uSafeHS Privacy Policy
February 21, 2024
Our Commitment to Privacy
The uSafeHS® application (“the app”) is a high school safety system to address multiple forms of school violence with comprehensive education, prevention, communication, and response tools. It provides these tools and resources to students on smartphones. In addition, school administrators can use the uSafeHS desktop dashboard to customize student resources, monitor school-wide app use, and communicate with students via reports and smartphone push notifications. Our primary goal is to provide high school administrators and students with a resource to make high schools safer. We understand that you may have questions or concerns regarding your personal information and how it will be used. To make this privacy policy easy to find, it is available both from the home page of the uSafe website at usafeapp.org (the “website”) and through our mobile application. You may also email us at prevention.innovations@unh.edu with any privacy-related questions.
App Permissions
The app may request access to the following. See below for more details.
Contacts - read or modify your contacts
Storage - read or modify or delete the contents of your shared storage
Other - View network connections, receive data from the internet, change phone settings
Applicability of Privacy Policy
Throughout this policy, we use the term “personal identifying information (PII)” to describe information that can be associated with a specific person and can be used to identify that person. We do not consider personal information to include information that has been aggregated and/or anonymized so that it does not identify a specific user.
The University of New Hampshire Prevention Innovations Research Center (PIRC) will only collect a screen name chosen by the student when they download the app and the student’s smartphone number. These two pieces of data (plus any information the student chooses to provide as part of an incident report), are shared with the user’s school of record only when a report is submitted via the Report an Incident feature. During app use, the chosen screen name could be shared with other users at the school of record as part of participation in the Weekly Challenges. In no other circumstances is information shared with the user’s school of record or any other entity, commercial or otherwise.
The app asks users for permission to access/store/read/write their contacts list as a requirement to utilize the feature Time to Leave. The app will not access the contacts list unless the user grants permission. This contact data is used ephemerally and is stored on the user's device only. No data about the contact other than their name is stored by the app and at no time does the app sync or transmit any information from the contacts list externally. Sharing contact information is not necessary for any other aspect of the app.
Finally, no other PII is collected or transmitted.
Information Collection and Use
For a better experience, while using our Service, we may require you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information. The information that we request will be retained by us and used as described in this privacy policy.
The app does use third party services that collect information used to identify you.
Links to privacy policy of third-party service providers used by the app:
Log Data Collection in the Case of an Error:
Whenever you use our Service, in the case of an error in the app we collect data and information (through third party products) on your phone called Log Data. This Log Data may include information such as your device Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, device name, operating system version, the configuration of the app when utilizing our Service, the time and date of your use of the Service, and other statistics.
Cookies: Cookies are files with a small amount of data that are commonly used as anonymous unique identifiers. These are sent to your browser from the websites that you visit and are stored on your device’s internal memory.
This Service does not use these “cookies” explicitly. However, the app may use third party code and libraries that use “cookies” to collect information and improve their services. If you object to the use of cookies, you should not use our service.
Evaluate Effectiveness:
In order to evaluate our effectiveness and improve our services, we collect aggregated and anonymized data. Any and all data collected is stripped of PII, and only data related to feature use and functions within the uSafeHS app will be collected. For example, we may collect the number of active users at a school of record, as well as the frequency of use of app features and content, including some data about use at specific times or days. This data does not identify a specific user. The only exception to this statement is when a user uses the “Report an Incident” feature. In that case, the user’s screen name, phone number and report content will be transmitted to the school of record.
When you use our mobile application, we collect your smartphone user id (UUID) and your cell phone number. UUIDs are used to provide relevant push notifications from your selected school. Cell phone numbers, which function as account numbers, are retained to capture progress in completing the educational components of the app.
When administrators visit the administrator dashboard (https://hsdashboard.usafeapp.org) the standard web login information is collected. When users visit uSafeApp.org, standard web analytics, such as your browser type and the pages you accessed on our website are collected. We also may collect certain geo-location information such as the location of the device (including computer, phone or tablet). If you do not agree to our collection of this information, you should not visit our website or the dashboard.
How Long We Retain Your Location Information:
uSafeHS does not collect or store user location information.
How We Share Information
PIRC will not rent, sell, trade, or otherwise share PII with third parties, other than OneSignal, a third-party service provider used to send push notifications from the school of record or the Preventions Innovations Research Center with prior approval from the school of record. OneSignal accesses only device IDs and phone numbers to send these messages and does not retain or share this information.
The only exception to this statement is when a user uses the “Report an Incident” feature. In that case, the user’s screen name, phone number and report information will be transmitted to the high school administrator.
Links to Other SItes
uSafeUS contains links to external websites that we cannot guarantee are up-to-date, secure and/or confidential; use of those links are at your own risk, and we do not make any warranty or promise regarding those websites or their privacy practices.
PIRC provides access to these websites via their public URLs; PIRC has no insight or influence over what PII these websites collect. PIRC does not provide any PII or any other data to these organizations.
We strive to ensure security on our systems. Despite our efforts, we cannot guarantee that information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed by breach of our administrative, managerial, or technical safeguards. Therefore, we urge you to take adequate precautions to protect your personal data as well, including never sharing your password with anyone.
Information from Minors
The uSafeHS app is not intended for minors under 13 years of age, and we do not knowingly collect PII from minors under 13. If we learn we have collected or received PII from a minor under 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a minor under 13, please visit this link (https://www.usafeapp.org/resources) to request that, we delete the user’s information from the uSafeHS system or email us at prevention.innovations@unh.edu with your request.
For minors over 13, use of the app is at the discretion of the minor’s parent or legal guardian. If the parent or guardian wishes to access information or request that information about their student be deleted from the app database, please visit this link (https://www.usafeapp.org/resources) to request this, or email us at prevention.innovations@unh.edu with the request.
Changes to this Privacy Policy and Notification
We will update this policy if our data collection practices are changed. If we make any changes pertaining to our collection, retention, use or sharing of PII, we will publish the update on our website first. The most up-to-date version of this policy is available on our website (usafeapp.org).
How We Use the Information We Collect
Our primary purpose in collecting user information is to enhance school safety and engage students in the app’s social emotional learning content. The student PII is used to:
Provide the phone number of a student who submits an incident report to the school of record.
Provide a customized learning experience.
Create and send custom notifications and alerts related to use of the app; and
Perform other duties as required by law.
Terms of Use
This privacy policy is subject to, and governed by the Terms of Use, to which you agree by accessing, downloading or using the uSafeHS® application.
How to Contact Us
Any questions about this privacy policy should be addressed to prevention.innovations@unh.edu.
Effective Date: September 21, 2020