What we record about a member under 18
Effective July 31, 2026 · Last updated October 16, 2026
Students aged 13 to 17 take part only through a licensed institution’s classroom, in an account treated as a minor’s account (see the Youth Policy). This page says what that means in practice. It is not a summary of a longer policy — it is the whole of what applies, and the platform is built to match it.
We do not ask for a date of birth
We store whether a member is under 18, and nothing more precise than that. No birthdate, no age in years, no school year. The question the platform has to answer is whether someone is a minor; a date of birth is a stronger identifier than that answer needs, so it is not collected.
That answer is set one of two ways: the member confirmed they were 18 or older when they signed, or the school or organisation that enrolled them told us. It is never guessed from how someone writes, when they post, or which school they belong to.
No profile is built of a student
For a member under 18 the platform does not generate a values profile, does not assign a values cohort, does not produce written insights about them, and does not run the drift, growth or re-emergence signals that look for changes in a person over time. These are off by default and there is no setting that turns them on.
This is the difference between recording what someone did and modelling who they are. We do the first for everyone. We do not do the second for a minor.
If we have never established an age, none of it runs either
Profiling requires a positive answer that someone is 18 or over. It is not enough that we have no reason to think they are a minor — an account whose age has never been established is treated exactly like a minor’s: no values profile, no cohort, no written insights, no signals.
This matters most for accounts that already existed. Every account created before these protections has an unestablished age, so the protection applies to all of them rather than only to accounts created afterwards. A safeguard that started with the next signup would have missed every student already here.
An adult member in that position is told on their own dashboard that their value stack is paused, and can resume it by confirming they are 18 or older. A member a school has identified as a student cannot confirm their way out of the protection.
Standing still counts what they actually did
A student under 18 still earns Standing, because Standing is a record of their own acts — documents they read and sealed, coursework they finished, witnesses other members gave them. Refusing to count a student’s own work would take away the thing they did while leaving any inference about them untouched, which protects nobody. Their PVOS commitments are the exception: those are their own words, with their own check-ins, and nothing scores them.
What a student keeps in PVOS
In PVOS a student keeps their own words: the values they chose, in the order they chose them; their answers to the Starter Pack’s prompts; the commitments they write and their own weekly check-ins (“I did”, “partly”, “I didn’t”); and notes sealed to their future self. These are kept only for them. Nothing in them is scored, ranked or compared with anyone, no model reads them, and their school or organisation cannot read them. At most, if the school turns it on, it sees how many of its participants have used PVOS, rounded down to steps of five.
They are in the student’s own data export, and deleting the account deletes them. The same holds for an adult whose school or organisation has turned PVOS classroom mode on for its roster.
What a teacher or school can see
A facilitator sees group totals, not individuals. They can see how far a class has got through the coursework and how it is doing in aggregate. They cannot see one student’s values, their value gaps, their Standing internals, or any narrative about them — those are not sent to an organisation for any member, minor or adult.
Group readings are withheld entirely when the group is too small to report without identifying somebody. A class of two produces no reading at all, because an average over two people is those two people.
No money touches a minor’s account
A member under 18 cannot receive a tip, cannot be sponsored, cannot connect a payout account, and cannot host anything that takes money. Nor can they pay: no Stake, no standing support, no membership, no product, no shop order, no gift, no seat sponsorship. Where a member’s age has never been established, those paths are refused too — for money the platform requires a positive answer that someone is an adult, not merely the absence of an answer.
How it is deleted, and who can ask
The member themselves can delete their own account. An administrator of the school or organisation that enrolled them can delete an account on their own roster — the enrolment is the relationship, and we do not ask the school to prove it again.
A parent or guardian can ask, and that request is not self-serve. We have no way to verify a guardianship claim from a form: a parent has no account here, and a box saying “I am the parent” proves only that somebody ticked it. So a guardian’s request is taken by a person, checked outside the platform with the school or the member, and carried out by the owner. We would rather say that plainly than build a button that deletes a child’s account on an unverifiable claim.
Every deletion is written to the staff audit record before it happens, naming who asked. A deletion that could not be recorded does not take place.
What deletion removes, and what it keeps
Removed: the account itself and its name, email, handle and seal number; their posts and replies; their classroom posts; their coursework progress and assessment results; their value signals, value stack and every snapshot of it; their Standing, its history and their commitments; their follows and their witnesses; their sealed readings and daily answers.
Kept, with the name taken out: an enforcement decision taken about them, a report they filed or that was filed about them, a purchase, and a staff action concerning them. These survive because a record of what was done and why has to outlive the account it concerns — otherwise nobody can check it afterwards, including the person it was about. In each case the link to the account is removed and the stored handle or email is replaced with a placeholder, so the decision, its reason and its date remain and the person does not.
Kept, and never linked to the account in the first place: a request from a government concerning them. Those are counted in our public Transparency report, and a request that vanished when an account did would let that count be quietly reduced. There is no link to remove, because one was never stored.
Also kept: anything they made that belongs to other people. A group they founded, a daily question they wrote, an institutional enrolment they filed. Deleting a group because its founder left would destroy every other member’s place in it, so the authorship is removed and the thing itself continues.
We say “kept with the name taken out” rather than “deleted” for those records because that is what happens. A promise of deletion over a row that survives would be worse than this sentence.