OrbitApplications

jmak, You're welcome. There is no benefit to us in shying away from our users' concerns and questions. We appreciate your positive comments and understand your concerns. We obviously need terms and conditions to protect us as a business, but do understand that these could (through not being transparent or concise enough, or indeed by being misinterpreted) serve as a reason for potential users to be unsure about how we conduct our business activities and deal with the data and information that is stored with us. We will, therefore, be carrying out a review our Terms and Conditions along with our Data & Privacy Policy in the very near future. In the meantime, in response to your queries: Our servers are located (and therefore our data is hosted) within the EU and we do process all data in line with EU law. The Terms and Conditions specifically mention a worldwide licence because we do have many registered users from countries outside the EU. We appreciate your comment that the Terms and Conditions may be viewed as contradicting the Data & Privacy Policy. This will be considered as part of the aforementioned review. For clarity, however, we do not and will not use images stored with us for promotional or marketing purposes. Regarding the use of data after users have stopped using the service: Our software allows the sharing (given the required permissions) of a child's data between their EYFS providers and parents, and in the future hopefully their Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 (and so on) education providers. As the data is related to the child and is important to the child we would hope that providers (even if they themselves have chosen to stop using Orbit) would not object to the data remaining associated with the child and therefore their parents and other education providers. That is the reason why this is included in the Terms and Conditions. We hope that you do trial our software (it is free to register and start using), and as with all our users, we would be happy to hear your comments about it should you do so. Regards, The Orbit Team.

GrumbleDook, Thank you for your comments. We do appreciate and understand the concerns raised here, as you say, there may be some "dodgy operators out there". We obviously would like to state that we are not one of them! Our 'Terms of Service' (as quoted by you) are supported by our 'Data & Privacy Policy' which is also available on the public-facing section of our website. This Data & Privacy Policy does contain further detail than our Terms of Service on how we deal with data and information that is stored with us. The following is quoted from it: [h=2]"OUR SPECIFIC POLICY TOWARDS THE DATA RECORDED ABOUT CHILDREN IN ORBIT SERVICES[/h]We only use this information for the purpose of providing Orbit Services. We do not share this information with any third-party except unless we are required to do so for the purpose of complying with the law. Specifically, this information is not used for marketing, promotion, advertising, or any other revenue generating purpose." With regard to the removal/destroying of information, through general use of the software, users/EYFS Practitioners with administration rights within their provider can access and delete information stored with us. Regards, The Orbit Team

We would like to comment on some of the queries raised in this thread: Orbit Early Years is a web based application with a complementary iOS app, therefore does not need to be used exclusively on iOS devices. The Orbit Early Years app does allow the taking of photographs, but these (and any other information stored in Orbit) are not stored on the device when taken through the app. All information recorded through Orbit is immediately saved to our secure cloud storage, therefore if devices are lost or stolen there is no data loss and from a safeguarding perspective this mitigates the risk of information falling into the wrong hands. We do not, and will not, ever use images stored with us for marketing or publicity purposes, and we are very clear about this on the terms on our website. We do not use data stored with us for any commercial benefit. You retain ownership of the data, however we need a licence to use the data that is input in order to provide the service to other users, such as your colleagues and the children's parents. If anyone has any further questions about our software please contact us via our website and we will be happy to respond. The Orbit Team.