Terms of Service

Terms of Service

Effective Date: October 11, 2013

Who Built America Badges for History Education (hereafter “the site”) is an initiative of the American Social History Project (ASHP), based at the City University of New York. The materials on the site (which include lesson materials, form data, Community postings, shared resources, and messages) are made publicly available for teaching and personal study only.

By registering for, accessing, browsing, downloading from, or using the site, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by the site’s terms and conditions.  ASHP reserves the right, at our discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of these terms and conditions (including Privacy, Acceptable Use, and Rights and Permissions) at any time.  ASHP reserves the right to terminate the site at any time.

Rights and Permissions

Materials on the site—both those created by ASHP and those created by users—may be used without permission for educational, non-commercial purposes, such as classroom distribution, student reports, etc. (Creative Commons Attribution—Non-Commercial) However, credit should be given as follows: American Social History Project/Center for Media Learning (http://badges.ashp.cuny.edu). Materials on the site may not be downloaded, stored, copied, distributed, or otherwise used for a commercial purpose without the prior written consent of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning.

Acceptable Use

As a user of the site, you agree that in the course of using the site you will not behave in a manner that:

  • Infringes or violates the intellectual property rights or any other rights of anyone else;
  • Violates any law or federal or state regulation;
  • Is harmful, fraudulent, deceptive, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable;
  • Jeopardizes the security of your account or anyone else’s (such as allowing someone else to log on as you);
  • Attempts, in any manner, to obtain the password, account, or other security information from any other user;
  • Violates the security of any computer network, or cracks any passwords or security encryption codes;
  • Runs Maillist, Listserv, any form of auto-responder or “spam” on the site, or any processes that run or are activated while you are not logged into the site, or that otherwise interfere with the proper working of the site (including by placing an unreasonable load on the site’s infrastructure);
  • “Crawls,” “scrapes,” or “spiders” any non-public page or portion of the site (through use of manual or automated means);
  • Copies or stores any significant portion of the site’s content, except as allowed by the site’s Creative Commons Attribution—Non-Commercial license;
  • Uploads someone else’s personal information without that person’s permission or otherwise in violation of that person’s legal rights;
  • Decompiles, reverse engineers, or otherwise attempts to obtain the source code of the site.

Privacy Policy

The following policy applies to users of the site and is intended to explain what type of information is gathered from users and how that information is used.

We do not collect any personal or professional information about you unless you provide that information voluntarily. Any personal or professional information you choose to provide via the site registration, badge submission forms, chat boxes, and in messages posted in the Community discussion forums will only be used by American Social History Project to conduct the business of the site. ASHP does not sell, rent, loan, trade, or lease personal information collected on the site. We limit employee access to personal and professional information collected through the site to only those ASHP employees and authorized educational researchers who need access to the information in the performance of their official duties related to the site.

If you choose to share (via email, Mozilla backpack, or available social media options) the evidence page generated when you earn a badge, your name, number of students taught, anonymous annotated student work, evaluation statements written by you and by a WBA History Educator, and (depending on the badge) any lesson materials you created will become accessible to people who are not logged into the site.

To protect your privacy and prevent unauthorized use, please keep your IDs and passwords in a secure place. Whenever you use the site from a public workstation, be sure to logout of the system and close all web browser windows before you leave the public workstation.

If you send ASHP an e-mail via the Contact Us section of the site, we will collect your e-mail address and the contents of your message. We will use your e-mail address and the information included in your message to respond to you, to address the issues you identify, and to improve the site.

Messages posted by users in the site’s Community discussion forums are visible to all logged in users of the site. When you complete any of the site’s badge submission forms as part of your participation in the program, the information you submit through those forms will be visible only to ASHP staff and authorized educational researchers.

To earn certain badges, users are required to submit anonymous samples of work completed by their students and annotated by the user to reflect on lesson design and student learning. It is the user’s responsibility to insure the student’s privacy by removing names or other identifying details before uploading the student work to the site. If student work containing a name or other identifying detail is uploaded to the site, as soon as ASHP staff becomes aware of such, ASHP will immediately delete the files from its server.  

All community postings, form data, and uploaded files are backed up and retained by the site until such time as the site is terminated. If a user deletes his/her account, ASHP will consider requests to delete or render anonymous all community postings, form data,and uploaded files.

Logs and Network Monitoring

ASHP maintains log files of all access to badges.ashp.cuny.edu and also monitors network traffic for purposes of site management and security. We use this information to help diagnose problems with the server and to carry out other administrative tasks. We also use log analysis tools for such purposes as creating summary statistics to determine which information is of most interest to users, identifying system problem areas, and determining technical requirements. The following information is typically collected in these files:

  • the Internet Protocol address and domain name of your Internet Service Provider and/or computer, if your computer has an IP address assigned directly to it;
  • the type of browser and operating system you use;
  • the date and time you visited badges.ashp.cuny.edu;
  • the web pages or services you accessed at cuny.edu and amount of time spent at each page; and
  • the web page from which you accessed badges.ashp.cuny.edu and from which any page on this site was linked.

None of the foregoing information is deemed to constitute personal information by the New York State Internet Privacy and Security Act.

In addition, we have implemented procedures to safeguard the integrity of the site’s information technology assets, including, but not limited to, authentication, authorization, monitoring, auditing, and encryption. These security procedures have been integrated into the design, implementation, and day-to-day operations of the site as part of our continuing commitment to the security of electronic content as well as the electronic transmission of information.

For security purposes and to maintain the availability of the site for all users, we employ software to monitor traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or otherwise damage this web site.

For questions regarding these terms of service, please contact enoonan@gc.cuny.edu