COPPA and children’s privacy

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a US federal law that protects the personal information of children under 13. Because our service involves information about children, we follow practices designed to honor COPPA’s purposes — and to extend similar protections to older children where appropriate. This page describes what we do and what rights parents and guardians have.

§ 01Our service is for adults

Ralspin is intended for parents, guardians, educators, counselors, and adults aged 18 and older. We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to create accounts, complete the intake form on their own, or otherwise provide personal information directly to us.

§ 02How information about children reaches us

When a parent or guardian uses our service, they share information about their children so that we can recommend suitable opportunities. This information comes from the adult account holder, not from the child. By providing this information, the parent or guardian represents that they have the authority to share it on the child’s behalf.

§ 03What we collect about children

Information a parent or guardian may share about a child includes:

• First name or nickname.
• Age.
• Grade level.
• School name.
• General interests.
• Optionally, learning support needs or medical considerations — if and only if the parent or guardian chooses to share them.

We do not collect a child’s full name in most circumstances, a child’s home address, contact details for the child directly, geolocation data, photographs of the child, or other categories of information COPPA treats with heightened sensitivity. If you wish to share less than the categories above, that is fine — our recommendations will be less specific, and we will still serve you.

§ 04How information about children is used

Information about a child is used exclusively to prepare opportunity recommendations for your family. It is:

• Stored encrypted in our database, with sensitive categories encrypted at the column level.
• Accessible only to named curators preparing your recommendations.
• Never shared with the programs we recommend, even when the recommendation is condition-specific.
• Never used for marketing or advertising, on or off our service.
• Never sold or shared with third parties for cross-context behavioral advertising

§ 05Parental rights

As a parent or guardian, you have the right to:

• Review the information we hold about your child.
• Request that we correct, update, or delete it.
• Withdraw consent for us to continue processing your child’s information.
• Refuse to permit further collection or use of your child’s information.

Exercising these rights does not affect your subscription or access to the service; recommendations may become less specific if you remove or restrict information.

§ 06How to exercise parental rights

Email [email protected] with your request. We will verify that you are the account holder and respond within 30 days. For requests specifically about a child’s sensitive information — the optional learning support or medical considerations — our lead curator handles the request personally.

§ 07Children aged 13 to 17

COPPA applies to children under 13. We extend many of the same protections to children aged 13 to 17 because we believe the spirit of the law applies to all minors and because UK and EU regulations impose heightened duties for under-18s. Specifically, information about teens is handled with the same encryption, access restrictions, and marketing prohibitions described above.

§ 08Data Protection Impact Assessment

To protect your information we verify your identity before fulfilling requests. For most requests this means confirming you control the email address on the account. For requests involving sensitive information we may take additional reasonable steps.

§ 09If you believe a child under 13 has signed up directly

At the point where we collect your personal information — the intake form, the sign-up flow, or any other collection point — we provide a notice describing what we collect and why. The full picture is in our Privacy Policy.

§ 10Contact and complaints