EduSalone Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your data

There are two parties, and the difference matters for what you can ask, and of whom.

So: to correct a mark, a class or a name, ask your school — they can change it directly and we cannot change it for them. To ask about your login, a support ticket, or how we hold data generally, ask us.

2. What we hold

About a school

• School name, address, telephone, email, logo and motto
• The title used by the head of school, and whether the school runs separate Primary, JSS and SS sections
• The school's access codes (see section 5 of the Terms)

About staff — heads, teachers, bursars, secretaries, proprietors

• Full name, email address, telephone number
• Role, official title, and the section of the school you work in
• Whether you are a form teacher, and which class and subjects you are given
• A photograph, if the school takes one for a staff ID card
• Qualifications, if the school records them
• When you signed in, and from what kind of device

About a pupil

• Full name, admission number, class, sex and date of birth
• A photograph, if the school takes one for a pupil ID card
• Marks for each subject — the two tests, the exam, the total, the grade and the position in class
• Attendance
• Affective traits and psychomotor skills as assessed by the school
• Remarks written by the form teacher and by the head of school
• Fees billed, payments received and receipts issued
• Homework submitted and the marks and feedback given for it
• Brain Points earned in the trivia game
• A card code — ten letters and numbers printed on the pupil's ID card. It is not the pupil's name, admission number or anything else about them. It is a meaningless code that only this school's own records can turn back into a pupil
• If the school scans cards at its gate: the date and time the pupil arrived and left, and which gate it was. See below

If your school scans cards at the gate

A school may choose to record arrival by holding a pupil's ID card up to a phone or a scanner at the gate. If your school does this, here is exactly what is kept and what is not.

• What is recorded — the pupil, the date and time, whether it was an arrival or a departure, the name the school gave that gate ("Front gate"), and which member of staff was holding the phone.
• What marks the register — the first scan of the day marks that pupil present, or late if it is after the time the school set. A teacher's own entry always overrides it.
• A pupil who does not scan is never marked absent by the app. The register belongs to the teacher. No child is punished by a machine.
• No photograph is taken at the gate. The camera reads the square code on the card and nothing else. No image is saved, sent or kept, not even for a moment.
• No face is measured or recognised. The app holds no biometric data of any kind.
• The equipment holds no names. A scanning box fitted at a gate stores no pupil list. It reads a code, sends it, and shows a light and a sound. If such a box were stolen, it would carry no information about any child.
• This is not tracking. Nothing records where a pupil is at any other time, or anywhere other than their own school's gate.

Only staff of that same school, and PalmRoot Tech support when a school asks for help, can read these records. A parent linked to a pupil can see their own child's attendance. No other school can see them at all.

About a parent or guardian

• Full name, email address, telephone number
• Which children you are linked to
• The fee record of those children

About everyone who uses the app

• Messages — the text, photographs, video and voice notes you send, whether to one person in EduChat or to a class or whole-school group, and who you sent them to. These are stored so they can be delivered and read again later. Photographs, video and voice notes are kept as files, reachable only through a short-lived link given to somebody who is in that group.
• Group membership — which class and school groups you are in, and whether the head has silenced you in a group and why.
• Documents you upload or that are sent to you — lesson materials, fee notices, letters
• Support tickets you send us, with your name, role and school attached
• A notification token — an identifier for the phone you last signed in on, so a message can reach it
• Technical records — device type and operating system, app version, sign-in times, and crash or error reports
• Ask AI questions — the text of a question you type into Ask AI. See section 4.

3. Permissions the app asks for

You can refuse any of these. Here is exactly what each is for and what stops working without it.

• Camera — to take an ID card photograph, to send a photo in a chat, and, on a phone used at a school gate, to read the square code on a pupil's card. Reading a code saves no image. Refuse it and you can still use everything else; you just cannot take a picture inside the app, and a gate phone would have to have codes typed in by hand.
• Microphone — to record a voice note in a chat or a group. It records only while you are holding the button down, or between pressing start and pressing stop, and it stops at one minute. Nothing else uses it. The app never records in the background.
• Notifications — to tell you a message has arrived. Refuse it and the app still works, but you will only see messages when you open it.
• Files — to attach a document you already have on your phone, and to save a report card or receipt.

4. Children

EduSalone holds information about children. We treat that as the most serious thing we do.

We do not advertise to children. We do not profile children. We do not sell anyone's data, and we never will. Brain Points from the trivia game are a game score — they are not a school mark, no teacher sees them as a grade, and they are not used to judge a child in any way.

Ask AI. The app has a study helper. When a pupil types a question into it, that question is sent to Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company in the United States, which produces the answer. We send nothing else with it — not the pupil's name, class, marks or school. We do not keep the conversation. Neither we nor Anthropic use it to train artificial intelligence models. If a school would rather its pupils did not use Ask AI at all, write to us and we will switch it off for that school.

5. Who else sees your data

Inside your school

• The head of school sees their whole school — or, where a school runs separate section heads, their own section only
• A teacher sees the pupils they teach
• The bursar sees fees; the secretary sees the register. Neither sees the other's
• A parent sees only their own children
• A pupil sees only themselves

Groups. Anything posted in a class or whole-school group is seen by everybody in that group and by the head of school, who is in every group. Parents of one class are never in another class's group. From JSS1 upward a class has a separate pupils' group; what a pupil writes there does not go to the parents' group. Below JSS1 there is no pupils' group at all, because those children have no account — only their parent does. A message can be taken back by the person who sent it or by the head, and a note is left in its place saying it was taken back, so a school can always account for what was sent.

Companies we depend on to run the service

These are the only companies that touch your data, and each only for the job named.

• Supabase — the database, file storage and login system. Your data is held in Supabase's European data centres, in Ireland.
• Netlify — hosts this website and the web version of the app.
• Expo — delivers push notifications. It receives the notification token for your phone and the short preview shown on your lock screen (who wrote, and whether it is text, a photo or a voice note). It does not receive the message itself.
• Google — delivers the app through the Play Store, and carries notifications to Android phones through Firebase Cloud Messaging.
• Anthropic — produces Ask AI answers, and receives only the question typed, as described in section 4.
• Sentry — tells us when the app crashes, so we can fix it. It receives the technical details of the fault and nothing about you: no name, no school, no marks, no messages, and not your IP address. Its records are held in the European Union.

Nobody else

Two exceptions we cannot promise away. If a court or a law that applies to us compels disclosure, we may have to comply — we will tell you unless we are forbidden from doing so. And if PalmRoot Tech is ever sold or merged, the data moves with the company; the buyer must honour this policy or give you notice and a way out before changing it.

6. How long we keep things

• Your login — destroyed the moment you delete your account. Not switched off, destroyed.
• Your personal details — email, phone, address, date of birth, photograph and qualifications are removed at the same time.
• The school register — the name on the register, marks, report cards, attendance and fee receipts stay with the school after your account is gone, because they are the school's record and not yours to take away. This is the same position as a paper register in the school office.
• Messages — kept so they can be read again, until deleted or until the school closes its account. This includes group messages and any photograph, video or voice note attached to them.
• Support tickets — kept while we work on them and for a reasonable period afterwards, so we can see whether a problem has come back.
• Financial records — kept for 7 years to meet Sierra Leone tax law.
• Gate scans — kept with the school's attendance record, because they are part of it. They are removed when the school's data is removed.
• Crash and error reports — kept only long enough to fix the fault.
• A school that closes its account — we keep its data for 90 days so it can be recovered or exported, then delete it, except financial records as above.

You can delete your own account inside the app at any time. Full instructions are at /delete-account.

7. Your rights

Whoever and wherever you are, you can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete your account and your personal details
• Give you a copy of your data in a form you can open elsewhere, such as CSV
• Stop a particular use, or withdraw a permission you gave
• Complain to us, and have a person answer you

Email [email protected] with “Privacy Request” in the subject line. We answer within 30 days.

If you are in the European Union, the GDPR applies to you and gives you these rights as law, not as our promise, including the right to complain to the data protection authority in your own country.

For anything on the school register — a mark, a class, a spelling of a name — ask your school first. They can correct it themselves, immediately. If they will not and you believe it is wrong, write to us and we will put you in touch with the right person at the school.

8. How we protect it

The most important thing to understand is where the protection sits. The rules are enforced by the database, not by the app. That means a modified copy of the app, or somebody typing commands into a browser's developer tools, meets exactly the same wall as everybody else.

• Every record carries the school it belongs to, and the database will not return a row from a different school to anyone
• Nobody can change their own role, school or section — the database refuses it however it is attempted
• Staff accounts are created switched off and released by a person: staff by their head of school, heads by PalmRoot Tech. Two separate things must happen before anyone can sign in
• Each school has a private staff invitation code, separate from the code given to parents, which the head can change at any time
• Passwords are handled by our login provider and are never stored anywhere in readable form. Nobody at PalmRoot Tech can see your password, and we will never ask you for it
• Everything travels over HTTPS/TLS encryption
• Backups are taken on the schedule our hosting provider operates for our plan

No system is perfect and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your data, we will tell you within 72 hours of finding it — what happened, what was affected, and what to do. That is our own commitment, not a legal requirement we are repeating back to you, because as section 7 explains there is not yet a Sierra Leone law that imposes one.

9. Cookies

The web version uses only what is needed to keep you signed in and remember your preferences. No advertising cookies. No tracking you across other websites. No selling your browsing.

10. Changes to this policy

When we change something that matters, we will:

• Publish the new version here, with a new version number and date
• Tell users by email or in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect
• Keep the previous version available on request, so you can see what changed

11. Which law applies

This policy is governed by the laws of Sierra Leone, and disputes are for the Sierra Leone courts. If you are in the European Union, your GDPR rights apply in addition and nothing here takes them away.

12. Contact us