Privacy Notice for Parents

1. Operator

MLN Learning LLC, a Virginia limited liability company, operates ASPIRE. Mailing address: PO Box 744, Midlothian, VA 23113. Email: privacy@app.aspireprep.us. For other questions, use our contact form.

2. Personal Information We Collect from Children

• Account information: name, email address, password (hashed), grade level.
• Practice activity: answers to practice questions, time spent, skill mastery estimates, written essay submissions.
• Technical: IP address, browser type, basic device information, and timestamps for security and fraud prevention.
• How the account was found: the referring site, campaign tags, and first page visited, saved on the account at sign-up, plus first-party product events (such as "signed up"). These are used only to understand which outreach works, never for advertising.

Scholarship applications (income range, household size, and an uploaded document) and tutor-referral sign-ups come from adults, not children; see the main Privacy Policy for how we handle them.

The free practice sampler at /try/ngat asks for nothing about a child: no name, no email, no account. Answers are scored in the browser; we receive only anonymous counts by grade band. If an adult asks us to email the results, we store that adult's email, the grade band, the three counts, and when they agreed — not a browser ID, visitor source, or birth year; see the main Privacy Policy.

We do not collect geolocation data, audio or video recordings, persistent identifiers for advertising, or social-graph data.

3. How We Use the Information

• To provide and improve the practice + curriculum experience.
• To personalize practice via adaptive question selection.
• To produce parent-facing progress reports.
• To communicate service-related updates to the parent.
• To maintain platform security and prevent abuse.

We do not use a child's information for behavioral advertising, and we do not sell or rent it.

4. Disclosure to Service Providers

We share child information only with the service providers needed to operate the platform, who may use it only to provide their services to us:

• Stripe — payments (parent billing only; child data not sent).
• Resend — transactional email (e.g. invitation acceptance confirmation).
• Vercel AI Gateway and OpenAI — AI-assisted essay feedback. Essays are sent without the student's name. Each request turns on the Gateway's zero-data-retention setting, so it goes only to providers with a zero-data-retention agreement with Vercel; OpenAI's agreement allows limited retention for safety and abuse monitoring. API data is not used to train models.
• Managed PostgreSQL database host — database hosting.
• Vercel — application hosting, request logging, and Vercel Web Analytics. We do not use advertising pixels.

5. Verifiable Parental Consent

Before a child under 13 (or any student in grades 5–7) can use ASPIRE, a parent must give verifiable consent, and the parent must invite the child from the parent dashboard. We accept one of two methods: (1) a successful charge to the parent's card for a paid plan, with Stripe's notice of the charge sent to the parent; or (2) a signed parental consent form that we receive and check. A free trial, a scholarship, or a promotion that brings the price to $0 is not a charge, so those accounts cannot add a child under 13 until consent is verified by one of these methods.

6. Your Rights as a Parent

• Review. Request a copy of your child's data. Available in-app via the parent dashboard or by emailing privacy@app.aspireprep.us.
• Delete. Request deletion of your child's identifying information. We anonymize practice and essay data by default so cohort analytics stay coherent; you may request hard deletion instead.
• Revoke consent. Stop further collection at any time. Existing data is anonymized or deleted per the above.
• Refuse further use. Tell us not to make further use of the information we already have.

We aim to answer parental email within 14 days. That deadline is not enforced by code.

7. Retention

This is our written retention schedule. We keep a child's information only to provide ASPIRE to that child. Account details, practice data, and essays: kept while the parent's account is active and the child is linked; deleted or anonymized within 90 days after the parent closes the account, removes the child, or revokes consent, and right away when a parent uses the in-app anonymize action. Server logs: our host's standard retention period. Billing records are about the parent, not the child, and are kept as long as tax law requires.

8. Security

Passwords are hashed; transit is TLS; database backups are encrypted at rest. No system is perfectly secure; we will notify you in the event of a breach affecting your child's data.

9. Changes

We will notify the parent of record by email before any material change to this notice that affects information already collected from a child.

10. Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: MLN Learning LLC, PO Box 744, Midlothian, VA 23113; privacy@app.aspireprep.us; or use our contact form.