tracker yourself.
Turn off or remove a student's sign-in at any time. The student loses access to records at their next action, and to lesson files within 30 minutes.
Delete. Removing an item in the app hides it from your account right away. To have your student's records deleted, email officialzacnorthup@zacnorthup.com. We will confirm you are the account holder and delete the records within 30 days of confirming. Backup copies expire on our normal backup schedule.

7. How long we keep it

While your subscription is active, we keep your records.
If your subscription ends, your account becomes read-only. You can still view and download everything. We keep the records for 24 months after the subscription ends, so you can come back where you left off. After that, we delete them. You can ask us to delete them sooner at any time.
Removed items are kept as backup copies in case of accidental deletion. Backup copies expire on our normal backup schedule.
Temporary download files are deleted after 7 days. System logs, which contain no student names, are kept for 30 days.

8. Reality Writes! and Amazon KDP

Your student's book belongs to your student. We claim no ownership of a student's manuscript, story, cover or published book, and no share of its royalties.
Students publish through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The KDP account must belong to an adult. For a student under 18, that's a parent or guardian.
Amazon's terms, privacy policy, royalty rules and content rules govern everything on KDP. We don't control Amazon, and we don't see or manage your KDP account.
A published book is public. Talk with your student about what name to publish under and what personal details appear in the book and the author bio.
We will feature a student's book or name (for example, on a "Student Authors" shelf) only with the parent's written permission.

9. FERPA and schools

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) applies to schools and agencies that receive federal education funding. Our customers are families, so FERPA generally does not apply to a family's use of Pharos Terminal. Your records are yours either way. If a micro-school, learning pod, co-op or school wants to use Pharos Terminal for its students, contact us first. We may need a separate written agreement covering who controls the records and how they are handled.

10. Questions

Email officialzacnorthup@zacnorthup.com. We'll answer questions about your student's information directly.

Zac Northup Books and Publications
PO Box 1321
Scott Depot, WV 25526