teachChat

How teachChat earns a classroom's trust

teachChat is built and run by one public school teacher. Everything on this page is the current, honest state of the system: no more, no less. The long-form version lives in the Privacy Policy.

🌱 We barely collect anything

• Students join with a first name and last initial. There is nowhere to type a full last name.
• No student emails, no student accounts, no photos, no phone numbers.
• Students pick their own screennames; classmates only ever see those.
• Teachers who want even less on our side can build the class from a roster sheet in their own Google Drive. In that mode the sheet is read in the teacher's browser and only screennames reach us, so student names never touch our servers at all.
• Teachers sign in with Google; we store the email address and the display name Google hands us, plus a record of which version of our terms was agreed to.

🚫 Things that are simply not in the building

• No ads, no trackers, no analytics scripts, no cookies beyond the sign-in session.
• No selling or sharing of data, ever. There is no third party in this story.
• Student data is never used to train AI models.

🔒 Where data lives

• Student names are never saved to our database. A name is checked once at sign-in, so nobody can impersonate a classmate, then handed to the teacher's own Google Drive and discarded on our end. Our servers only ever keep the screenname.
• Everything runs on Cloudflare's network, encrypted in transit (HTTPS/WSS) and encrypted at rest.
• Nightly encrypted backups go to separate storage, kept 30 to 180 days, and we prove they work by actually restoring one into a scratch database rather than assuming. The first time we ran that drill it failed, which is exactly why it is worth running.
• Class exports go to the teacher's own Google Drive, so schools keep their records in accounts they already control.

🗑 Deletion is real deletion

• Deleting a class erases its chat, points, and roster from our live database immediately.
• Nothing has to be deleted by hand to eventually go away. A class with no activity for 12 months is deleted automatically by a job that runs every day, so a forgotten class does not sit on our servers forever.
• The honest footnote: a deleted class still sits inside the encrypted backups until those rotate, which takes at most 180 days. Backups exist to recover from disaster and are never used to bring a deleted class back.
• Files already exported to a teacher's Drive stay put: those belong to the school.

🇺🇸 Offered to U.S. schools only

• teachChat is offered only to schools in the United States and its territories. That is not just a sentence in the terms: requests from outside that area are turned away before they reach the application.
• The point is scope, not exclusion. Satisfying every country's privacy law at once is not a promise one person can keep, so teachChat makes a narrower one it can: built for U.S. classrooms, under U.S. student privacy law.

🛡 Safety is the product, not an upsell

• Freeze, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, and blocked words are in the free tier forever. Safety is never paywalled.
• The teacher holds every moderation lever, enforced server-side. This is also why chats are not end-to-end encrypted: your moderation tools have to be able to read them.
• Revealing a student's real name is logged, so there is a record to stand behind.

🤝 The paperwork

• FERPA and COPPA responsibilities are spelled out in the Privacy Policy; consent flows through the school, as it should for classroom tools.
• The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy have been through counsel review and are live. Every teacher has to read and accept them before running a class, and we record which version they agreed to, so there is a real answer to "what did you agree to, and when."
• If your district has its own DPA, send it over and we will review and sign. A signed school agreement controls over these documents wherever student data is concerned.
• There is a written incident-response plan covering what happens if something goes wrong: how we contain it, how we work out what was actually exposed, and who gets told. Schools hear from us quickly, because the records are yours. The order of the rest follows what the law requires, which in New Jersey means the State Police are told before notice reaches the people affected.
• Questions get answered by the person who wrote the code: Dalton Fowler.