Trust & Safety
Safety and privacy, built in from the start
Children, teens, families, and schools use Big Thinkers. That shapes how we handle data, how our AI characters behave, and what we refuse to build. This page explains how it actually works.
The commitments here are spelled out in full in our Privacy Policy and Terms.
Four commitments we design around
No ads. No data sales.
There is no advertising inside the learner product, and no ad or retargeting SDKs run on lesson or dashboard pages. We do not sell personal information, and we never use a child’s data for behavioral advertising or to build a profile of them.
When we don’t know a learner’s age, we assume they’re a child.
Age decides what a learner can reach and what we are allowed to collect. Where our code cannot determine someone’s age band, it applies the strictest child protections rather than the loosest.
We collect as little as we can.
No biometrics, no precise location, and no photos or voice recordings of children. Nothing gets added to a child-facing form because it might be useful to us later.
Everything here is written down.
Our Privacy Policy names each vendor that handles personal information, what it does, and how long data is kept. When the product changes what we collect, the policy changes with it.
How we keep AI chat safe
Learners can talk to Ren or Mira for help inside a lesson, in some in-lesson activities, and in the Playground. Each of those conversations passes through the same set of controls.
Messages are screened before they reach the model
Every message a learner sends is checked first — for self-harm and crisis language, sexual or violent content, personal information, and attempts to talk the character out of its rules. In the Playground, the reply is screened again before it appears on screen.
The characters stay in their lane
Ren and Mira run on instructions our servers control, which a learner cannot see or rewrite. They are told never to ask for personal details, never to give medical, legal, or financial advice, never to enter romantic or sexual conversation, and to keep replies plain text without links or images.
Crisis language gets a real response
When a message matches self-harm or crisis wording, the reply points the learner to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and to a trusted adult, a review record is opened for trained staff, and a limited safety notice may go to a parent email on file. Big Thinkers is an educational product, not a crisis service.
People review what the software flags
A safety classifier reviews conversations across every AI feature and routes concerning exchanges into a staff queue with response targets. Only authorized staff can open those records, they are never used for advertising or profiling, and resolved records are deleted after 90 days.
Limits are part of the design, not an afterthought
The Playground is open to learners 13 and over, carries a daily creation cap, and can be switched off entirely if something goes wrong. No streak, score, or reward is attached to it, so there is nothing pushing a learner to keep chatting.
Learners always know they are talking to an AI
Every AI chat carries a permanent line naming the character as an AI, not a real person, and noting that it can get things wrong. There is no setting that hides it.
What we keep, and for how long
Nothing a child gives us is kept indefinitely. Every store of learner data has a deletion clock attached to it, and the deletion runs automatically.
Retention
- Lesson help chat
- Not kept as a transcript. Messages generate the reply, stay in the learner’s session while they remain in that activity, and are dropped when they leave.
- Playground chats
- Saved so a learner can pick a project back up, then purged after 12 months without activity.
- Deleted Playground chats
- Removed for good 30 days after the learner deletes them.
- Safety review records
- Deleted 90 days after the review is resolved.
- Problem reports
- Deleted after 90 days.
Safeguards
- Row-level security in the database, so one account cannot read another account’s data.
- Error reports are scrubbed and configured not to carry personal information.
- Server-side analytics events pass through an allowlist, so child identifiers and message text never enter them.
- Session recording never runs on a learner account — only on parent, teacher, and admin accounts, with password and email fields masked.
- Data is encrypted in transit by our hosting providers and at rest by our database provider.
Parents, guardians, and schools
Before a child under 13 gets an account
- Signup asks for age plainly, with no hint about which answer unlocks more of the product.
- A learner who answers under 13 cannot turn around and retry with a different age.
- We email the parent or guardian a permission request listing what we would collect. The account is not created until they approve it.
- If nobody approves, the information gathered to make that request is deleted after 14 days.
What parents can ask for
- Review what we hold about your child, get a copy of it, have it deleted, or withdraw your consent — at any time, by emailing support@bigthinkers.ai.
- A learner can export their own data or delete their account from Settings. Deleting the account also revokes the parental consent record behind it.
- Withdrawing consent stops further collection, and we delete what we already hold.
For schools and districts
- We commit to FERPA and state student-privacy principles: no targeted advertising, no sale of student data, no profiling beyond the educational purpose a school engaged us for, and deletion on district request.
- Student data from a school deployment is never used for marketing.
- Self-serve classroom signup is currently paused — reach us directly and we will help you get set up.
Talk to a person
If something on Big Thinkers looks unsafe, or you have a question this page does not answer, email support@bigthinkers.ai. Schools and districts can reach us at educators@bigthinkers.ai. The full detail behind everything above lives in our Privacy Policy, and our Help Center covers the day-to-day questions.
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