Privacy Policy

• Works with no account. You can use AcornSmarts at home, offline, without signing up. In that mode, unless your child joins a class with a class code or uses Writing Coach, your child's progress is stored only in your browser on your device — we never receive it.
• No full names needed to use the app. No child's full name is needed to use the app; the name box asks for a nickname or first name. A child is shown by that name and an avatar. The one place we ask a parent for a student's first and last name is ESA and scholarship paperwork, because the program requires it: the invoice request (the app's ESA help says what to email us) and the one-time program-card checkout (see Stripe, Resend and Microsoft 365 in section 2).
• No advertising, ever. There are no ads, no ad networks, and no advertising identifiers in AcornSmarts.
• No tracking in the app — analytics on this website only. The AcornSmarts app has no analytics, no pixels, and no cross-site trackers. No child data leaves the device unless you use cloud sync, your child joins a class with a class code, or your child uses Writing Coach. (Your browser's own voice services are covered in section 5.) The app does check once per launch whether Writing Coach is available; that check carries no child data. This marketing website (not the app) uses Google Analytics on some pages to count visits and see which pages help families find us — but not on this privacy page. It has no ads and no Facebook pixel.
• One use of AI. Nothing your child reads in the app is AI-generated at runtime. An AI model (Anthropic's Claude) is used in one place: the Writing Coach check. It scores what your child wrote — Writing Coach answers and, in grades 6–12, short written math explanations — and picks from our fixed set of pre-written coaching lines. See section 3.
• We never sell data. Not your data, not your child's data — not to anyone, for any reason.

• A grown-up's email, password, and display name — to secure the account. Passwords are hashed (bcrypt); we never see or store them in plain text.
• Each child's nickname or first name, avatar, and grade — to show the right profile. Not a full legal name. A child is added by a family from its own account, by a student joining a class with a class code, or by a teacher adding first names to a class roster.
• Learning progress — practice results, mastery scores, question-type tallies, stars, streaks, awards, reading totals (never book titles), comfort settings, a last-practiced time, and class membership, so growth follows the child to a new device.
• Settings sent from your account — if a family asks us to change a child's grade or school-test starting levels on the child's own devices, we keep that one request: the grade; Below, On or Above for each subject; the level an i-Ready report prints for each section (such as “Needs Improvement” for Phonics or “At Grade Level” for Geometry); and, if the family asks, a yes to replacing starting levels already set on the device (“Find my level”, a Backpack code or earlier starting levels — never practice). Each device that applies it adds a random code for that account on that device and, per subject, how many starting levels it set or left alone — no names and no answers. Only the family's own account holders can see it, never a teacher; it is cleared when the request changes and deleted 30 days after it was made.
• Reminder subscriptions — if a signed-in parent turns on reminders, the browser's push address and keys, so we can send them.

Cloud data is stored with Supabase (US East region) and protected by row-level security. Signed-in access works by role: a family's own account holders (including a co-parent they invite) see their children's data, a teacher sees the names and progress of students in their own class, and a school administrator sees school- and class-level counts.

Every outside service that handles data (complete list as of 16 Sep 2026)

• Supabase — our database, sign-in, and server functions (US East). It stores the cloud data above, including class-code students' names, grades, avatars, and progress, which reach it without anyone signing in. Writing Coach answers pass through its server function on the way to Anthropic. It receives the once-per-launch Writing Coach check from every online device. Its platform logs record each request's IP address, browser, approximate location (city and postal code), and network operator.
• Vercel — hosts app.acornsmarts.com and this website, serving files only. It sees ordinary request details (IP address, browser, and the page address, which can include a class code in a join link). It receives no student records.
• Anthropic (Claude Haiku 4.5) — the Writing Coach check only, which also grades the short written math explanations in grades 6–12. See section 3.
• Resend — sends our email (through Amazon SES). It receives each recipient's email address and the email itself: the weekly family summary, sent to every parent account whose child practiced that week (one-click unsubscribe in every one of these emails, plus a toggle in the app’s account panel), with each child's nickname, days practiced, questions answered and correct, minutes, acorns, and hardest question type; a one-time note to a free-plan family whose child stopped practicing, with the child's nickname (also in the subject line), days practiced, and question count (this note respects the marketing opt-out); waitlist tips (email address and language only); three welcome emails in a new parent account's first two weeks (how to get started, a check-in a few days later and a first-week note sent on day 7 to 12), with each child's nickname, days practiced, questions answered and correct, and minutes, never in the subject line (these respect the marketing opt-out, and each one has a one-click unsubscribe); a password-reset email with a one-time link, sent only when someone asks for one on the app's log-in screen and only if that address has an account (to stop abuse we count requests per email and per IP address for an hour, storing only keyed hashes of them, never the address itself, and clear those counts after a day); and our internal alerts (class names, join codes, roster counts, and class practice counts, plus each one-time ESA/IEA order: the license, the student's name the parent typed and the payer's email).
• Stripe — payments (section 6). It receives the paying adult's email, our account ID, and the plan, plus the card details typed on Stripe's own checkout page. No child data, with one exception: the one-time ESA/IEA checkout (paid with a state program card) also asks for the student's first and last name, because the program's paperwork needs it.
• ImprovMX and Microsoft 365 — forward and hold email sent to @acornsmarts.com addresses (such as info@). Microsoft 365 also receives our internal alerts.
• Google, on this website only (never in the app) — Google Analytics 4 on 18 website pages (removed from this privacy page and the founder dashboard on 17 Sep 2026). Our fonts are self-hosted, so no page loads Google Fonts. Analytics events carry only an event name, the part of the page, and — where it applies — the skill, plan or checkout clicked, the subject line of an email link, the topic picked on our contact form, or the language of a printed tip sheet; never a name, an email address or a message. Google Analytics also records, as standard, the page address and title, the page a visitor came from, and browser and device details, and it can record its own scroll, outbound-link, site-search, video, file-download and form-interaction events. It sets first-party cookies (_ga) holding a random visitor ID, and Google uses the visitor's IP address to estimate an approximate location (country, region, city); Google says Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. The app sets no such cookies.
• Google's public STUN server — used only when two devices connect for two-device play. It sees each device's IP address. No student data.
• Our contact form (on the home page, English and Spanish) — your name, email, role, topic, and message go to Black Swan Media Solutions' own business system (hosted on Vercel), which emails them to us.

Your browser maker's own services can also be involved, depending on your browser and settings: voice input and read-aloud (section 5), and reminder notifications, which the browser maker's push service delivers as an empty notification. More detail for schools is in the District Privacy Evidence Pack.

The safety label

The same check gives each answer a label: “none,” “pii,” or “distress.” The model is told to use “pii” only for an address, phone number, email, or a full name or school name beyond what the prompt asked for; to use “distress” only for first-person signs of real harm, abuse, self-harm, or serious fear or sadness about the child's own life, never for fictional characters; and to choose “none” when unsure. The model is also told the label must not change the grading. For “pii,” your child always sees the coaching line “Great writing keeps private things private — leave out real names, addresses, and phone numbers.” For “distress,” the model is told to pick only gentle coaching lines, and nothing else changes on screen. No screen tells the child that a label was set.

When a label is set, the app saves a note (the date, the prompt, your child's words, and the label) in that device's own storage. It keeps the newest 3 notes of each label; notes do not expire by date. Notes never go to our servers, a school, or any teacher screen, and they are left out of backup files, Backpack codes, and cloud or class sync. The device's own recovery snapshots can still contain them. Only the paid parent dashboard on that device shows them, in each child's “Print & paperwork” section, to whoever passes the grown-ups gate: the family PIN if you set one, otherwise a math question that an older child could answer. On a shared device, everyone who passes the gate sees every profile's notes. On a free plan, notes are saved but no screen shows them. There is no switch to turn the label off.

A related on-device feature, the Butterfly Box, may offer an optional “worry box” screen when a child's own predictions keep coming in below their results. What the child types there is not saved or sent; only the date it was offered is kept, on the device.

Schools and districts should review Writing Coach with their counsel before students use it; that review may call for parental-consent language.

• Using the app never needs a child's full legal name, home address, or phone number (ESA and scholarship paperwork, in section 1, is the one place we ask a parent for the student's full name). (A child can still type such details into a Writing Coach answer; see section 3.)
• Precise location or photos. The camera is off by default and requests nothing; if a family turns on optional card scanning, it runs only while scanning, on the device only — no photo is ever saved and nothing from the camera ever leaves the device.
• Contacts, browsing history, or activity on other apps and sites.
• Any advertising or cross-site tracking identifiers.

Processed on the device: handwriting tracing is scored on the device, and the strokes are not stored or sent. The app never records or stores audio. (For voice input and read-aloud, see section 5.)

• Delete on-device data — “Reset progress on this device” on the parent dashboard clears practice progress and this device's settings. The device can still keep a recovery snapshot, which can include Writing Coach safety notes; clearing your browser's site data for AcornSmarts removes everything, snapshots included.
• Delete a cloud account — Settings → account → delete. This permanently removes your account and your children's synced data from our database. Our providers' request logs are not tied to your account and are not removed. For a student who joined a class with a class code, the teacher or school can email us to delete that student's data.
• When a license ends — when a center, school or district license ends, the class data tied to it is deleted within 60 days after the end date, or sooner on the customer's written instruction. A child on a family's own account stays with that family's account.
• Ask us — email the address below and we will delete or export your data on request.