Privacy Policy

Overview

Schoolwise ("we", "our", or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you use our website, mobile app, and SMS services.

Information We Collect

• Phone Number: Used for account authentication via SMS verification and, with your consent, one operator-triggered proactive stalled-signup follow-up plus automated replies to SMS messages you send.
• Email Address: Used to send weekly digest emails and optionally to connect your Gmail account for syncing school-related emails (with your explicit consent).
• Family Information: Your name, your child's first name, grade level, and school. Used to personalize school event information and notifications for your family.
• Chat Messages: Questions you ask about your school to provide answers and improve the service.
• Preferences: Your notification preferences and communication settings, used to customize the timing and content of alerts.
• Device Information: Basic device identifiers for push notifications, app functionality, and debugging.

How We Use Your Information

• To authenticate your account and provide our services
• To answer your questions about school events and information
• To improve our service quality and answer accuracy
• To send you important notifications about your school (with your permission)

SMS Text Messaging

If you save an SMS preference with Schoolwise, we collect your phone number and consent record for one proactive stalled-signup follow-up plus automated replies to SMS messages you send. Nothing is sent immediately and no school alerts are sent over SMS. If onboarding remains unfinished, an operator may deliberately trigger at most one proactive follow-up; it is not scheduled automatically.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. SMS opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties.

• Phone Number Use: Your phone number is used solely to record your SMS preference, for account verification, for the one operator-triggered proactive stalled-signup follow-up, and for automated replies to SMS messages you send
• No Sharing: We do not share, sell, or rent your mobile phone number or SMS opt-in consent to any third party or affiliate for marketing or promotional purposes
• Message Frequency: At most one proactive stalled-signup follow-up per opt-in, plus automated replies to SMS messages you send
• Carrier Fees: Message and data rates may apply based on your mobile carrier plan
• Opt-Out: Contact support to remove the saved preference, or reply STOP to unsubscribe and HELP for assistance

For more details about our SMS terms, please see our Terms of Service.

Gmail Integration

You may optionally connect your Gmail account to automatically sync school-related emails. This feature requires your explicit consent through Google's authorization process.

• Read-Only Access: We request read-only access to your Gmail. We cannot send, delete, or modify any of your emails.
• School Emails Only: We only sync emails from your child's school and school newsletter services. Your personal emails are never accessed, read, or stored.
• Sender Filtering: After you connect, we scan your recent email senders and ask you to confirm which school-related senders to sync. Only emails from senders you approve are accessed.
• Token Security: Your Google authorization tokens are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM encryption and stored securely in our database.
• Disconnect Anytime: You can disconnect Gmail at any time from your settings page. This immediately revokes our access to your Gmail account.
• No Third-Party Sharing: Your Gmail data is never shared with, transferred to, or used by any third party. It is only used to provide you with school information within Schoolwise.

Schoolwise's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Analytics and Session Replay

We use two analytics providers to understand how people find and use Schoolwise: PostHog (product analytics and session replay) and Google Analytics 4 (traffic and acquisition). We use them to see where people get stuck — which pages they leave from, which steps of signup they finish — and for nothing else. We do not sell this data, and we do not use it for advertising or to build profiles for anyone other than ourselves.

• Pages you visit: the address of each page, along with basic browser and device information (browser, operating system, screen size, coarse location derived from your IP address by the providers). One-time links we email you — the signup verification link and the "open my chat" link — have their entire query string removed before the address is sent, so the code inside them never reaches an analytics provider.
• Steps of the signup funnel: which demo you viewed, how you arrived, whether you opened the sample brief, whether you asked a question, which kind of school you chose, and whether you verified your email. Each of these carries only values from a fixed, published list or a yes/no flag. Free text cannot be attached to them, which is why the question you typed, the answer you were shown, your email address, your child's name, and your teacher's name are never part of an analytics event.
• Session replay: PostHog records a reconstruction of the page so we can watch where a layout or a form goes wrong. Everything you type into a form or the chat box is masked. Past that, nothing is masked automatically: it covers only the regions we have marked by hand, which include your chat conversation and the address we echo back to you on the signup confirmation. Anything we have not marked is recorded as written — page headings, buttons and school-wide notices, and also parts of your settings page, including a connected email address, a school name and a child's name. If we add a new screen and forget to mark it, what it displays would be readable in a replay until we do.
• When you create an account: we keep, on your account record, a copy of how you arrived that first time — the referring site, the first page you landed on (including any campaign tags in its address), the coarse location and device type at that moment, and the random analytics identifiers above — so we can tell where new families come from and recognise a signup that reached us by mistake. This is the same information the providers already hold; keeping it ourselves means it is deleted with your account.
• How you are identified: before you have an account, by a random identifier your browser generates. When you start a signup we link that to a random identifier derived from the signup request itself — never from your email address or any code derived from it. Once you sign in, analytics events are associated with your Schoolwise account.

Retention. Analytics events and replays are held by PostHog and Google under their own retention schedules, which we do not shorten or extend; see PostHog's privacy policy and Google's privacy policy. Deleting your Schoolwise account removes your data from Schoolwise; it does not, on its own, delete analytics events or replays already held by PostHog or Google. We have no automated deletion request to either provider today.

Your choices, stated honestly. Schoolwise does not currently show a cookie or analytics consent banner, and it does not currently detect the Global Privacy Control or "Do Not Track" setting your browser may send — we are working on both, and until they ship neither signal changes what is described above. We also have no self-service control that turns analytics off for one account. What does work today: any browser setting or extension that blocks analytics scripts blocks ours. You can write to support@schoolwise.ai or privacy@schoolwise.ai with a request about your analytics data and a person will answer you — we are not promising a particular outcome here, because the mechanism to guarantee one does not exist yet.

Data Security

We use industry-standard security measures to protect your data. Your information is stored securely and we do not sell your personal data to third parties.

Data Retention

We retain your data only as long as necessary to provide our services. You can request deletion of your account and data at any time by contacting us.

If you start a signup and never confirm it. The demo asks for your email address, and optionally your child's grade and teacher, before you click the link we send you. Until you click it, that — along with the question you asked and the answer we showed you — sits in a pending signup record. The link stops working after 24 hours, and we delete the whole record a week after that, whether or not you ever came back. Nothing about you is added to your school's records until you confirm your address.

If you tell us your school isn't listed. We keep your email address and the school name you typed so we can let you know when Schoolwise reaches you. That is the one thing we keep indefinitely without an account behind it; email privacy@schoolwise.ai and we will remove it.

If you delete your account. Your family record and everything attached to it goes, including the signup record that created it and the transcript of the question you asked in the demo. See the analytics section above for what that does and does not do at our analytics providers.

Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services:

• Google Gmail API for email sync
• Twilio for SMS messaging
• OpenAI for content processing
• Firebase for push notifications
• Supabase for data storage
• Postmark for email delivery
• Novu for notification management

Children's Privacy

Our service is intended for parents and guardians. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. The app provides information about schools but does not collect data directly from children.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, please contact us at: privacy@schoolwise.ai

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new policy on this page and updating the "Last updated" date.