Security & Trust

The short version

• No ads, no third-party advertising trackers, no selling data. Ever.
• Encrypted in transit and at rest; the most sensitive secrets get a second layer of encryption.
• Optional two-factor authentication on every parent and teacher sign-in.
• Your data leaves any time as a full export, and you can delete your account yourself.
• Our AI providers can't train on your family's data. Homeroom improves its own AI only from anonymized corrections, and you can turn that off.

Encryption

Every connection to Homeroom uses TLS. Data is encrypted at rest by our database provider. On top of that, the most sensitive values we hold (Google Calendar refresh tokens and two-factor secrets) are encrypted again at the application layer with AES-256-GCM, so even a raw database copy doesn't expose them. Passwords are never stored, only bcrypt hashes.

Account security

Sign-in is protected by rate limiting that locks briefly after repeated failures and warns the account holder by email. Optional two-factor authentication (TOTP, the standard authenticator-app kind, with one-time recovery codes) is available to the account owner and every invited teacher in Settings. Sessions are signed, httpOnly cookies. Students never have credentials beyond an optional 4-digit PIN on a device you hand them, and student mode can't reach settings or records.

Backups

The database is backed up automatically every night, and we can run an on-demand backup before risky changes. Backups exist so a bad day (ours or an infrastructure provider's) doesn't cost you your records.

Your data is yours

• Export: download your entire account any time as a .zip of JSON and CSV files, from Settings.
• After you cancel: records stay printable and exportable. No hostage-taking.
• Deletion: delete your account yourself from Settings. It cancels any subscription first, then permanently erases every student, subject, lesson, record, and forum profile.

Children's privacy

Homeroom is built for parents. About a child, we store what a gradebook would: a first name or nickname, an emoji avatar, and schoolwork records (subjects, lessons, grades, attendance, hours, reading). Children have no accounts, no email addresses, and no passwords in Homeroom. There is no advertising anywhere, so there is no advertising profile of anyone, let alone a child. The AI helpers are parent-only tools: no AI ever chats with your child, and nothing an AI proposes is saved until the parent approves it. Essay text and photos of a child's work are processed for the helper you invoked and are not stored.

What our AI learns from, in both directions

Outbound, to our AI providers:when you use an AI helper, the text, photos, and lesson context you submit are processed by our AI inference provider under no-training terms. Nothing your family submits trains anyone else's models, and the photos are not retained after processing.

Inbound, to Homeroom's own AI:when you correct an AI suggestion (fix a parsed lesson title, uncheck a proposed action, flip a graded item), Homeroom keeps an anonymized before-and-after of that correction, and we may use those corrections to train and improve Homeroom's own AI features. We say this plainly and proudly: corrections are how the helpers get better for every family.

We're comfortable doing this because of the posture behind it. Names are replaced with placeholders before anything is written, at the code path every correction must pass through. Your child's work product (essay text, worksheet photos, writing photos) is never stored in any form. Correction records age out after 400 days. Deleting your account deletes your family's correction rows. And there is an off switch: Settings, Your data & account, "Help improve Homeroom's AI." Disclosing all of this builds more trust than burying it, which is why this page exists.

Who touches your data (subprocessors)

Homeroom runs on a small, named set of providers. Each sees only what its job requires.

• Hetzner hosts the application server.
• Neon hosts the database (encrypted at rest).
• Stripe processes payments. Card numbers never touch Homeroom's servers.
• Resend sends transactional email (digests, receipts, security notices).
• Fireworks AI runs AI inference under no-training terms, only on what you submit to a helper.
• Google is involved only if you connect Calendar sync, with the narrowest scope Google offers: Homeroom can manage only the calendars it creates and cannot see the rest of your Google account.

Found something? Tell us

If you spot a security problem or anything on this page that doesn't match what the product does, report it in the Homeroom support center or through The Academy of Chaos. We fix first, then disclose what happened. See also the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.