From the first day we launched Perusall, we’ve always made security and privacy a priority. In 2015, that meant architecting our system and designing our processes to align with industry best practices and developing a privacy policy that treated student data as sacrosanct: no unnecessary data collection, no ads, and no selling or unnecessary sharing of student data.

A decade later, the landscape has changed: AI has raised the stakes, making it easier for attackers to compromise online platforms. We believe that having a tool that “works” for your course is no longer enough: platforms should always respect and protect your data and your privacy, and have the processes and infrastructure in place to back up those claims. 

As a result, we’ve doubled down and invested in our infrastructure and organization to fulfill your privacy and security expectations, even as we’ve continued to expand the footprint of the Perusall platform to provide an even more comprehensive solution for creating meaningful engagement with your course content. (For example, our just-released checkpoints feature lets you embed required discussion prompts and quizzes directly into the content – check it out!)

One outcome of this work is that we are now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, the result of a significant investment of resources into building and maturing our internal practices and processes. This culminated in a rigorous audit by an external firm that evaluated and confirmed our compliance with a comprehensive set of security controls and processes. If you’re interested in the details of what sorts of security measures we have in place, our Trust Center provides more information; the SOC 2 certification is what tells you that we really do what we say we do! And of course, we continue to abide by major international privacy laws (FERPA in the US, PIPEDA in Canada, and GDPR in Europe).

Our commitment to privacy and security includes the use of AI in Perusall. First, and perhaps most importantly, AI features in Perusall are completely optional for each instructor. While we think they can be incredibly valuable and time-saving for instructors, we recognize and respect that individual instructors make their own decisions about whether and how to incorporate AI into their work. For instructors who choose to use AI features in Perusall, AI models are always run within our private environment – your data is never sent to model providers, and we never train models using your data. Learn more about AI safety in Perusall

As a company that was founded and is still run independently by educators, our guiding principle is that your data — and your students’ — should be treated as we would want ours to be treated. We’ll continue to invest to ensure that continues to be the case.

Sincerely, 

Brian Lukoff, Perusall Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer