Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and what this policy covers

CircleUp, LLC ("CircleUp", "we", "us") makes software that homeschool co-ops, classes, studios, clubs and other community groups and organizations ("groups"; our Terms of Service call them "organizations") use to run their activities, and CircleUp Planner, a homeschool planning and records tool for families. This policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use and share it, and the choices you have. It covers getcircleup.com, the CircleUp mobile apps, and group websites hosted on CircleUp.

Two kinds of information, two responsible parties.

• Your CircleUp account and your use of CircleUp, including CircleUp Planner. We decide how this information is used, and this policy governs it.
• Information you give a group through CircleUp. This includes registrations, form answers, payments to the group and records the group keeps about your family. The group decides what it asks for and how it uses it. We store and process it on the group's behalf, under our agreement with the group. For questions about how a group uses your information, contact that group. We will help groups answer requests about it.

Your family profile, including your children's details, is part of your CircleUp account. When you share it with a group, the group also uses it for its own purposes, as described above.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not show advertising.

2. Information we collect

Most of what we hold, you or your group gave us directly. The rest is collected automatically when you use CircleUp.

Photo and video location. When a photo or video is uploaded to a feed, chat, album, class resource or work sample, we remove its location (and, for photos, camera details) before storing it. Other uploads, such as documents, assignment submissions and email attachments, are stored as you upload them, so check a file's location settings before you share it.

Group admins can add their own questions to forms and family profiles. Whatever they ask is collected for that group, as described in section 1.

Health information. Group forms and family profiles can hold a child's allergies, medical conditions, medications and emergency contacts. This is sensitive information. It is collected only when you choose to enter it, it is used to run the group's activities safely and to provide CircleUp, and it is shown to the people and handled by the providers listed in sections 3 and 5.

Information about other people. When you add family members, emergency contacts or anyone else to CircleUp, you confirm that you are allowed to share their information for this purpose.

3. Children's information

Children cannot create a student login on their own. A parent or guardian adds their children to the family profile, and only a parent can create a student login for a child.

Parental consent. When a parent creates a student login, they confirm that they are the child's parent or legal guardian and consent to us collecting the information the child provides through it (chat messages, assignment submissions, planner check-offs and profile details) to run the service for their group and family. We record who gave that consent and when. We use the child's information only for that purpose. We do not use children's information for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build profiles beyond what the group and family need. You can agree to us collecting and using your child's information to run CircleUp without agreeing to us disclosing it to third parties other than the service providers needed to run it (section 5); without consent to collection, your child cannot have a student login. If we make a material change to how we collect, use or disclose children's information, we will ask for your consent again before the change applies to your child.

What a parent controls.

• Whether a child has a student login at all. A parent creates it, can reset its password and can delete it at any time.
• Whether the child can start chats. A parent chooses this when creating the login and can change it for each child in Family settings. The child's instructors and group admins can still message the child, and the parent is included.
• What is on the child's family profile, which the parent can view and correct.

What a student login can do. Students can see their classes, assignments and grades, submit work, see their own planner lessons, and chat with their own instructors, their group's admins and their own parents. No user can add a student to a conversation: students are added only by CircleUp's software, and their parents are added with them. Adults already in a conversation can add other adults to it. Conversations created before October 1, 2026 were not changed.

Who can see a child's information.

Outside companies. A child's information is stored and handled by the providers that run CircleUp for us (section 5): Supabase stores it, Vercel serves it, Mux hosts videos the child may appear in, Resend and the push-notification services deliver messages that may name the child, and Sentry receives error reports that can include a student's account ID. PostHog may capture a child's name or details when an adult views them during a recorded session (section 7), and Google Workspace and Slack may handle it when it appears in a support email or an alert. A child's name can appear in a payment description sent to Stripe when a parent pays for a class. Our service providers may use it only to provide their services to us, except that Stripe and the push-notification services also use some information for their own fraud-prevention, security and legal purposes under their own policies. Our team's AI assistant may see it while helping us operate CircleUp (section 4). We do not disclose children's information for any other purpose, and we never sell it.

No more than needed. We do not require a child to provide more information than the activity needs. A student login needs only the child's name, an email address and a password, all chosen by the parent.

How long we keep it. When a parent deletes a student login, the login is deleted immediately and the child can no longer sign in. The child's name, and the email address the login used, stay on the family profile and on the group's records such as rosters and grades, until the parent removes them or asks us to. Student logins that have not been used for 3 years, whose family is no longer in any active group, are deleted automatically, together with the child's birthdate, age, allergies and the answers to the group's profile questions. The child's name stays on the group's records. We do not keep a child's information indefinitely: 3 years after a family is no longer in any active group and no longer has a CircleUp Planner trial or plan, we delete its children's profiles, student logins and planner records. Records a group keeps about a child (rosters, attendance, grades, signed forms) are deleted when the group asks, or 3 years after the group closes. Records the law requires us to keep are kept.

Analytics. We do not record student sessions, and our analytics tools do not identify students: their activity is counted without their name, email or account ID.

Your rights as a parent. You can review your child's information, ask us to delete it, or refuse further collection by emailing [email protected]. We aim to act on a deletion request within 45 days; if we need more time, we will tell you why, and we may take up to 45 more days. Records the law requires us to keep are kept. Records your group keeps about your child, such as attendance, grades or signed forms, may also need a request to the group (see section 10).

If we learn that we have collected information from a child under 13 without a parent's consent, we will delete it.

4. How we use information

We use personal information to run CircleUp for you and your group, and for nothing unrelated to that.

• Provide the service: create your account, run registrations, classes, chat, forms, documents, the group's website and CircleUp Planner.
• Process payments: create charges and payment plans for groups, run autopay you turn on, bill CircleUp Planner plans, send receipts and reminders, and handle refunds and disputes.
• Communicate: send account and payment emails, notifications you have turned on, and messages group admins send through CircleUp.
• Keep people safe: review reported content, enforce our Terms, prevent fraud and abuse, and protect accounts.
• Support you: answer your questions and fix problems you report.
• Improve CircleUp: understand how features are used and find errors, using the analytics and error tools in section 7.
• Meet legal obligations: keep financial records and respond to lawful requests.

AI tools. Our small team uses Anthropic's Claude as an assistant to help operate CircleUp: to summarise each day's usage and product feedback, investigate errors and support requests, check that payments, emails and scheduled jobs are working, and help write and test our software. To do that it can read information in our systems, including names, email addresses, the groups people belong to, feedback and support messages, and other records in our database, which can include children's information. It is used only to run and improve CircleUp. It is not used for advertising, and it does not make decisions about you on its own. We use Claude under Anthropic's terms for businesses, or with model training turned off, so Anthropic does not use this information to train its models. Our analytics provider, PostHog, may also use AI to summarise adult session recordings for us.

5. How information is shared

We share personal information only in the ways listed here.

With your group. Admins of a group you join, and people the group gives admin permissions, can see your profile, including your phone number and mailing address, your family members, your registrations, form answers, signatures and payments to that group. Instructors see what they need to teach their class: the families enrolled in it, their contact details, and the children's allergies and medical notes. A group may also export this information for its own records. Your group cannot see your CircleUp Planner records.

With other members of your group. Other members can see your name and profile photo, posts and messages you share with them, and the directory details you choose to show. Your phone number and mailing address are visible to other members only if you choose to share them in that group's directory. Your children's names appear where they take part, such as class rosters, sign-up sheets and chat. Other members cannot see your children's birthdates, allergies or medical information. We design our database to enforce these limits.

With service providers who run parts of CircleUp for us. They may use the information only to provide their services to us, except that Stripe and the push-notification services also use some of it for their own fraud-prevention, security and legal purposes under their own policies.

Videos embedded from YouTube or Vimeo load from those companies when you play them, under their own privacy policies.

With professional advisers. Our lawyers, accountants and insurers, who must keep it confidential.

For legal reasons. We may disclose information when the law requires it, to respond to valid legal process, or to protect someone's safety or our rights.

If CircleUp changes hands. If CircleUp is sold or merged, personal information would transfer to the new owner under the commitments in this policy.

With your permission, in any other case.

6. CircleUp Planner

CircleUp Planner is our homeschool planning and records tool for families. If you use it, we store the education records you enter about your children:

• School years, days off, and the curricula, courses and activities you plan
• Lesson progress, including lessons checked off by you or your child
• A reading log of books each child has read
• Work samples: photos and files of your child's work that you upload
• Transcript details, including courses, credits and grades
• Your state's requirement checklist and other compliance records
• Evaluator links you create, and when they were last viewed

Who can see it. Your planner records are visible to the parents in your household. A student login you create for your child can see that child's own records and check off their own lessons. Groups you belong to, and their admins and instructors, cannot see your planner records. Someone outside your household, such as an evaluator or umbrella school, can see a child's records only through a private link you create, which includes only what you choose to share, expires after 7, 30 or 90 days, and can be revoked by you at any time. Shared pages are not indexed by search engines. Work samples are stored privately and are shown only to the people above.

Book lookups. When you scan a book's barcode or type its ISBN in the reading log, the camera image is read on your device and is not uploaded or stored. Our server then sends only the ISBN to Open Library (operated by the Internet Archive) and, if it has no match, to Google Books, to fetch the title, author, page count and cover. No name, account or child information is sent with it. A book's cover image is loaded by your device directly from Open Library or Google, which can see your device's IP address but not the CircleUp page you are on.

Calendar feed. If you subscribe to the planner calendar feed, the calendar app you add it to receives your children's first names and their planned lessons. You can reset the feed link at any time, which stops old subscriptions.

How we use it. We use planner records only to provide the planner to your household. We do not sell them and do not use them for advertising. Planner plans are billed through Stripe, which receives your email address and payment details; we do not store card numbers. When your child uses a student login, our analytics do not identify them and do not record their session.

Deleting it. You can delete individual records, including work samples (which deletes the uploaded file), and evaluator links in the planner at any time. If your trial or plan ends, your records are kept for 3 years so you can still view, print and share them, and then deleted unless you subscribe again. To have all of your family's planner records deleted, email [email protected]. Your planner records are included in the data export in your account settings.

7. Cookies, analytics and session recording

We use cookies and similar browser storage to keep you logged in, remember your choices, and understand how CircleUp is used. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not track you across other websites. Stripe, Cloudflare and embedded YouTube or Vimeo players may use their own cookies or device signals, including across sites, for fraud prevention, bot detection and their own purposes under their policies.

Session recording. PostHog records how adult users move through CircleUp: pages, clicks and scrolling. This lets us see where people get stuck. A recording shows what was on the screen, which can include names and other information displayed on the page. Text typed into form fields is masked and passwords are never recorded. Student sessions are never recorded. Our error monitoring (Sentry) does not record sessions.

Analytics and error data from your browser are sent through our own domain, so our analytics providers do not receive your browsing on other websites.

Your choices. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking essential cookies will log you out.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. CircleUp does not track you across other websites, does not sell or share personal information for advertising, and does not use targeted advertising, so we do not change how we handle data in response to these signals.

8. Emails and notifications

You get three kinds of email from CircleUp, and each has its own way to stop it.

Push notifications are sent only if you allow them on your device or browser. You can turn them off in your device settings or in CircleUp's notification settings.

We do not send text messages.

9. How long we keep information

We keep your information while your account is open. When you delete your account, we delete your login and contact details, and keep your name only on the records your group or the law needs, listed below.

Deleted when you delete your account: your login, email address, phone number, mailing address, the profile photo on your profile, saved payment cards in CircleUp, push-notification tokens, settings and chat memberships. Your name stays on the records listed below, so your group's records still make sense.

Kept after you delete your account:

You can ask us to delete any of these sooner. We will do so unless the law requires us to keep it, or the group needs it and asks us to keep it. Stripe keeps its own records of payments and payment methods under its own privacy policy.

Other data. Data held by our providers follows their retention settings for our accounts. Analytics records are kept for up to 7 years. Session recordings and error reports are kept for up to 90 days. Database backups are kept for about 7 days, then replaced.

10. Your rights and choices

Anyone with a CircleUp account can see, fix and download their information, or ask us to delete it (subject to section 9). We offer these choices to every account holder, whatever state they live in.

• See and correct your profile and family information in Settings.
• Download a copy of your account information with "Request Data Export" under Settings → Account. It includes your profile, your family, your registrations, attendance and grades, your children's messages and submissions, your payments and your planner records. It leaves out other people's content and admins' internal notes.
• Delete your account under Settings → Account. Section 9 explains what is kept.
• Stop emails and notifications as described in section 8.

Minnesota and other US state privacy laws. Depending on where you live, including Minnesota under the Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act, you may have these rights:

• To know whether we process your personal data, and to get a copy of it in a portable format.
• To correct it, or to have it deleted.
• To get a list of the specific third parties we have disclosed your data to.
• To opt out of targeted advertising, sale of personal data and profiling with significant effects. We do none of these.
• To question the result of a profiling decision. We make no such decisions.
• Not to be treated differently for using these rights.

How to make a request. Email [email protected] from the address on your account, or write to us at the address in section 11. We may need to confirm your identity first. You can have someone else make a request for you if you give them written permission. We aim to answer within 45 days. If we need longer, we will tell you why within that time, and we may take up to 45 more days where the law allows.

If we say no, you can appeal by replying to our decision with "Appeal" in the subject line. We will answer the appeal within 45 days. If you disagree with that answer, you can contact your state attorney general.

Information a group holds. For records a group keeps through CircleUp, we will pass your request to the group and help it respond.

Posts and photos about you or your child. If someone else posts a photo of you or your child, or something about you, you can ask the group's admins to remove it, or email [email protected] and we will review it with the group. We give priority to requests about children.

11. Security, changes and contact

Security. All connections to CircleUp are encrypted, and our database and file storage are encrypted at rest. We design CircleUp so that each group's data is kept separate in the database, and the same database rules limit children's birthdates and health details, and members' phone numbers and addresses, to the people listed in sections 3 and 5. Photos, videos and files posted to a feed or chat are stored privately. Each time someone opens one, we check that they can see the post or conversation, then give them a link that expires after a short time: minutes for photos and files, and a few hours at most for videos. An image shown inside a push notification uses a link that lasts up to 3 days, so your device can display the notification. Card and bank details stay with Stripe. Access to production systems is limited to CircleUp staff, the AI assistant described in section 4 and the service providers in section 5, each only as needed to run and support the service. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you, your group and the authorities as the law requires.

Where your data is stored. CircleUp is run from the United States, and your information is stored and processed in the United States.

Changes to this policy. When we make a material change, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect. We will not use information we already hold in a materially different way without your consent. The effective date at the top always shows the current version.

Contact us.

CircleUp, LLC · 202 N Cedar Ave Ste #1, Owatonna, MN 55060 · [email protected] · (612) 562-8280