Privacy Policy

1) Information We Collect

We aim to collect the minimum personal information necessary to operate fair, secure, and reliable math contests.

• Account and registration information — student name, grade, school, city, province, country, username, email address, parent/guardian contact information, school/coordinator account information, and related registration details.
• Contest information — contest registration, attempts, answers, scores, time-on-task, submission time, rankings, certificates, reports, appeals, and contest-integrity records.
• Payment information — payments are processed by Stripe. We do not store full credit card numbers on our own systems. We may receive limited payment-related records, such as transaction status, receipt information, payment amount, and billing contact information.
• Device, log, and security information — IP address, browser type, operating system, device information, timestamps, login activity, error logs, diagnostic information, and other technical information used for performance, security, fraud prevention, and contest integrity.
• Support and communication information — emails, support requests, messages, forms, attachments, and related communications sent to or from us.
• Online proctoring information, where applicable — for individually registered online students only, limited proctoring information may include camera-based identity or environment checks, still images or short webcam checks where enabled, browser-focus events, timestamps, attempt logs, device/browser/IP information, and session flags.

Important proctoring clarification: For contests administered in person or under the supervision of a school, board, education centre, approved coordinator, or qualified proctor, we do not collect video, image, or audio data through the platform for proctoring purposes. Limited online proctoring is used only for individually registered online students where required for exam integrity.

2) How We Use Information

We use personal information only for purposes reasonably related to operating, protecting, and improving the Services, including:

• registering students and managing accounts;
• delivering contests and related services;
• verifying eligibility, identity, and contest integrity;
• scoring contests, generating results, rankings, certificates, and reports;
• providing access to students, parents/guardians, educators, coordinators, schools, or boards where appropriate;
• processing payments through Stripe;
• sending contest-related, account-related, support, security, policy-update, and administrative communications;
• detecting, preventing, and investigating cheating, misuse, fraud, unauthorized access, or security incidents;
• maintaining, troubleshooting, securing, and improving the website and platform;
• complying with legal, accounting, tax, contractual, school/board, and regulatory obligations;
• creating aggregated or de-identified statistics for contest reporting, service improvement, and educational analysis.

We do not use student personal information for targeted advertising. We do not sell student personal information.

3) Public Rankings, Certificates, and Reports

Contest results may be used to generate certificates, progress reports, and rankings at school, city, province, national, or contest levels. Public ranking displays may use abbreviated names, initials, school names, cities, provinces, or other limited information, depending on the contest format.

Students, parents/guardians, schools, boards, or authorized coordinators may request pseudonymization or limitation of public display where appropriate by contacting support@math-contest.org.

4) Online Proctoring

Online proctoring is used only where necessary to protect exam integrity and is generally limited to individually registered online students. It is not used for in-person or school-supervised contest settings where a school, board, approved coordinator, or qualified proctor supervises the contest.

Depending on the contest settings and technical setup, online proctoring may collect limited information such as:

• camera-based identity or environment checks;
• still images or short webcam checks, where enabled;
• browser-focus events and screen/session activity indicators;
• timestamps, attempt logs, and contest session logs;
• basic device, browser, operating system, and IP address information;
• flags generated by the system or by authorized review personnel.

We do not routinely collect audio for school-supervised or in-person contests. If audio or video collection is required for a specific individually registered online contest, this will be clearly disclosed before the contest and used only for identity verification, exam integrity, investigation of potential misconduct, platform security, and legal or school/board compliance purposes.

Online proctoring evidence is retained only for as long as necessary for exam-integrity review. Unless a longer period is required for an active dispute, investigation, security review, legal obligation, or school/board requirement, online proctoring evidence is deleted within 90 days after the contest/result-review period.

Raw proctoring media is not retained for unrelated purposes. When it is no longer necessary, it is deleted. If non-identifying statistical or exam-integrity information is retained, direct identifiers such as name, email address, account ID, user ID, IP address, and other account identifiers are removed or separated so the remaining information is no longer reasonably associated with an identifiable individual.

5) Cookies and Similar Technologies

We use essential cookies and similar technologies for login, account sessions, contest delivery, security, fraud prevention, and platform functionality. Essential cookies are required for taking a contest and using secure account features.

We may use limited, privacy-conscious analytics or diagnostic information to understand website performance and feature usage. You can disable non-essential cookies in your browser settings, but some features may not work properly without essential cookies.

6) How We Share Information

We disclose personal information only where necessary to provide, protect, or improve the Services, or where required by law. We do not sell student personal information.

• Schools, boards, educators, and coordinators. Where students are registered or managed by a school, board, education centre, club, or coordinator account, authorized representatives may access relevant student registration, participation, score, certificate, and report information.
• Service providers. We use service providers for hosting, payment processing, email delivery, support, security, and platform operation. They receive only the information needed to perform their services.
• Legal and safety reasons. We may disclose information where required by law, court order, legal process, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, safety, security, or integrity of students, users, schools, boards, the public, or the Services.
• Contest integrity. We may disclose limited relevant information to parents/guardians, educators, schools, boards, coordinators, or proctors where necessary to investigate or resolve contest-integrity concerns.

7) Third-party Service Providers and Subprocessors

Our current key third-party service providers are listed below. We will update this list if there are material changes.

The platform uses WordPress and MasterStudy LMS software within our own hosted Oracle Cloud environment. These software components operate within our hosted platform and do not routinely receive independent disclosure of user personal information. If vendor support access is ever required, access will be limited to what is necessary and subject to confidentiality and security safeguards.

Third-party service providers and subcontractors that process personal information on our behalf are expected to maintain appropriate privacy and security safeguards that are equivalent to or stronger than our own safeguards, taking into account the nature of the service and information involved. They may process personal information only for the purpose of providing services to us and not for their own unrelated purposes.

We are not currently using Cloudflare for the Services.

8) Data Location and Storage

Primary application data for Ontario users is stored in Canada on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the Toronto, Canada region.

The Services are cloud-hosted. User data is not primarily stored on the user’s device, other than normal browser cookies/cache needed for login, session management, contest delivery, and website functionality.

Application data is stored in our cloud-hosted database and file system, including account records, contest registration data, results, certificates, technical logs, support records, and limited online proctoring evidence where applicable.

Payment information is processed by Stripe according to Stripe’s payment-processing and security practices. We do not store full credit card numbers on our own systems.

9) Retention, Deletion, and De-identification

We retain personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for contest administration, account management, certificate/result verification, support, legal/accounting obligations, security, audit, and contest-integrity purposes.

Our standard retention practices are:

• Inactive, cancelled, or lapsed accounts: account/profile data is deleted or de-identified within 24 months after the last activity or the end of the applicable contest season, unless a shorter period is requested and no legal, accounting, contractual, security, or contest-integrity reason requires continued retention.
• Contest records, results, and certificates: retained only as necessary for result verification, certificate access, appeals, academic/contest record purposes, school/board reporting, and audit. Where long-term statistics are needed, we use aggregated or de-identified data where appropriate.
• Payment and transaction records: retained only as required for tax, accounting, fraud prevention, and legal obligations. We do not store full credit card numbers.
• Online proctoring evidence: retained only for exam-integrity review and normally deleted within 90 days after the contest/result-review period, unless needed for an active dispute, investigation, security review, legal obligation, or school/board requirement.
• Technical logs: retained only as long as reasonably necessary for security, troubleshooting, fraud prevention, and audit purposes.
• Backups: deleted or overwritten according to the backup rotation schedule, normally within 90 days.

At the end of the applicable retention period, personal information is securely deleted from active systems or de-identified so that it is no longer reasonably associated with an identifiable individual. Backup copies expire through the normal backup rotation process.

10) Account Deletion, Access, Correction, and Data Export

Users, parents/guardians, schools, boards, or authorized coordinators may request access, correction, deletion, or export of personal information by contacting support@math-contest.org.

• Access and correction: You may request access to or correction of account information, registration information, or contact information.
• Deletion: You may request deletion of an account or personal information. We will verify the requester’s identity and authority, especially where the account belongs to a minor or is connected to a school, board, or coordinator group. Verified deletion requests are normally processed within 30 days, subject to legal, accounting, security, contractual, audit, or contest-integrity retention requirements.
• Export: You may request a copy of available account profile information, contest records, certificates, or related data. We may provide the information in a reasonable format, such as PDF or CSV, subject to identity and authority verification and privacy safeguards.
• Public ranking display: You may request pseudonymization or limitation of public ranking display where appropriate.
• Email choices: You may opt out of non-essential promotional emails. Transactional, security, policy-update, payment, contest, and account-related messages may still be sent where necessary.

11) Children’s Privacy

InSpire Canada Math Contest serves school-age students, including elementary and secondary students. For students under the age required by applicable law, a parent/guardian, school, board, or authorized coordinator should create or manage the account and consent to participation and data processing where required.

We collect student personal information only as necessary to provide the Services, administer contests, maintain contest integrity, issue results and certificates, support users, and comply with applicable obligations.

Parents/guardians, schools, boards, and authorized coordinators may contact us at support@math-contest.org to request access, correction, deletion, or export of a student’s information, subject to identity and authority verification.

12) Security Safeguards

We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal information against unauthorized access, use, disclosure, alteration, loss, or destruction.

Our safeguards include:

• HTTPS/TLS encryption for data in transit;
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hosting in the Toronto, Canada region;
• encrypted cloud infrastructure for stored data, files, and backups;
• hashed account passwords;
• role-based access controls for students, coordinators, and administrators;
• least-privilege access for administrative users;
• limited administrative access to authorized personnel only;
• server-level access controls and firewall/security-list controls;
• regular WordPress, LMS, plugin, server, and database maintenance and patching;
• logging and monitoring of suspicious login, registration, and platform activity;
• backup and recovery procedures;
• data minimization and limited retention for online proctoring evidence;
• incident and breach response procedures.

Our security practices are aligned with recognized security principles and controls, including NIST Cybersecurity Framework principles, CIS Critical Security Controls, OWASP web application security practices, privacy-by-design, and data-minimization principles.

We do not currently hold a formal SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, or CSA STAR certification. Upon appropriate request and subject to confidentiality, we may provide schools, boards, or authorized partners with reasonable documentation regarding our security controls, such as policy summaries, incident response procedures, subprocessor information, infrastructure overview, access-control procedures, backup procedures, and HTTPS/TLS configuration evidence.

No online system is 100% secure. Users should keep passwords confidential and report suspected security issues to support@math-contest.org.

13) Breach Response and Notification

We maintain a breach response protocol that includes identification, containment, investigation, notification, remediation, and documentation.

Containment may include temporarily disabling affected accounts or features, revoking or rotating credentials, passwords, API keys, or access tokens, blocking suspicious IP addresses or traffic, temporarily taking affected systems or features offline where necessary, preserving logs and evidence, applying patches or configuration changes, and restoring from clean backups where appropriate.

Remediation may include root-cause analysis, correction of the vulnerability or process failure, review of administrative and user access permissions, additional monitoring, user/school/board notification where required, staff or administrator retraining where appropriate, and updates to policies, procedures, and technical controls.

If a confirmed or suspected security or privacy breach involving personal information occurs, we will notify affected users, parents/guardians, schools, boards, or authorized contacts directly by email where appropriate and as soon as reasonably possible after we have sufficient information to provide meaningful notice.

For school-board use, we will notify the relevant school or board privacy/security contact as soon as reasonably possible after becoming aware of a confirmed or suspected breach involving their users’ personal information.

Notifications may include, where available, the nature of the incident, the types of information involved, the date or approximate date of the incident, steps taken to contain and remediate the issue, recommended steps for affected users, and contact information for follow-up questions.

14) Business Transfers

If InSpire Canada Math Contest or InSpire Education Technology Inc. is involved in a sale, merger, acquisition, restructuring, financing, transfer of assets, or similar business transaction, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction.

Any successor organization will be required to protect previously collected personal information using safeguards equivalent to or stronger than those described in this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use, and to use the information only for the purposes described in those documents, unless further notice or consent is obtained.

Where reasonably possible, users, parents/guardians, schools, boards, or authorized contacts will be notified by email before the transfer is completed. Where applicable, users or schools/boards may request deletion, opt out of non-essential transfer, or discontinue use before the transfer, subject to legal, accounting, contractual, security, or contest-integrity requirements.

15) Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the Services, legal requirements, security practices, contest operations, or business needs.

When we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will provide notice by email to affected users, parents/guardians, school coordinators, and/or school/board contacts where appropriate. We may also provide a prominent notice on the website or in the application.

For material changes that expand the collection, use, disclosure, or retention of student personal information, we will provide notice before the change becomes effective and obtain consent or school/board approval where required.

The updated Privacy Policy will include a new “Last updated” date.

16) Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, account deletion, data export, security, breach notification, or how we handle personal information, please contact us:

InSpire Education Technology Inc.
503A Windsor Crossing Premium Outlet Mall,
1555 Talbot Rd, Windsor, ON N9H 2N2, Canada

Phone: +1 888-MATH(6284)-618
Email: support@math-contest.org