COPPA Policy

Parental consent

COPPA requires us to obtain verifiable parental consent before we collect, use, or disclose personal information from a child under 13. Because a Sparkpip account is set up by a parent for their child, the parent is present at the point of collection and consents as part of creating the child's learning profile.

We obtain that consent through the account-creation flow: the parent creates the account with their own email address, affirmatively agrees to our Terms and this policy, and enters the child's learning profile themselves. For paid plans, the parent also completes payment with a valid card through our payment processor.

If we ever want to use or share a child's information in a materially different way than this policy describes, we will contact the parent by email and ask for consent again before doing so.

What we collect from or about a child

We do not collect personal information directly from children. Everything below is either entered by the parent or generated as the child works with the tutor.

• Entered by the parent: a first name or nickname for the child (a nickname is perfectly fine), grade level, region or curriculum, learning preferences, the topics the child finds hard, and optionally a short note in the parent's own words about what the child struggles with.
• Created as the child learns: the messages exchanged with the tutor during a session, which topics were practiced, whether answers were right or wrong, progress and accuracy over time, and session timing.
• Homework photos, if used: a child can photograph a homework problem so the tutor can help with it. These are sent to our AI provider to generate a reply and are not retained by us afterwards. They are meant to show schoolwork, not the child.
• Voice, if turned on: voice mode is optional. When it is on, your browser's own speech service converts speech to text — on Chrome that means the audio goes to Google. Sparkpip receives only the resulting text, never the audio.
• We never ask a child for an email address, phone number, home address, photograph of themselves, date of birth, geolocation, or persistent contact information of any kind.

Information collected automatically

Like most websites we record basic technical information when Sparkpip is used: the IP address of the connection, essential cookies that keep the parent signed in and remember which child is active, and standard server logs. We use these to keep the service running, keep accounts secure, and prevent abuse.

We do not use behavioral advertising cookies, we do not allow third-party advertising networks on Sparkpip, and we do not build advertising profiles of children.

How we use a child's information

• To teach: personalizing sessions to the child's grade, region, learning style, and the topics their parent flagged.
• To show the parent progress: the dashboard and the optional weekly email are generated from the child's own practice data.
• To keep the service working and safe: enforcing session limits, preventing abuse, and diagnosing technical problems.
• We do not use a child's information to advertise to them, and we do not use it to train AI models.

Who we share it with

We do not sell, rent, or trade children's personal information, and we never disclose it to anyone for their own marketing purposes. We share only with the service providers that make Sparkpip work, and only so they can perform that work for us:

• Anthropic — receives session messages and any homework photo in order to generate the tutor's reply. Under their commercial terms this content is not used to train their models.
• Railway — hosts the application and stores our database.
• Cloudflare — provides network security and stores encrypted off-site database backups.
• Stripe — processes payments from the parent. Stripe does not receive children's learning data.
• Resend — delivers account emails to the parent's address. Children are not emailed.
• Google — if the parent chooses to sign in with Google, and, when voice mode is on in a Chrome or Chromium browser, the browser's speech service converts the child's speech to text.
• We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the safety of a child or another person.

How long we keep it

• Learning and progress data: kept while the child's profile exists, so the tutor can build on what the child already knows and parents can see progress over time.
• Session messages: we do not store full chat transcripts. What persists is the practice record — topic, correctness, progress.
• Homework photos: sent to the AI provider to produce a reply; not retained by us afterwards.
• Technical data such as IP addresses and logs: kept only as long as needed for security and abuse prevention.
• Deleting a child's profile deletes that child's learning data. Closing the account removes the rest. We do not keep a child's information indefinitely, and we do not keep it after it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for.

Your rights as a parent

At any time, and without affecting your child's ability to keep using Sparkpip in other ways, you may:

• Review the personal information we hold about your child.
• Correct anything that is wrong — most of it is editable directly in your dashboard.
• Delete your child's profile and its learning data, from the dashboard, at any time.
• Refuse to allow any further collection or use of your child's information, by closing the account.
• To ask us to do any of these for you, email hello@sparkpip.com from the address on the account. We may need to confirm you are the account holder before we act, so that we are not handing a child's information to someone else.

Security

Passwords are stored hashed, never in readable form. Traffic is encrypted in transit, database backups are encrypted, and access to production data is limited to what is needed to operate the service. No system is perfectly secure, but we treat children's data as the most sensitive thing we hold.

If a breach ever affected a child's personal information, we would notify affected parents and the appropriate authorities without undue delay, and tell you plainly what happened and what to do about it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we handle information already collected about your child, we will email you and obtain consent again before applying it.

Contact us

Questions about this policy, or about your child's information, can be sent to hello@sparkpip.com and a person will answer.

The operator of this service is Sparkpip Learning Inc., 3601 Highway 7 East, Suite 1005, Markham, Ontario L3R 0M3, Canada.