Privacy Policy — School Board Discourse Corpus

1. About This Application

The School Board Discourse Corpus is a private academic research tool used by a single researcher to collect, store, and analyze publicly available transcripts of US school board meetings for purposes of critical discourse analysis and linguistic scholarship. It is not a public-facing consumer product and does not provide accounts, registration, or access to third parties.

2. Use of the YouTube Data API

This application uses the YouTube Data API v3 to discover and retrieve publicly available YouTube channels and playlists operated by school districts and related government bodies. Specifically, the API is used to:

Search for YouTube channels associated with school board meetings (search.list)
Retrieve channel metadata and upload playlist IDs (channels.list)
Enumerate publicly posted videos within those playlists (playlistItems.list)
Download publicly available auto-generated or manually uploaded captions for research analysis

All data accessed via the YouTube API is limited to publicly available content. No private user data, authenticated YouTube accounts, or user-generated content beyond publicly posted school board meeting videos is accessed.

By using YouTube API Services, this application is bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Use of Google APIs is also subject to Google's Privacy Policy.

3. Data Collected and Stored

This application stores the following categories of data:

Transcript text — the caption/transcript content of publicly posted school board meeting videos
Video metadata — title, upload date, video ID, channel name, playlist URL; all publicly available
District metadata — district name, state, county, NCES ID sourced from public NCES datasets

No personal information about YouTube users, video viewers, or members of the public is collected. No cookies, tracking pixels, or analytics are used. The application does not have user accounts and does not collect names, email addresses, or any identifying information.

4. Data Retention and Deletion

All data is stored locally in a private SQLite database on a researcher-controlled server. Data is retained for the duration of the research project and will be deleted upon project completion or upon request.

To request deletion of any data sourced from a specific YouTube video or channel, contact the researcher at the address below. Deletion will be completed within 30 days.

YouTube API data (including cached API responses) is not retained beyond the immediate processing session. No YouTube API tokens, credentials, or user authorization data are stored in the database.

5. No Third-Party Sharing

Data collected by this application is not shared with, sold to, or disclosed to any third party. All analysis outputs used in academic publications contain only aggregate statistics and anonymized quotations consistent with fair use and academic research norms.

6. Security

The application runs on a private server with access restricted to the researcher. The database is not publicly accessible. API keys are stored as environment variables and are not committed to version control or logged.

7. Contact

Questions about this privacy policy or data deletion requests may be directed to:
[email protected]

8. Changes to This Policy

This policy may be updated as the research project evolves. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.