Security & privacy
Last updated October 13, 2026
Many of our students are under 13. We built Science Scrimmage the way we'd want it built for our own kids: collect as little as possible, show each person only what they should see, and let parents decide.
- A parent gives permission before we keep a child's practice data, and can delete it all any time.
- Kids' names are never sent to the AI service. It sees "Student A", not your child.
- No ads, no analytics, no trackers, no selling data. Ever.
- Kids don't have email addresses, and we never ask for a phone number or location.
- Every connection is encrypted. Passwords and PINs are stored scrambled.
Parents are in charge
- Permission first. When a coach adds a child, a parent confirms before the child can practice. We record each permission and email a confirmation. A coach can't give permission for a family.
- See everything. In your parent account you can see every test with your child's answers, every report, every review worksheet and every email we've sent you.
- Delete any time. One button in Settings deletes your child's account and all of their practice history. Copies of past emails about your child are blanked too. We email you a confirmation.
- We don't keep data forever. Accounts that have been inactive for two years are deleted, under a written retention policy.
What we don't collect
- No email address, phone number, home address, location or contacts for kids. Kids sign in with a username and PIN from their coach.
- A profile photo is stored without its location or camera details: we redraw it from the picture alone before saving it.
- No advertising, analytics, tracking or crash-reporting services, in the app or on this website.
- These pages set no cookies and collect nothing (see the website privacy statement). Signing in to the app sets two cookies: one keeps you signed in, and one opens the app for you when you come back to sciencescrimmage.com. Logging out removes both.
How we use AI, carefully
- AI (Anthropic's Claude) helps write practice questions, check written answers, and draft summaries and reports.
- It never sees a child's name: students appear as "Student A", "Student B", and names are put back on our own server.
- Under Anthropic's commercial terms, the data isn't used to train its models.
- Anything a child reads from the AI is written under child-safety instructions, and every practice question is reviewed before a child sees it.
Who can see what
- Parents see only their own children.
- Coaches see only their own teams.
- School administrators can look at their school's teams but can't change anything.
- Teammates never see each other's scores. Team rankings show a child only their own place.
Keeping accounts safe
- Encrypted connections only. Every page and app request uses HTTPS with modern encryption (TLS 1.2 or newer); older, weaker connections are refused.
- Scrambled passwords. Passwords are stored hashed with Argon2, never as plain text. Kids' PINs are hashed the same way for signing in, plus one encrypted copy so a coach or parent can look up a forgotten PIN.
- Limits on guessing. Sign-ins are rate-limited, an account waits 15 minutes after 10 wrong passwords, and a PIN locks for 15 minutes after 5 wrong tries. Asking for a temporary password never switches off your current one.
- Face ID and Touch ID for coaches, in the app. In the iPhone and iPad app, coaches can sign in with a passkey, and adding one requires their password. On this website, coaches sign in with their password.
- Sign-ins stay on the device. On iPhone and iPad, sign-in details are kept in the device's Keychain.
- Sign-ins the page itself can't read. In the web app, staying signed in uses one secure cookie that the page's own code can't read, sent only to our sign-in check, and signing out deletes it. Nothing that could sign you in is kept in the browser's storage. To save typing, the sign-in screen remembers the last email used and, on a shared device, up to six kids' names and usernames (never a PIN or password). You can remove each one from the sign-in screen, and deleting a child's data removes them from that device.
- Extra checks for big changes. Deleting a child's data asks for the parent's password again.
- Backed up, and encrypted. Every change to the database is archived, so it can be restored to any moment in the last four weeks. A nightly copy is also encrypted and kept for 30 days. Backups are deleted on schedule, so a deleted child doesn't live on in them for long.
Checked regularly
- We run automated security reviews on a regular schedule, and every problem found is fixed with a test so it can't come back.
- We follow a written security program, with a yearly review and a plan for telling families promptly if anything ever goes wrong.
- Found a security issue? Email [email protected].
The companies that help us
Railway hosts the app and its database, Cloudflare delivers it securely, Resend sends our emails, Anthropic provides the AI (without names), and Apple distributes the iPhone and iPad app. That's the whole list.
The full details
The app's privacy notice for families explains exactly what we collect and why, written for the U.S. children's privacy law (COPPA): sciencescrimmage.com/privacy.