StudentAidPrivacy Policy
StudentAid helps schools run their transport safely: a live view of where a van is, a verified record of who boarded it, and a verified record of who collected a child at the end of the day. Doing that means handling information about children. This page explains exactly what we hold, why, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do about it.
On this page
1. Who this covers
This policy applies to the StudentAid platform, operated by StudentAid INC. ("StudentAid", "we", "us"), an Ontario corporation of 27 New Hampshire Court, Brampton, Ontario L6S 0B9, Canada. It covers:
- the school portal at app.studentaid.io and the platform console at admin.studentaid.io;
- the Parent app and the Driver app;
- the API at api.studentaid.io that those apps talk to;
- this website, studentaid.io.
It does not cover a school's own systems, or any other app or website you reach by a link from ours.
2. Our role, and your school's
Almost all the personal information on StudentAid is entered by, or on behalf of, a school or a transport operator — the student roster, guardian phone numbers, driver records, routes. Those organisations decide what to collect and why. We hold and process it on their instructions, to provide the service they have signed up for.
In practice that means:
- If you are a parent or guardian, your school is the first place to go to correct your child's record, change who may collect them, or ask what is held. We will help, but we generally act through the school.
- If you are a driver, the operator who employs you and the schools they serve control your record. Your national ID is a special case and is described in section 9.
- If you are a driver who keeps van fees in the Driver app, the families on your list and their fee records are yours to look after. You add them, and we hold them for you so you and each family see the same figures.
- If a driver keeps your family on their fee list, the driver typed in your name and number, or picked them from their phone's contacts. Please ask the driver first to change or remove them. You can also write to us.
- We do not sell personal information. We do not use it to advertise, and there is no advertising of any kind in the Parent or Driver apps.
Who answers your request. The school or operator decides what is collected and why, so they are the first point of contact and the party that can change a record directly. We hold the information on their behalf.
That split is about responsibility, not about sending you away. If you write to us at info@studentaid.io we will acknowledge within 7 days and answer within 30 days, working with your school to do it. If your school does not respond to you, or has stopped using StudentAid, we will answer you directly rather than leave you without a route. We will not refuse a request solely on the basis that you should have asked someone else.
3. What we collect
We collect only what the service needs to work. Grouped by whose information it is:
Students
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, school-issued student ID, class | To identify the child on a van manifest and at the school gate. |
| Photograph (optional) | So a driver or gate staff member can confirm they have the right child. If no photo is provided, the app shows the child's initials instead. |
| Home address area | Used to suggest a suitable route. Suggestions are confirmed by school staff, not applied automatically. |
| Transport method, route and van assignment, enrolment dates | To build the daily manifest and to reconstruct historical records accurately. |
| Boarding and drop-off times, attendance, absence and self-drop flags | The record of each journey — the core of the service. |
| Collection records at dismissal: who collected the child, by what method, and when | A verified custody trail, so it is always known who took a child home. |
Parents and guardians
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, relationship to the child, mobile number, email (if given) | To link you to your child, to sign you in, and to send alerts. |
| One-time passcodes sent to your phone | To verify it is you. Codes are stored hashed and expire in minutes. |
| Device push token, app version, platform | To deliver notifications to the right device. Removed when you sign out. |
| People you authorise to collect your child, and any short-lived collection passes you issue | So someone other than you can collect your child safely. |
| Consent records | To evidence that consent for data and photographs was given, and to let you withdraw it. |
| Your location when you check in at pickup (one reading) | To confirm you are at the gate. Kept 30 days with the check-in, then the location is removed. See section 4. |
| Your photo, if you add one when someone gives you a collection pass | So the gate can see a face beside the pass. Deleted when you delete your account. |
| Which screens you open in the StudentAid app (counts only) | To see which parts of the app people use and where they get stuck. Never names, photos or locations. See section 12. |
Drivers
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, mobile number, licence number, years of experience | Identity and eligibility to drive. |
| National ID number (CNIC in Pakistan, Emirates ID in the UAE) and supporting documents | Required for driver verification and for transport compliance records. Stored encrypted; displayed only as the last four digits; the full number can be revealed only once, deliberately, and every reveal is logged. See section 9 for deletion. |
| Approval, rejection and revocation history | To show a school that the person driving their children has been checked. |
| Location while a trip is running, and the van's position when it stops at a family's door or when an emergency alert is raised | See section 4. |
| Your van: number plate, make, model, year, seats, colour, and a photo of the front and of the inside (if you add them) | So we can check the van before it is approved, and so a school and parents can recognise it. Photos are kept privately, and we remove the location and other details a phone saves inside a photo. |
| A van listing, if you publish one: your name, photo, years of experience and a short note about you, the areas and schools you serve, timings, monthly fare, seats and a description of the van | So families looking for a van in the StudentAid app can find you. It is shown until you take it down. |
| Seat requests from parents: the child's name, school, class and area, and the request | So you can accept or decline a family who asks for a seat in your van. |
Families on a driver's fee list
A driver can keep track of van fees in the Driver app. What they keep there is about the families who ride with them:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Child's name, school and area, the date they started riding, the monthly fee and any discount | So the driver knows who rides and what each month costs. |
| Guardian's name and mobile number, typed by the driver or picked from their phone's contacts | To connect the fees to the right family and send reminders. When a driver picks a contact, the app only sees the one contact they choose, never the rest of their address book. |
| Balances, charges and payment records | So the driver and the family see the same figures. |
| Payment screenshots a parent sends as proof | So the driver can confirm a payment. Deleted after 12 months. |
Fee reminders a driver sends open WhatsApp on the driver's own phone. We do not send WhatsApp messages ourselves.
School and operator staff
Name, email, mobile number, role, and a log of significant actions taken in the portal — who approved a driver, who released a child, who changed a setting. That log exists so a school can answer questions about its own records, and it is not used to monitor staff productivity.
This website
If you submit the pilot-demo form, it opens WhatsApp with your details so you can send them to us — nothing is submitted to our servers by the form itself. Our web server keeps ordinary access logs (IP address, page requested, time).
4. Location information
Location is the most sensitive thing we handle, so it is worth being precise.
The Driver app
While a trip is running, the Driver app sends the van's position periodically so the school and the waiting parents can see where it is. This is the vehicle's location during a working trip. It starts when the driver starts the trip and stops when the trip is completed.
The van's position is also noted on two events: when the van stops at a family's door to collect a child, and when the driver raises an emergency alert. A stop at the door keeps its location for 30 days, then the location is removed and only the stop and its times stay. An emergency alert keeps its location while it is open, and for 30 days after it is closed.
The Parent app
The Parent app does not track you. It asks for location only when you tap to check in at pickup, and then it takes a single reading at that moment to confirm you are at the gate. That reading is kept 30 days with the check-in, then the location is removed; the check-in itself (that you arrived, and when) stays as part of the day's pickup history. There is no continuous tracking, and the app does not request background-location permission — so it cannot read your location when it is closed.
What parents can see
A parent sees the van carrying their own child. They do not see other routes, other schools, or other families' children.
We are changing this to be narrower still: van position will be visible to a parent only during the window their own child is actually riding, rather than for as long as the van's trip is running. Until that change ships, a parent may still see the van for the remainder of a trip after their child has been dropped off.
5. Children's information
Most of what StudentAid holds is about children, and we treat it accordingly.
- Children are not our users. The apps are for parents, drivers and school staff. We do not create accounts for children and do not market to them.
- No advertising, no profiling, no sale. There is no advertising SDK in either app. We do not build behavioural profiles and we do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.
- Consent is recorded, and revocable. A school records consent for a child's data and separately for their photograph, and either can be withdrawn. Withdrawing photo consent removes the photo; the app falls back to initials.
- Least exposure. A driver sees only the children on their own manifest for the trip they are running. Where one van serves two schools, each school sees only its own children.
Parent-teacher meeting recordings
If your school uses PTM notes, a teacher can record a parent-teacher meeting so that notes can be written from it. It is off unless the school switches it on.
- Only with your consent. A meeting is recorded only if you agree: in the app (for the whole day, or when the teacher asks during the meeting), or out loud to the teacher. When you agree out loud, the teacher notes it with their name and the time, it is shown as "agreed in person", and we tell you afterwards so you can object. If you say no, nothing is recorded; the teacher writes notes instead.
- Audio is deleted after 7 days, whatever happens to the notes. The transcript is deleted after 7 days too.
- Only approved notes are kept. The teacher or the school checks the notes and approves them; notes not approved within 7 days are deleted. Approved notes are kept with your child's school record and can be seen only by that teacher, the school's administrators and you (if the school shares them).
- You can object at any time. In the app, or from the link we send you, ask us to delete a recording. We delete the audio, the transcript and the notes straight away, even if the notes were already approved.
6. How we use it
- To show a live view of a van and to send alerts — that a van is approaching, that a child boarded, that a child was dropped off, that a child was not on the van as expected.
- To verify boarding: a child's pass is scanned at the van, rather than a name being ticked off a paper list.
- To run dismissal safely and record who collected each child.
- To raise and route emergency alerts to the school's escalation contacts and to the guardians of affected children.
- To produce the compliance and route records a school must keep.
- To sign you in, keep your session secure, and support you when you contact us.
- To keep the service working — diagnosing faults, preventing abuse, and maintaining security.
We do not use personal information to train machine-learning models, and we do not make automated decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect on anyone.
7. Who can see what
| Who | Sees |
|---|---|
| A parent | Their own children only — the child's plan, journey events, and the van carrying them. |
| A driver | The manifest for the trip they are running, and the identity checks needed to board a child safely. |
| School staff | Their own school's students, guardians, drivers serving them, routes and records — limited further by their role. Not another school's data. |
| A transport operator | Their own vehicles, drivers and trips. |
| StudentAid staff | Only what is necessary to operate and support the service. Access to a school's data is restricted and logged. |
These boundaries are enforced by the system itself, not by convention: a request for data outside your boundary fails rather than returning a filtered result.
8. Service providers
We use a small number of providers to deliver parts of the service. They act on our instructions and are not permitted to use the information for their own purposes.
| Provider | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Google (Firebase, Maps, Cloud) | Push messages to your phone, phone sign-in, and the map inside the apps. App usage counts in the StudentAid app: which screens are opened, never names, photos or locations. Our servers and databases run on Google Cloud in Mumbai, India, including everything the Driver app keeps: van fees, the families and payment screenshots on a fee list, van details and photos, listings and seat requests. |
| SMS gateway | Sends your sign-in code by SMS when Firebase can't. |
| Anthropic (Claude AI) | Only if your school turns on an AI helper. These are all off unless a school switches them on. When one is on, the document it reads is sent to Anthropic in the United States to be read and summarised: a doctor's note for a leave request, a driver's ID or licence for a check, or a fee payment screenshot. Anthropic does not use it to train its models, and nothing is sent while the helper is off. |
| Soniox and OpenAI (speech-to-text) | Only if your school uses PTM meeting recordings. Audio recordings of parent-teacher meetings are sent to Soniox, Inc. (speech-to-text, processed in India or the EU) solely to produce a transcript, or to OpenAI, L.L.C. if we switch provider. Neither uses this data to train its models, and we delete the audio and transcript from the provider immediately after transcription. Summaries are written with Anthropic's Claude. |
| Sentry | Crash reports: the app version, the phone model, and what went wrong. No child details. Only while a version of the app with crash reporting is in use. |
| Amazon Web Services (S3, India) | An encrypted copy of our databases, made every night as a backup. Copies are kept up to 12 months, locked with a key only we hold. |
| Uptime checks (healthchecks.io, UptimeRobot) | Tell us when the service is down. They receive no personal information. |
Some of these providers operate outside your country, which means information may be processed internationally, including in the United States, Canada and India, where our servers run in Google Cloud's Mumbai region. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect the safety of a child.
9. How long we keep it
Our default is 30 days. Information that exists to run a journey is deleted 30 days after it stops being useful. This is enforced by scheduled jobs that run every night, not by anyone remembering to do it.
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Location history — where a van was, minute by minute | 30 days, then permanently deleted. |
| Location on a pickup check-in or on a van's stop at your door | 30 days with the check-in or stop, then the location is removed. The check-in or stop itself, and its times, stay. |
| Location on an emergency alert | Kept while the alert is open, then 30 days after it is closed. The alert itself stays. |
| Driver national ID numbers and ID scans | 30 days after a driver is rejected or revoked. Only the last four digits survive, for the audit record. |
| Collection-pass national IDs | 30 days after the pass expires or is revoked. |
| Visitor-register national ID numbers — written at the school gate | 12 months after the visit. Only the last four digits survive, so the register still reads as it did. |
| One-time passcodes | Minutes. Stored hashed, never in readable form. |
| Device tokens for notifications | Removed when you sign out or the device stops responding. |
| Phone numbers in the activity log | Shortened to the last four digits after 12 months, or straight away when you delete your account. |
| Parent-teacher meeting audio and transcripts | 7 days after the meeting, then deleted. Notes not approved within 7 days are deleted too; approved notes stay with the child's record. |
| Payment screenshots on a driver's fee list | 12 months, then deleted. The payment itself stays on the list. |
| Nightly backup copies | Up to 12 months, encrypted, then deleted. Something deleted from the service can stay in a backup until that copy expires. |
What we keep for longer, and why
Two things cannot be on a 30-day clock without breaking the service or the school's own obligations, so we are explicit about them rather than burying them:
- Your child's record and their journey history — enrolment, route, and the record of which days they travelled — are kept while the child is enrolled in transport at the school, and afterwards for as long as the school must keep them. A school has to be able to answer a question about a journey that happened last term, and to produce transport records for the authorities. The school decides how long, and can ask us to delete them.
- Custody records — who collected a child, by what method, and when — are append-only. They cannot be edited, and they are not deleted on a timer. The entire value of that record is that it is still trustworthy long after the day it was written; a custody trail that quietly erased itself after a month would be worth nothing in the one situation it exists for.
When a school stops using StudentAid, its data is made available for export and then deleted, except where the law requires us to keep it.
10. How we protect it
- All traffic to our websites and apps is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
- National ID numbers are encrypted at rest, hidden by default, and shown in full only through a single deliberate action that is logged.
- Access is controlled by role. Boundaries between schools and between operators are enforced by the data layer and fail closed.
- Sign-in is by one-time passcode to a verified phone number; app sessions use scoped tokens that can be revoked.
- Boarding cards carry a random code that cannot be guessed, and a lost card can be cancelled straight away. Collection passes are cryptographically signed and time-limited, and can be revoked immediately.
- Significant actions are written to an audit log.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information we will act to contain it and inform the affected schools, and you, without undue delay.
11. Your choices and rights
You can ask us, or your school, to:
- tell you what information is held about you or your child;
- correct anything inaccurate — a misspelled name, a wrong phone number, a wrong class;
- remove a photograph, or withdraw consent for it;
- remove a person you previously authorised to collect your child;
- delete information, where we are not required to keep it for safety or compliance reasons.
You can delete your StudentAid account yourself, from the app. See Delete your account for what that removes and what the school keeps.
You can also turn off non-essential notifications in the app. Emergency alerts cannot be switched off — an SOS is not a preference, and the apps deliberately provide no setting that could suppress one.
Because your school controls most of this information, the fastest route is usually to ask the school directly. If you would rather come to us, contact us at info@studentaid.io and we will work with your school to answer. We may need to verify your identity first.
12. Cookies
The school portal and platform console use a single session cookie to keep you signed in. It is necessary for the service to function and is not used for tracking or advertising. Fonts and map tiles are loaded from Google, which may log the request.
This marketing website — and only this website — uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read, so we know what to explain better. It sets analytics cookies and sends Google your approximate location, device and browser type, and the pages you viewed; your full IP address is not stored. We do not use it for advertising and we do not sell what it collects.
The StudentAid app counts which screens are opened. It uses Google's Firebase Analytics for that: which screens people open, the app version and the kind of phone. It never sends a name, photo, location or trip, and it is not used for advertising. The driver app, the school portal and the platform console have no analytics at all. If you would rather not be counted on this website, any browser setting or extension that blocks analytics cookies will stop it, and nothing on this site will break.
13. Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Where a change materially affects how information about you or your child is handled, we will tell the school and, where appropriate, notify you in the app.
14. Contact us
Questions about this policy, or about information held about you:
- Email: info@studentaid.io
- WhatsApp: +92 332 777 7299
- Post: StudentAid INC., 27 New Hampshire Court, Brampton, Ontario L6S 0B9, Canada
- Pakistan office: Office #242, Main PWD Road, Sector A, Islamabad, Pakistan
See also our Terms of Service Delete your account.