Privacy Policy · MellowHive

The short version

MellowHive reads what your school already shows your family in Schoology and turns it into an evening plan. It never posts, submits or changes anything in Schoology.
A parent creates the account, connects Schoology and decides what the student sees. We don’t collect anything directly from children.
We don’t sell or share your data, we don’t show ads, and the marketing site has no cookies or trackers.
A few service providers help us run MellowHive (hosting, email delivery, a language model). They only get what they need to do that job.
You can ask us to delete your family’s data at any time.

Who we are

MellowHive (“we”, “us”) is an independent product based in the United States, provided by MellowHive. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by PowerSchool, Schoology or any school. This policy covers the website at https://mellowhivego.com and the MellowHive app at https://app.mellowhivego.com.

MellowHive is offered to families in the United States. We invite families in small groups, school by school.

What we collect from parents

When a parent creates an account we ask for:

Email address, confirmed with a one-time code.
Your name and a family name, shown inside the app.
A password. We store only a one-way hash of it, never the password itself.
Your agreement to these terms, with the date and time you gave it.

For each child, the parent provides or confirms the child’s name as it appears in Schoology and their grade, and agrees that the child’s school information may be used to build the plan.

If you join the early access list on this website, we keep what you type in the form: whether you are a parent or school staff, your email, your school, the student’s grade, and your note. We also keep where the visit came from (for example, a link we shared), your browser’s user agent, and a scrambled (hashed) version of your IP address that can’t be turned back into the address. We use this only to invite you and to keep spam out. We send you one email when it’s your turn and nothing else.

What we read from Schoology, and why

A parent connects their Schoology account in the app. To do that, the parent enters their Schoology (ClassLink) sign-in once. We do not store that password. It is used once to sign in and then discarded. We keep the resulting signed-in session, encrypted, so we can read updates without asking you to sign in again. You can disconnect at any time.

With that session, MellowHive reads what Schoology already shows the parent:

assignments, tests and their due dates
teacher posts and updates in courses, and in clubs and groups
course materials and folders, and files attached to tests
the Schoology calendar, including club events
grades and grade history

We read this to build the plan: what’s due, what to start early, how many minutes tonight takes, and when a date moves. MellowHive does not post, comment, submit work or change any setting in Schoology. It does not read private messages.

We also keep what you add yourself: activities and events (practice, lessons, trips), goals such as “chess, three times a week”, daily limits, and files or links you attach to a test.

Children

MellowHive is set up and managed by a parent. Students in grades 6 to 12 use it, and some of them are under 13. We follow the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) this way:

The parent creates the student’s profile and gives consent before any of the child’s school information is used.
We don’t collect information directly from the child. A student has no email address and no password in MellowHive. The parent sets up the student’s device, and the student signs in on it with a short PIN.
The parent decides what the student sees, for example whether grades are shown.
The parent can review the information we hold about their child in the app, and can ask us to delete it at any time (see “Your choices”).

We never use a child’s information for advertising or to build a profile beyond the family’s own plan.

How we use a language model

Some of the reading and planning work is done with a language model from a third-party provider, through its business API. We use it to understand teacher posts and assignment descriptions (for example, that “the quiz moves to Friday” is a date change), to split big work into steps, to turn an activity you type in plain words into a calendar entry, and to review the week’s plan.

What we send:

the text of assignments, tests and teacher or club posts (shortened), with their course or club and dates
the student’s grade level
the plan itself: item titles, minutes, days, your activities and goals, and your earlier answers to the plan’s suggestions

What we don’t send: the student’s name, the student’s grades, your password or your Schoology session.

The provider processes this only to return an answer to us. Under its business terms it does not use our requests to train its models and keeps them only for a limited time. We keep the results (for example, “this post moves a date”) in our own database so we don’t ask twice.

Where your data is stored and how long we keep it

Where: on servers in the United States, including backup copies.
Security: connections are encrypted (HTTPS). The Schoology session is stored encrypted. Passwords and PINs are stored only as one-way hashes, and never appear in logs. Access to the servers is limited to us.
Raw copies of Schoology pages that we read, and technical logs, are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically.
Backups of the database are made nightly and expire within 60 days.
Everything else (your account, the plan, the school information it is built from) is kept while your family uses MellowHive. When you ask us to delete your family, we delete it from the live service within 30 days, and it disappears from backups when they expire.
Early access list entries are kept until you’re invited or ask us to remove you.

We don’t sell, rent or share your information with anyone for their own use, and there is no advertising in MellowHive. We use a small number of service providers to run MellowHive. They act on our behalf, may only use the data to provide their service to us, and are bound to protect it:

Service	What it handles
Hosting of the app and its database	Everything stored in MellowHive
Hosting of this website	The early access form, while it is passed on to our servers
Email delivery	Your email address and the messages we send (sign-in codes, notices)
Language model	The text listed in “How we use a language model”

We’ll tell you which companies these are if you ask. We may disclose information if the law requires it, and we will tell you unless we’re not allowed to. If MellowHive is ever transferred to someone else, this policy keeps applying to your data, and we will tell you before anything changes.

Cookies

This website uses no cookies and no analytics or tracking scripts.

The app uses only the cookies it needs to keep you signed in: a session cookie (30 days, renewed while you use it), a device cookie for a student’s device that the parent set up (180 days), and a short-lived cookie during sign-up (30 minutes). There are no advertising or third-party cookies.

Your choices and rights

See and correct: most of what we hold is visible in the app. Ask us for anything else.
Disconnect Schoology: at any time in Settings. We stop reading right away.
Delete: ask us at hello@mellowhivego.com to delete your family. We remove your accounts, the Schoology connection and all school information we hold about your family as described above.
Leave the early access list: email us and we’ll remove you.

We answer these requests within 30 days, usually much sooner. If your state gives you further privacy rights (for example California), we honor them.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the date and version at the top. If a change affects how we use your data in a meaningful way, we tell parents in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions or requests about privacy: hello@mellowhivego.com. Security issues: security@mellowhivego.com.