teachChat

Your classroom data

What we collect, where it goes, and how you control it. For the full details, read the Privacy Policy.

🌱 What we collect

• Students join with a first name, last initial, screenname, and PIN.
• Students do not need an email address or a Google account to join.
• Students pick their own screennames; classmates only ever see those.
• Teachers who want even less on our side can build the class from a roster sheet in their own Google Drive. The initial import is read in the teacher's browser and sends only screennames and generated PINs. A later teacher-requested reveal or name-bearing export processes the app-created roster file transiently, without saving names in our database.
• Teachers sign in with Google; we store the email address and the display name Google hands us, plus a record of which version of our terms was agreed to.

🚫 No advertising or data sales

• No ads, no trackers, no analytics scripts, no cookies beyond the sign-in session.
• We do not sell student data. Cloudflare, Google, and Stripe provide hosting, sign-in, Drive, communications, and payment services as described in our Privacy Policy.
• Student data is never used to train AI models.

🔒 Where data lives

• Student names are saved to the teacher’s Google Drive, not our database. New students wait for teacher approval after their name is saved. Returning students use a screenname and PIN, and their roster entry is checked in Drive.
• Class data is hosted on Cloudflare, encrypted in transit (HTTPS/WSS) and at rest.
• Nightly encrypted backups go to separate storage, kept up to 180 days. Restore drills check that backups can be recovered.
• Class exports go to the teacher's own Google Drive, so schools keep their records in accounts they already control.

🗑 Deletion and retention

• Deleting a class erases its chat, points, and roster from our live database immediately.
• Nothing has to be deleted by hand to eventually go away. A class with no activity for 12 months is deleted automatically by a job that runs every day, so a forgotten class does not sit on our servers forever.
• Deleted class data can remain in encrypted backups until those rotate, which takes at most 180 days. Backups exist to recover from disaster and are never used to bring a deleted class back.
• Files already exported to a teacher's Drive stay put: those belong to the school.

🇺🇸 Offered to U.S. schools only

• teachChat is offered only to schools in the United States and its territories. That is not just a sentence in the terms: requests from outside that area are turned away before they reach the application.
• The point is scope, not exclusion. Satisfying every country's privacy law at once is not a promise one person can keep, so teachChat makes a narrower one it can: built for U.S. classrooms, under U.S. student privacy law.

🛡 Teacher moderation tools

• Pause chat, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, and blocked words are in the free tier forever. Safety is never paywalled.
• Teacher moderation settings are enforced by the server. This is why chats are not end-to-end encrypted: your moderation tools have to be able to read them.
• Each time a teacher reveals a student's name, the action is recorded in an audit log.

🤝 The paperwork

• FERPA and COPPA responsibilities are spelled out in the Privacy Policy; consent flows through the school, as it should for classroom tools.
• The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy have been through counsel review and are live. Every teacher has to read and accept them before running a class, and we record which version they agreed to, so there is a real answer to "what did you agree to, and when."
• If your district has its own DPA, send it over and we will review and sign. A signed school agreement controls over these documents wherever student data is concerned.
• There is a written incident-response plan covering what happens if something goes wrong: how we contain it, how we work out what was actually exposed, and who gets told. Schools hear from us quickly, because the records are yours. The order of the rest follows what the law requires, which in New Jersey means the State Police are told before notice reaches the people affected.
• Questions get answered by the person who wrote the code: Dalton Fowler.