Privacy in your school's app.

Your school's app is built and run for the school by Appier Technologies LLC ("Appier", "we"), a Massachusetts company. This notice explains what the app does with information about students, families and staff. What this website collects is on the website's privacy page.

Your school is in charge

Your school decides what the app is used for and owns the information in it. Appier is the school's service provider: we handle that information only to run the app for the school, on its instructions and under a written agreement with it. In the United States we act as a "school official" under FERPA; elsewhere we follow the privacy law that applies to the school.

What the app collects

What it reads from your school

You sign in with your school's Veracross account, so the app never sees or stores your password. Depending on your role and the features your school turns on, the app reads from Veracross, through your school's own server, and shows you:

• your name, school email, school ID, grade and role (student, parent, faculty or staff);
• your schedule, classes, advisor, and the school calendar;
• the school directory: names, school photos and contact details, showing only what each person and family has chosen to share in Veracross;
• athletics teams, rosters, games and scores;
• school news, events, and similar school information.

The server checks every request against your role and your family's relationships in Veracross, so you see only what the school lets you see.

What the app keeps

• Your account: your name, school email, school ID and role, so the app knows who you are and other members can find you in club rosters and pickers.
• What you choose and save: your home screen layout, class colors, saved calendar items and similar settings. Only you can read these.
• What you add: where your school turns these features on, athletic sign-ups and your answers to sign-up questions, club pages, posts and photos, club memberships and RSVPs, attendance and scores that a teacher, coach or team leader enters, and Name Game scores (shown on the school's leaderboard with your name).
• Your name recording: where your school turns on name recordings, you may record how you say your name, up to ten seconds, in About Me. The app uses the microphone only while you record, after you allow it, and only you can record yours. You can listen to it, record it again or remove it at any time. Where your school's people recorded their names on the school's own website, the app may play that recording until you make one in the app, and the school may have those recordings copied into the app.
• What staff record about you: where your school runs tryouts in the app, the coaches' private notes on each student who tries out, their ranking of the students, and the results, which only the sport's coaches and the school's office that runs sign-ups can see.
• Records the school can review: when a school administrator or Appier support views the app as a particular person to help them, each session and each change made is recorded in a log the school's app administrators can read.
• Your Veracross approval: if you approve the app making changes in Veracross under your own name, the server keeps an encrypted Veracross token for that purpose, which no device can read.
• Usage counts: daily totals of how often screens and features are used, with no name and no user, device or session identifier.

The Community Map

Where your school turns on the Community Map, the server reads household addresses from the school's Veracross directory (only for families who share theirs there), turns them into map coordinates with Google's geocoding service, and keeps the coordinates and a keyed one-way fingerprint of each address (to tell whether it has changed), never the addresses. Google handles those addresses under its own terms and privacy policy, not as our processor, and may keep and use them to run and improve its services. In the iPhone and Android apps the map itself is drawn by Apple Maps and Google Maps, which receive the area shown and your device's details under their own terms.

The app beta

Where your school runs an app beta, a small group of the students, faculty, staff and parents the school chooses use new versions of the app before everyone else and tell us what works and what does not. Taking part is your own choice. Faculty, staff and parents join with one tap, and students enter Bug Hunt, which shows a few harmless planted oddities in that student's own app to find, before a draw in each grade picks the students who get in. For each person who signs up, the app keeps their name, grade, group, whether they are a member, on the waitlist or in Bug Hunt, when they joined, a student's catches, whether they show the Beta Tester badge, and the number of bugs they reported.

Members send feedback from the beta's page: what happened, or a short check-in with a rating from 1 to 5 and an optional comment, with their name and the version of the app they use. Who signed up and their feedback can be read only by the school's app administrators and Appier's support staff. A member's Beta Tester badge, with the number of bugs they reported, shows on their directory card to everyone signed in to the school's app; a member can hide it on the beta's page. Members install the beta version through Apple's TestFlight or Google Play's testing program, under Apple's and Google's own terms; on Android, the Google account a member gives is added to the app's tester list in Google Play.

What stays on your device

The app keeps a copy of what it has loaded so it works without signal, and clears it when you sign out. Sign-out also deletes the copies of photos and files the app and its pickers made on your device; the images your phone's own system caches are the one exception. If you allow access to your contacts, the app checks on your device which directory results you have already saved; your contacts never leave your device. If you pick a photo (a profile photo, a club photo, or a screenshot to read phone numbers from), only the photo you pick is used, and a screenshot is read on your device. The app uses your camera only when you scan a check-in code or take a profile photo, and never records video. It uses your microphone only while you record your name (above), and never uses your location.

What it does not collect

The app does not collect grades, health records, government ID numbers or your device's location.

How we use it

We use information only to provide the app to your school: to sign you in, show you what your role allows, keep what you save, deliver notifications, support you and the school, and keep the app secure. Usage totals that identify no one help us see which features are used.

• We never sell information about students, families or staff.
• The app shows no advertising, contains no advertising or analytics SDKs, and does not track you across other apps or websites.
• We never use your information to build a profile of you or for any purpose but running the app for your school, and we never let our processors do so.
• We never use your information to train AI models.

Who it is shared with

Within your school

• Other members of your school see only what the app shows their role, such as the directory, club rosters and the Name Game leaderboard. Your school's app administrators manage the app's settings and rosters.
• Club photos, opponent crests and the campus map in the app's file storage can be opened by anyone who has their link, because the app shows them without signing in. A file attached to a message can be opened only by the people the message went to, the person who sent it and the school's app administrators. A name recording plays, through a link that works for ten minutes, to the members of your school the feature is on for; if your school reviews recordings, a new one plays only to you and the school's name reviewers until one approves it. No other file in storage can be opened by anyone.
• At Noble and Greenough School, a signed-in member can still look up another member's account by its exact school email, which older versions of the app need, until those versions are retired.
• Where your school turns on the Community Map, parents who use it can see where other participating households are, within ten miles; staff see counts by town only.

At Appier

A small number of named engineers, each under a confidentiality agreement, can reach a school's project to run and support it. The school can remove Appier's support sign-in to the app at any time, which ends our access through the app, while our engineers keep the access to the school's project that running it requires.

Service providers

These companies help us run the app. The full list, with where each one operates, is on our subprocessors page.

• Cloud hosting (Google Cloud and Firebase): sign-in, the database, file storage, backups and the app's server, as our processor under Google's data processing terms.
• Email (Google Workspace): our email, which holds whatever you or your school send us, as our processor under Google's data processing terms.
• Support and operations (Anthropic's Claude, an AI service): helps our team read and answer support and security email and fix problems from the app's logs. It receives whatever information that email or those logs contain, in the United States, under Anthropic's commercial terms and data processing addendum, which do not let it use the information to train its models.
• App updates (Expo): it receives your device's operating system, its IP address and a random token, and nothing else about you.
• Notification delivery (Apple, Google and your web browser's maker): each carries each notification to your device encrypted to it, so the services that deliver it cannot read it, on their own standard terms.
• App distribution (Apple and Google, through their app stores).

The app also reads and writes Veracross, your school's own system, with the school's permission. The Community Map, where your school turns it on, uses Google's geocoding service and Apple's and Google's maps under their own terms (above).

If Appier changes hands

If Appier's business is reorganized, merged or sold, the company that takes it over is bound by this notice and by each school's agreement, and we will tell each school before it happens, as its agreement requires.

Where it is kept

Your school's records stay in Veracross, the school's own system. What the app keeps is in a Google Cloud project used for your school's app alone, separate from every other school's, in a region chosen with the school. Your school can tell you which region, or you can ask us. Sign-in records are kept in Google's United States data centers, the app's logs run on Google's global services, and Appier's team works from the United States.

How long it is kept

App data is kept while the school uses the app, and for the periods below. When a school asks us to delete a person's data, or all of it, we delete it from the app within 60 days of the request or of the end of the school's contract; copies in our nightly backups expire within 97 days, and are never used except to restore the app after a failure.

• Your account, settings and what you saved: while you are at the school, and deleted automatically 30 days after the school's Veracross stops listing you.
• Athletic sign-ups, answers, tryout results, coaches' notes and rankings: deleted 548 days after the sport's sign-ups closed.
• Club pages, posts and photos: while the club exists.
• The app beta: your place, a student's catches and your badge, while you are in it, deleted when you leave or the school takes you off; feedback, until the school's administrators close it, and deleted 180 days after. All of it is deleted with the rest of your account after you leave the school.
• Your name recording: until you record it again or remove it, or a name reviewer rejects it, and deleted with the rest of your account after you leave the school.
• Messages: removed from the app after 90 days; a file attached to one is deleted 120 days after it was attached.
• Records of "view as" sessions and changes made for the school, each naming the person who viewed or acted and recorded before the first thing is shown: 1 year.
• Your device's push notification registration: renewed each week you use the app, ended when you sign out or your session ends, and deleted after 90 days unused.
• Your Veracross approval: deleted after 90 days unused.
• Google's logs of requests to the app's server (which include IP addresses): 30 days. Security logs of who accessed which records, by account identifier and not content: up to 365 days.
• Nightly backups: 90 days, in the school's own project and region. At Noble and Greenough School, the nightly club roster update also saves a copy of every profile (emails included) before each run, kept 90 days like the backups.
• Usage totals that identify no one: 3 years.
• Copies on your device are cleared when you sign out.

How we protect it

Everyone signs in through the school's own Veracross accounts. The school's Veracross credentials are never in the app: they are kept in a secret store in the school's own project, read only by its server and by our deploy checks. The database's access rules are tested automatically on every change. Information is encrypted in transit and at rest. If information is ever accessed, taken, used, disclosed, changed or lost without authorization, we tell the school without undue delay, and within 72 hours at most, after we learn of it and have confirmed it or reasonably believe it happened. The school decides what the families affected are told. More is on our security page.

Children and students

The app is for a school's students, families and staff, and the school authorizes students' use of it for school purposes, as the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) allows a school to do. We collect information from students only to provide the app to their school, never for any commercial purpose, and a parent can ask the school to review or delete their child's information. Where a school runs an app beta for students, a student signs up on their own, as part of the app the school authorizes, and can leave at any time; a parent can ask the school to take their child out of it.

Your rights

To see, correct or delete information about you, or your child, ask your school, which will involve us when needed. You can also write to us (below) and we will pass your request to your school.

Changes and contact

We will tell schools before any change to how information is used, and post the updated notice here with its date. Questions or requests: security@appiertech.com, +1 617-286-2250, or Appier Technologies LLC, 82 Wendell Ave., Suite 100, Pittsfield, MA 01201, United States.