Privacy Policy

We keep this list short on purpose.

If you visit without signing in

Very little. Cloudflare, our hosting provider, processes your request to serve the page. This includes your IP address and basic request metadata (browser type, page visited). Cloudflare gives us aggregated traffic counts, not individual visitors, and may set a short-lived security cookie. Google Analytics records which pages are viewed, as described under Analytics. Outside Europe its cookies are on unless you turn analytics off; in Europe they are off unless you accept them. We load no advertising or social media pixels, and we don't fingerprint your browser.

If you create an account

You can sign in with Google, with a link we email you, or with a passkey on your device. If you use Google, Google shares the following with us:

• Your name — so we know what to call you
• Your email address — so we can identify your account and contact you if needed
• Your Google profile photo URL — so we can show your avatar in the app

That's it. We don't request access to your contacts, calendar, files, or anything else from Google. If you sign in with an emailed link, we have only your email address. A passkey stays on your device; we store its public key, which can't be used to sign in anywhere else.

If you use the service

• Saved schools and preferences — if you bookmark or compare schools, we store those choices tied to your account
• Applications you track — if you use the application tracker while signed in, we store each school you add with the status, dates and notes you enter
• Session data — a session cookie to keep you logged in

If you answer the feedback question

• Your answer — which option you tapped (for example "Moving to the area"), anything you type in the optional box, the page you were on, and the time. It isn't tied to your name, email or account, and we never publish it.
• A one-day spam check — to stop floods, we store a scrambled code made from your network address and that day's date. It can't be turned back into your address and can't link your answers across days.

If you answer as school staff

• Your work email — to confirm you work in a school district, you type your work email on our staff page. It goes from your browser to a separate SchoolScope verification service that does only this job; the main site never receives it. That service emails you a link that works for 24 hours and keeps no copy of your address. It keeps a scrambled code made from your address and the school year, so one address can answer once a year, and that code is never stored with your answers. To stop floods it also keeps two short-lived scrambled codes, one made from your address and the hour and one from your network address and the day. Those are deleted within about two days.
• Your answers — opening the link gives your browser a one-time pass naming your district and the school year, and nothing about you. You then choose your school on our page. We confirm the district, not the school, so anyone with a work email in a district can answer for any school there. Your answers are held outside our database until release day, and a release appears on the site only once all of its answers are in. They’re stored with the school you chose, the school year and the twice-yearly release they join: no email, name, account, role, network address or time of day. The staff pages load no analytics.
• What we publish — counts for each question, only once at least 5 people have answered for that school, and only twice a year. Anything you type in the optional box is read by our editors and never appears on a school’s page. If you ticked the box that allows it, we may quote it in an article, attributed only to “a staff member in” your district, never to your school or role; we can’t ask you first, because we keep no way to reach you. We delete it 90 days after release.
• A bot check — the staff form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to check that it isn’t being used by a bot. It sees the page you’re on and your browser’s request, not your email or the school you picked; Cloudflare already handles every request to this site, and its privacy policy (see Who sees your data) applies.
• The limits, stated plainly — Resend, which sends your link, keeps a record of the message, including your address. Cloudflare keeps short-lived request logs and database backups. We built the system so that nothing we store links an address to an answer.

If you answer as a parent

• In Spanish — the parent form is also available in Spanish, at /ca/parents/es; it collects exactly the same things. This privacy policy is in English only.
• What we collect — on our parents page you tick a box saying you’re a parent or guardian of a current student at the school and 18 or older, and give an email address. We don’t check either: we confirm only that you can open the email. Your answers are unverified and self-reported, and we say so wherever they appear.
• Your email — it goes from your browser to the same separate verification service staff use; the main site never receives it. That service emails you a link that works for 24 hours and keeps no copy of your address, only scrambled codes so one address can answer for up to 3 schools a school year, and short-lived flood-check codes deleted within about two days. Resend, which sends your link, keeps a record of the message, including your address. Cloudflare Turnstile checks the form isn’t being used by a bot.
• Your answers — the multiple-choice answers and the school you chose, the school year and the twice-yearly release they join. There’s no comment box, and nothing about your child, your name, account, network address or time of day. Answers are held outside our database until release day. The parent pages load no analytics.
• What we show — for now, only how many families have answered for a school. Answers would appear only as counts, once at least 20 families have answered for that school in a school year. They’re never part of the Scope Score, rankings, search or comparisons.
• How long we keep them — each family’s answers are kept as a separate row, with no link to the person who gave them, so we can’t find yours to change or delete it.

If you use SchoolScope through an AI assistant

AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can look up school data through our connector at mcp.schoolscope.co.

• Without linking an account — the assistant sends us only what a lookup needs, such as a school's name, a city or ZIP code, or a location to search near. We don't receive your conversation, and we don't store what was asked. For each call we record the tool used, the assistant's name and version, whether the call worked and how long it took. That record has nothing about you and nothing from the lookup itself.
• If you link your account — you sign in on schoolscope.co and approve the assistant, and the approval screen lists what it may do. It can see your name and email address. It can read your saved schools and add or remove them, and read your tracked applications and add a school or update its status or note, when you ask it to. It gets nothing else from your account. We store the assistant's registration and the access tokens we issue it. A link you don't use for 90 days ends on its own.
• Disconnecting — signing out of schoolscope.co doesn't end a link you approved for ongoing access. Remove SchoolScope in your assistant's settings, or contact us and we'll revoke its access.

If you sign up for alerts

You can ask SchoolScope to email you when a school's new test results are in, or when California's statewide results come out. You don't need an account for this — just an email address.

We store your email, chosen topics, signup source, confirmation and management tokens, consent timestamps, and delivery records. For signup limits, we may store a hash of your IP address. If you sign up through your account, we also store the account link.

Anonymous signups and new topic requests need email confirmation. A signed-in account with a verified email can authorize its own alerts without another confirmation email.

Every alert carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can remove or stop alerts anytime from the "manage alerts" link in that email. Unsubscribing stops emails but keeps the stored signup and delivery records. Ask us to delete your alert data and we will.

SchoolScope runs on Cloudflare Workers, which provides:

• HTTPS everywhere — all connections are encrypted in transit
• DDoS protection at the network edge
• No origin server to attack — the application runs at Cloudflare's edge

You sign in through Google, an emailed link or a passkey, so there is no SchoolScope password for us to handle or store. Session tokens are cryptographically signed and httpOnly.