Privacy policy

Plain answers about your data.

Simusim handles information about schools, staff, parents, and — most importantly — children. This page explains what we collect, why, where it lives, and what we will never do with it, in language written for a head teacher or a parent, not a lawyer.

§ 01 — What we collect

Only what a school actually needs.

Everything below exists so that a school can run a register, a gradebook, a fee ledger, and a set of learning apps — or so that a family can subscribe directly. Nothing is collected for advertising or profiling.

From schools

  • Roster information the school provides: student names, class levels, guardian names and phone numbers, and staff names and emails.
  • School records the school creates by using the platform: attendance, grades, report cards, fee invoices and payments, lesson plans, and announcements.
  • Login credentials: student codes and PINs, staff emails and passwords. PINs and passwords are stored by our identity service in hashed form — we cannot read them — and accounts lock after repeated failed attempts.

From families

  • Account details a guardian provides at sign-up: their name, email, phone number, and their children's first names and class levels.
  • Subscription payments are processed by Paystack. Card and mobile-money numbers go directly to Paystack — they never touch our servers, and we store only the payment reference and status.

From using the apps

  • Learning progress — lessons opened, exercises completed, scores — so students, teachers, and parents can see how learning is going.
  • SMS and email delivery records, so the school can see which messages reached which guardians.
  • Website analytics on this marketing site only, via self-hosted, cookieless Umami. No cookies, no cross-site tracking, no third-party analytics companies.

§ 02 — Face recognition at the school gate

Some schools choose to use our gate kiosk for attendance. It is optional, chosen by the school, and built deliberately conservatively:

  • The kiosk stores numeric face templates (vectors), never photographs. A template cannot be turned back into a picture of a child.
  • A manual check-in path is always available — no child is required to use face recognition.
  • Templates are deleted when a student leaves the school or the school stops using the kiosk.

§ 03 — Children's data

  • Children's accounts are created by their school or their guardian — never by the child alone.
  • There are no public profiles, no messaging with strangers, no leaderboards that expose a child's identity beyond their own school, and no behavioural advertising of any kind.
  • Children's data is used for exactly one purpose: their own learning and their school's records.

§ 04 — Where data lives, and how it is protected

  • Data is hosted on dedicated servers in European data centres (Hetzner), encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest in backups.
  • Every school is isolated at the database layer — each record is bound to one school, enforced by the database itself, not just by application code.
  • Administrative actions are audit-logged: who did what, when, and from where.
  • Encrypted backups are taken daily and stored off-site.

§ 05 — Who we share data with

Only the processors the platform needs to function, each receiving the minimum required:

  • Paystack — family subscription payments.
  • Arkesel — SMS delivery to guardian phone numbers.
  • Resend — transactional email delivery.
  • Hetzner — server hosting, as described above.

We do not sell, rent, or trade data — to anyone, ever. We disclose data beyond this list only if the law requires it.

§ 06 — Your choices and deletion

  • Schools own their data and can request a full export or deletion at any time.
  • Guardians can ask their school — or us directly — to correct or delete their family's information.
  • Family accounts can cancel their subscription at any time and request deletion of the account and its data.

Send any request to info@simusim.com. We honour deletion requests fully; where a school has a legal duty to keep certain records (for example fee receipts), we delete everything else and tell you what was kept and why.

§ 07 — Changes and contact

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update this page and note the new date at the top. Questions, concerns, or requests: info@simusim.com or +233 54 911 2103.

See also how the platform is engineered to protect each school's data on the security section of the home page, and the terms of service.