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Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy explains how Tecvo (Pty) Ltd ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses, stores and protects your personal information when you use the Teacher Parent App ("the App"). The App is designed to connect parents of South African school learners with their child's classroom by giving teachers a structured channel to share homework, tests, assignments, exams, sports updates, meetings, announcements and attendance information directly with parents.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and complying with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) of the Republic of South Africa, as well as the Google Play Families Policy.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information you provide on registration

When you register as a teacher, we collect:

• Title, first name, surname
• Email address
• Mobile phone number
• Password (stored only as an encrypted hash by Firebase Authentication)
• School information (name, EMIS number, province) — selected from public Department of Basic Education data
• Grades, sub-grades (classes) and subjects you teach
• Optional: profile photograph, biography, professional qualifications, education history, prior teaching schools

When you register as a parent, we collect:

• Title, first name, surname
• Email address
• Mobile phone number
• Password (stored only as an encrypted hash by Firebase Authentication)
• Optional: profile photograph

2.2 Information about your child (provided by parents)

When a parent registers a child, the parent provides:

• The child's first name and surname
• Grade and sub-grade (class)
• School (selected from public Department of Basic Education data)
• Subjects the child studies
• Optional: a profile photograph of the child

Parents may add multiple children. Children do not register or use the App themselves. All child information is entered, controlled and may be deleted by the parent at any time from within the App. When a parent deletes their account, every child record and child photograph linked to that account is permanently removed from our systems.

2.3 Information generated by your use of the App

• Content posted by teachers: homework, tests, assignments, exams, sports updates, meetings, announcements, attached PDF documents
• Attendance records: daily present/absent markings for learners in the teacher's class
• Comments made by parents and teachers on posted content
• Direct messages exchanged between a parent and a teacher about a specific child and subject
• Read receipts and timestamps for the above

2.4 Technical information

We use the following Google Firebase services to operate the App, which automatically process certain technical data on our behalf:

• Firebase Authentication — a unique user identifier (UID) and device authentication tokens, used to authenticate sessions and secure your account.
• Firebase Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage — process your IP address and request metadata for the purpose of serving your data securely.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) — issues your device a push-notification registration token, which we store against your account so we can deliver in-app notifications (e.g. new homework, a message reply). The token can be revoked at any time by uninstalling the App or disabling notifications in your device settings.
• Firebase Crashlytics — if the App crashes, an anonymised stack trace and basic device information (model, OS version, language) is sent to us so we can diagnose and fix the crash. Crashlytics does not collect names, emails, phone numbers, content or messages.
• Firebase Analytics — records app-usage events (e.g. screen opens, feature usage) and basic device information to help us understand which features are used. Analytics does not collect names, emails, phone numbers, content or messages, and we have not enabled advertising identifiers or user-property profiling.

We do not use advertising identifiers, third-party advertising SDKs, or cross-site trackers.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your information only to:

• Create and manage your account (parent and/or teacher)
• Match a parent to the teachers of their child's exact class and subjects, and deliver classroom content (homework, tests, etc.) to the correct parents
• Enable direct messaging between a teacher and a parent regarding a specific child
• Display attendance records to a parent for their own child
• Send transactional notifications (e.g. a new homework post, a reply to a message)
• Maintain the security of your account and detect abuse
• Comply with our legal obligations

We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, or automated decision-making that produces legal effects.

4. Legal Basis for Processing (POPIA)

We process personal information on the following lawful bases:

• Consent — given when you complete registration and tick the Terms & Privacy acknowledgement
• Performance of a contract — to deliver the App's functionality to you
• Legitimate interest — to keep the service secure and to improve it
• Legal obligation — where required by South African law

5. Children's Personal Information

The App is intended for use by parents and teachers (adults aged 18 and over). We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from any child. Information about a child is entered by their parent on the parent's own device, under the parent's account, and remains under the parent's control.

A parent may at any time:

• View what information is held about each child
• Edit or correct a child's information
• Remove a child from their account
• Delete their entire account (which deletes all of that parent's children from our systems)

Teachers receive content posted to their class and may see the names of children in their own class register for attendance purposes. Teachers do not see other children's information.

6. Who Has Access to Your Information

6.1 Other users of the App

• A teacher can see the names of learners in the exact class they teach, the names of those learners' parents who have registered, and content/messages those parents send to that teacher.
• A parent can see the names, profile photo, biography and professional details of teachers who teach their child, and content/messages those teachers send.
• The App uses a strict "box" matching system: a teacher and a parent can communicate only if they share the same exact combination of school, grade, class and subject.

6.2 Service providers

We use the following sub-processors to operate the App. They process personal information strictly on our instructions:

• Google LLC — Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, and Analytics (Firebase Privacy)

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information to any third party, and we do not share it for marketing purposes.

7. Cross-border Transfers

Firebase services may store and process data on servers located outside the Republic of South Africa, including in the European Union and the United States. Google LLC is bound by appropriate contractual safeguards. By using the App you consent to such cross-border processing as permitted under section 72 of POPIA.

8. How Long We Keep Your Information

The Teacher Parent App also serves as a record of school communications, so that a parent or teacher can later show what was (or was not) shared. To support this while respecting your privacy, we use a retain-then-purge model.

• Account information is kept for as long as your account is active.
• Content (homework, tests, messages, attendance) is kept for as long as the author's account is active, or until the author deletes it.
• When you delete an individual post, comment or message: it is immediately removed from the App for you and for every other connected user (it disappears from their device, like a deleted message in a chat app). A single copy is kept in a restricted internal archive for the retention period below, then permanently deleted.
• When you delete your account: your sign-in credentials are deleted and you can no longer log in; your profile, your children's information, your photos, your messages and the content you posted are removed from the App and hidden from all other users, and your photos are deleted from our file storage. A copy of the school-communication records (posts, attendance, messages) is kept in the restricted internal archive for the retention period below, then permanently and automatically deleted.

Retention period: archived records are kept for 12 months and are then permanently and automatically deleted. We may retain specific records longer only where required by law (for example, a live legal dispute or a lawful request).

Who can see archived records: the internal archive is not visible to any App user — not to teachers, not to parents, not even to the person whose data it was. It is accessible only to Tecvo (Pty) Ltd, under access controls, and is used only to resolve disputes or meet legal obligations. Because some of this content concerns children, it is kept locked down and to a minimum. If you want a record permanently erased before the 12-month period ends, contact us and we will erase it unless we are legally required to keep it.

9. Security

We take reasonable and appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, including:

• Encryption in transit (HTTPS / TLS) and at rest (Firebase managed encryption)
• Authentication via Firebase Authentication with hashed passwords
• Server-side Firestore and Storage security rules that restrict each user to their own data and to the specific class/child scope they are entitled to see (the "box" matching system described in section 6.1)
• Profile photographs uploaded to Cloud Storage are scoped to the uploading user's identifier and only writable by that user
• Restricted internal access on a need-to-know basis

No system is completely secure. If we become aware of a security compromise affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as required by POPIA.

10. Your Rights Under POPIA

You have the right to:

• Be informed that we hold your personal information and what we do with it
• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Correct information that is inaccurate or out of date
• Delete your account and personal information (available in-app under Settings → Delete Account)
• Object to processing of your information in certain circumstances
• Withdraw consent previously given (this may mean you can no longer use the App)
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator: inforegulator.org.za · complaints.IR@justice.gov.za

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at support@tecvo.co.za.

Your right to deletion is subject to the retention described in section 8: when you delete data it is removed from the App immediately and hidden from other users, and the retained archive copy is then automatically deleted after 12 months — or sooner if you ask us, unless we are legally required to keep it.

11. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the latest version. Material changes will be notified to you within the App.

12. Contact Us

Responsible Party (Information Officer): Tecvo (Pty) Ltd
Email: support@tecvo.co.za
Country: Republic of South Africa