Privacy Policy

Effective August 6, 2026 — Version 1.0

I, Rig Saini, operate scienium, a browser-based science-research game and classroom tool at https://scienium.app. scienium is run by me as an individual — there is no company behind it — and in this policy "we", "us", and "our" mean me.

This policy explains what information scienium collects, why, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and the choices students, parents, teachers, and schools have.

scienium is used by minors in classrooms. We have written this policy to be read, not skimmed past — the short version below is accurate, and the sections after it are the complete version.

The short version

• We collect what is needed to run a research-lab game and show a teacher how their students are doing. Nothing more.
• We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not serve ads at all.
• There are no third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking SDKs in scienium. No Google Analytics, no ad pixels, no data brokers.
• We do not ask for birthdates, home addresses, phone numbers, government identifiers, precise location, or biometrics, and the app has no field to enter them.
• Student writing is sent to our AI provider to generate quizzes, explanations, and feedback. Our AI provider states that it does not use API inputs or outputs to train its models.
• School work is visible to the student's teammates and their teacher. It is only visible to the public if the student chooses to publish it and a teacher approves it.
• You can request a copy of your data or its deletion at any time. For students under 18, the school approves the request, because the authority over a minor's school record belongs to the school.

Contents

1. Who this policy covers
2. Two ways scienium is used, and who is responsible
3. Age requirements
4. Information we collect
5. What we deliberately do not collect
6. How we use information
7. AI features and what happens to student writing
8. Cookies and similar technologies
9. How we share information
10. The public showcase
11. Where data is stored
12. How long we keep data
13. Security
14. Your choices and rights
15. Information for parents and guardians
16. Information for schools: FERPA, COPPA, and state student-privacy laws
17. California residents
18. Other US state privacy rights
19. Third-party sites and research content
20. Changes to this policy
21. How to contact us

• Appendix A: Service providers
• Appendix B: Data categories at a glance

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to everyone who uses scienium: students, teachers, school administrators, and visitors who view a published project in the public gallery without an account.

It applies to the scienium website and application. It does not apply to a school's own systems, to a third-party site you reach through a link in a research paper, or to any service that has its own privacy policy.

2. Two ways scienium is used, and who is responsible

Through a school. A teacher creates a class, students join it with a class code, and the teacher approves each student. In this arrangement the school directs how student data is used, and we act on the school's behalf as a service provider and, where applicable, as a "school official" with a legitimate educational interest under FERPA (see section 16). The school is responsible for providing any notice or consent that its district policy or applicable law requires. We use student data only to provide and improve scienium for that school, and we follow the school's instructions about correction, export, and deletion.

Directly, without a school. A student aged 13 or older, or a teacher, may create an account without a class. In this arrangement no school is in the loop, so we are directly responsible for the data, and the rights in section 14 are exercised with us. If the user is under 18, we ask that a parent or guardian review this policy with them; a parent or guardian may exercise every right in section 14 on the student's behalf.

An account can move from one arrangement to the other — a student who signed up directly and later joins a class becomes school-directed from that point forward, and their earlier work moves with them.

3. Age requirements

scienium accounts are for people aged 13 and older.

Children under 13 may use scienium only through a school that has provided consent on the parents' behalf, as permitted under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA") when a service is used solely for school-authorized educational purposes. A school that enrolls students under 13 confirms to us that it has authority to give that consent and has given parents the notice its own policy requires.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13 who signed up on their own, without a school. If we learn that we have, we delete the account and its data promptly. A parent or guardian who believes a child under 13 has created an account without school involvement should email hello@scienium.app and we will delete it.

Because we ask for a school and class at sign-up and not for a birthdate, we treat every student account as belonging to a minor by default and apply the protections in this policy to all of them.

4. Information we collect

4.1 What you or your school give us

4.2 What is created as you use scienium

This is the bulk of what we hold. It is schoolwork and game state.

• Research work: research papers you upload (PDFs), papers you save from scholarly search, notes, source relevance judgments, your discovery graph, synthesis matrices, research plans, idea checks, and vocabulary cards.
• Learning records: quiz sessions and answers, explain-back attempts and their scores, paper proficiency levels, Field Codex lesson progress, and expertise exam attempts.
• Written work: project log entries, dataset notes, showcase titles and abstracts, and any other text you type into the app.
• Files you upload: paper PDFs, project-log photographs, showcase board images and visuals, and dataset files.
• Conversations with the in-app AI assistant: the messages you send and the replies you receive, in paper chat and Study-with-Vega.
• Teacher records: feedback a teacher writes on your work, rubric scores, and a teacher's view of your class's progress.
• Game state: knowledge points, buildings you have bought and placed, daily task progress, science-fair associations and deadlines, and Battle Arena results such as spells used and trophies.
• Notifications: in-app notifications, your notification preferences, and, if you opt in to email reminders, the record that an email was sent to you.

4.3 What is collected automatically

• Session and authentication data handled by our authentication provider: session identifiers, sign-in times, and the cookies that keep you signed in.
• Server logs. Our application logs are written under a redaction policy that records opaque identifiers and event names only — not names, not email addresses, not the content of student work. Our hosting provider keeps its own request logs, which include IP address, according to its retention schedule.
• Error reports. When something breaks, an error report may be sent to our error-tracking provider. These contain technical information about the failure and an opaque user identifier.
• Rate-limit counters. To keep the service available and to control the cost of AI features, we count recent requests against your account identifier and, for signed-out requests, your IP address. These counters expire within about a minute and are not used for any other purpose.
• Public gallery view counts. When someone views a published project, we record one view per visitor per day using a salted one-way hash of request attributes. The raw IP address is never stored. These records are deleted after 90 days.
• Security events. A bounded record of security-relevant actions — a role change, a denied access attempt — containing opaque identifiers and a fixed event name, never free text or content.
• AI usage accounting. Token counts and estimated cost per AI call, so we can see and cap what the service spends. This contains no message content.

We do not use device fingerprinting for tracking, and we do not build advertising or behavioral profiles.

4.4 Information from third parties

• Our authentication provider returns your verified email address and, if you use a third-party sign-in, your name.
• Your school or teacher may tell us which class and team you belong to.
• Public research databases supply paper metadata, abstracts, citation relationships, patent records, and plain-language health explainers. When we query them we send search terms and paper identifiers. We do not send your name, email address, or account identifier to any research database.

5. What we deliberately do not collect

We want this to be explicit, because a privacy policy that stays silent about these is usually hiding one of them:

• No date of birth, and no age beyond the school-or-not distinction.
• No home address, phone number, or emergency contact.
• No government identifier, student identification number issued by the state, or social security number.
• No precise geolocation. No GPS, no location permissions requested.
• No biometric data, no photographs of faces collected by us (a student may upload a photo to a project log; see the rules in our Terms of Service).
• No health information, other than what a student may choose to type while researching a health topic.
• No contact list, calendar, microphone, or camera access.
• No advertising identifiers, and no third-party analytics or advertising code of any kind.
• No purchase or payment information — scienium is free today and collects no payment details.

6. How we use information

We use the information described above only for these purposes:

1. To provide the product — sign you in, load your lab, save your work, run the game, and show your team's progress.
2. To generate learning content — quizzes, explain-back grading, source explanations, and AI assistant replies, as described in section 7.
3. To let a teacher teach — show the teacher of your class your work, progress, and submissions, and let them leave feedback and approve publication.
4. To send notifications you asked for — deadline reminders and in-app notices, with email only if you opt in.
5. To keep the service safe and available — rate limiting, abuse detection, moderation of published content, security monitoring, and incident response.
6. To control cost — AI spend accounting and caps, because AI calls cost real money and an uncapped bug is a real bill.
7. To fix and improve scienium — diagnose errors, understand which features are used, and make the product better. When we do this we work with aggregated or de-identified information wherever it will answer the question.
8. To comply with law and to enforce our Terms of Service.

We do not: sell personal information; share it for cross-context behavioral advertising; use student data to build a profile for any purpose other than providing scienium; serve targeted advertising; or use student personal information to train third-party AI models.

7. AI features and what happens to student writing

Several features are powered by a large-language-model provider (Anthropic). Being precise about this matters more than any other paragraph in this policy.

What is sent. When you use a feature that generates content — a quiz from a paper, an explanation of a source, grading of an explain-back answer, a reply in paper chat or Study-with-Vega, a relevance check — we send the provider the text that feature needs. That can include the text of a paper you uploaded, the question or message you typed, and a small amount of context about the task.

What is not sent. We do not send your name, your email address, your school, or your account identifier. The provider receives the schoolwork, not the student's identity.

Training. Our AI provider states in its commercial terms that it does not use inputs submitted through its API, or the outputs it returns, to train its models. It retains limited data for a short period for abuse detection and legal compliance. We rely on those terms; we do not control them, and you should read the provider's own policy if this matters to you.

What we keep. We store the resulting quizzes, explanations, grades, and chat transcripts in your account so the app can show them to you and your teacher again. We also keep a short-lived record of AI calls keyed by a hash of their inputs, so that a repeated or retried request replays the answer we already paid for instead of calling the provider a second time.

Accuracy. AI output can be wrong, incomplete, or confidently mistaken. It is a study aid, not a source of truth, and it is never a substitute for reading the paper, your teacher's instruction, medical or safety advice, or a science-fair rulebook. Verify anything that matters.

What not to type. Please do not type sensitive personal information — about yourself or anyone else — into an AI chat or any free-text field. Nothing in the product needs it.

Human review. We may review AI conversations and generated content when investigating abuse, a safety report, a bug, or a cost anomaly. Teachers can see the AI-assisted work their own students produce.

8. Cookies and similar technologies

scienium uses strictly necessary cookies only:

We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, social-media pixels, or any cookie that follows you to another website. Because there are no non-essential cookies, scienium does not show a cookie consent banner — there is nothing to consent to beyond what is required to sign you in.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. scienium does not track users across third-party websites, so there is no cross-site tracking to disable. We honor a Global Privacy Control signal as a request to opt out of sale or sharing; since we do neither, the signal changes nothing about how we handle your data.

Local storage in your browser is used to remember interface preferences and to run the in-browser Python environment used by the Data Terminal. That data stays on your device.

9. How we share information

We share personal information only in the situations below.

Within your class and team. Your teammates see the team's shared work. The teacher of your class sees your work, progress, submissions, and the feedback they have given you. A school administrator associated with your school may see class-level information. The Battle Arena trophy leaderboard shows team names and trophy counts to other teams in the same class — not student names, and not to anyone outside the class.

Publicly, only if you and a teacher both choose it. See section 10.

With service providers who run parts of the product. Each provider receives only what its job requires, and is contractually limited to using it for that job. The full list is in Appendix A.

With your school. If you use scienium through a school, we share your information with that school on request, and follow its instructions about your records.

For legal reasons. When required by law, subpoena, or valid legal process, or to establish or defend legal claims. Where we are permitted to do so, and the request concerns a student, we will notify the school before responding.

In an emergency. If we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm to a person, we may share information with the school, a parent, or an appropriate authority.

In a business transfer. If I transfer scienium to a company I form, or sell it or its assets to someone else, information may transfer with it. Student personal information may only transfer to a successor that agrees to be bound by the commitments in this policy, and we will notify schools before any such transfer so they can request deletion instead.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California law or any other US state privacy law.

10. The public showcase

A completed project can be published to the scienium showcase. Each project has a visibility setting the student chooses:

Some things to understand about publishing:

• Public means public. A published project can be viewed, copied, quoted, and indexed by search engines by anyone in the world. Treat it as permanent, even though you can unpublish it.
• A teacher must approve a public project before it appears, and approval is bound to the exact version reviewed — editing an approved project returns it to pending review.
• Do not publish personal information. Do not include your full name if you would rather not, and never include another person's name, face, contact details, or identifying information without their permission — and, for another minor, their parent's permission.
• We can remove anything. We may remove or unpublish content at our discretion, and a teacher or school may direct us to.
• Anyone can report a published project through the report link on the page.
• We count views with the salted, non-reversible fingerprint described in section 4.3, retained for 90 days.

For a student under 18 using scienium through a school, public publication should follow the school's own media-release or directory-information practice. The teacher approval step exists so that a school is always in the loop.

11. Where data is stored

scienium is operated from the United States, and all of the providers in Appendix A store data in the United States unless their own documentation says otherwise. If you use scienium from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws differ from those in your country.

scienium is intended for use in the United States and is not directed at individuals in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom.

12. How long we keep data

Accounts and schoolwork. We keep your account and work for as long as the account is active, and afterwards until you, your school, or your parent or guardian asks us to delete it, or until we delete it under a retention schedule agreed with your school.

End of a pilot or school year. When a school ends its use of scienium, we will delete or return its student data on request. We ask schools to tell us what they want done; if a school does not respond, we retain the data so that a student's work is not destroyed by silence, and we will follow up.

Records with a fixed schedule today:

Records without a fixed schedule yet. We have built the mechanism to expire older records automatically — activity feeds, notifications, AI transcripts, teacher feedback, delivered-email records — but the specific number of days for each is a decision that belongs with schools and with qualified advice on FERPA and COPPA, and it has not been finalized. Until it is, the mechanism is set to keep rather than to delete, so that nothing is destroyed by an unreviewed default. We will publish the schedule in this section once it is set, and we will treat shortening it as a change we announce in advance under section 20.

Backups. Deleted data may persist in encrypted database backups for a limited period after deletion from the live system, and is overwritten on the normal backup cycle. Backups are not used to restore deleted accounts.

After deletion. Some records survive an account deletion on purpose, and we want to be exact about which:

• Work a student contributed to a team — project logs, the team's discovery graph, the synthesis matrix, purchases — stays with the team, because deleting one member's contributions would destroy their teammates' project. It is no longer linked to a name or an email address.
• The user record itself is not dropped but emptied: name, email address, and the authentication identifier are overwritten with non-routable placeholders and the record is marked deleted. Nothing personal remains readable through it.
• Append-only membership and security logs keep an opaque identifier, which after the step above no longer resolves to a person.
• Cost accounting keeps token counts, which contain no content.

13. Security

We take the security of children's schoolwork seriously and design for it deliberately. In practice that means:

• Every database query and change is scoped to the requesting user's own team and class, so one team cannot read or modify another team's data.
• Uploaded files are stored in a private bucket and served only through an access-controlled route — never from a public URL.
• Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and encrypted at rest by our database and storage providers.
• Passwords are handled entirely by our authentication provider; we never see them.
• Application logs are written under a redaction policy that keeps names, email addresses, and student content out of them.
• Expensive AI routes are rate-limited, spend is metered against a daily threshold that raises an alert, and a kill switch can stop all AI calls immediately.
• Security-relevant events are recorded and monitored, and we maintain a written incident-response runbook.
• Access to production systems is limited to the people who operate the service.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim scienium is. If we discover a breach of personal information, we will notify affected schools and users without unreasonable delay and in accordance with applicable state breach notification laws, and we will tell you what happened, what data was involved, and what we are doing about it.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please email hello@scienium.app with the details. We will not pursue legal action against researchers who report vulnerabilities in good faith, who do not access or modify other people's data, and who give us a reasonable chance to fix the problem before disclosing it.

14. Your choices and rights

Regardless of where you live, you can ask us to:

• Access or export a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct information that is wrong. Names and email addresses can also be changed directly in your account settings.
• Delete your account and its data.
• Stop emailing you. Turn off email notifications in your notification preferences, or use the unsubscribe link in any notification email. We will still send essential account and security messages.

How to make a request. Signed-in users can file an export or deletion request from within the app. Anyone can email hello@scienium.app. We will acknowledge the request and complete it within 30 days, or tell you why we need longer.

How we verify you. We verify a request by confirming control of the account's email address, and for a school-linked student account by confirming the request with the school. We ask for no more identifying information than the verification requires, and we do not use anything you send us for verification for any other purpose.

Requests about a minor's school record are approved by the school. For a student under 18 who uses scienium through a school, filing a request in the app does not by itself erase anything: the request is queued, and an operator executes it only after the school confirms it. This is deliberate. The authority to destroy a minor's school record belongs to the school and the parent, not to a one-click button that a classmate could reach or a student could hit by accident. For a direct account with no school, the account holder, or their parent or guardian, is the one who confirms.

Deletion is permanent and not reversible. An export is delivered through your school's agreed channel rather than emailed, because an export bundle is the single densest collection of personal information the system can produce and email is not a safe way to move it.

No retaliation. We will never degrade your experience, charge you, or treat you differently for exercising a privacy right.

15. Information for parents and guardians

If your child uses scienium through a school, the school has directed its use, and the school is the right first point of contact. You may ask the school — or us, and we will coordinate with the school — to:

• review the personal information we hold about your child;
• correct anything inaccurate;
• have it deleted;
• refuse any further collection or use of your child's information, which means the account will be closed, since the product cannot run without it.

We will honor a verified request from a school to delete a student's data even if the student objects, and we will honor a verified parental request routed through the school.

If your child signed up directly, without a school, you can exercise all of those rights with us at hello@scienium.app. We may ask you to verify that you are the parent or guardian of the account holder.

What your child does in scienium: reads research papers, takes quizzes, writes about experiments, chats with an AI study assistant about scientific papers, builds a virtual lab, and competes in a spell-battle minigame. There is no open messaging between students in scienium — no direct messages, no public comments — so the usual stranger-contact risk of a social app is not present. Students on the same team see each other's shared project work, and published projects are visible to whoever the visibility setting allows.

16. Information for schools: FERPA, COPPA, and state student-privacy laws

FERPA. Where a school uses scienium to maintain student information, the school may designate us a "school official" with a "legitimate educational interest" in the education records we process on its behalf, under 34 CFR 99.31(a)(1). On that basis we commit that we:

• use education records only to provide and improve scienium for that school, and for no other purpose;
• remain under the school's direct control with respect to those records;
• do not re-disclose education records except as this policy describes or the school directs;
• correct, export, or delete records on the school's instruction; and
• support the school in responding to a parent's request to inspect and review their child's records.

The school remains responsible for compliance with FERPA, including any required annual notification and any direct-consent requirement its own policies impose.

COPPA. For students under 13, we rely on the school to provide consent on behalf of parents, which COPPA permits when a service is used solely for school-authorized educational purposes and the school has been given notice of our collection practices. This policy is that notice. We do not condition a child's participation on disclosing more information than is reasonably necessary, we do not use children's personal information for targeted advertising or to build a non-educational profile, and we delete it on request. A school may review the child's information and refuse further collection at any time by contacting hello@scienium.app.

State student-privacy laws. Consistent with California's SOPIPA and similar laws in other states, we commit that we do not:

• target advertising to students, on scienium or anywhere else, using information acquired through scienium;
• create a profile of a student except in furtherance of school purposes;
• sell or rent student information;
• disclose student information except as described in section 9.

And that we do maintain reasonable security procedures, and delete student information on the request of the school or district.

PPRA. scienium does not administer surveys about the protected categories listed in the Protected Pupil Rights Amendment, and does not collect student information for marketing.

Written agreements. A school or district that needs a data privacy agreement, a state student-data-privacy addendum, or a signed FERPA school-official designation should contact hello@scienium.app. A signed agreement with a school controls over this policy where the two differ.

17. California residents

This section supplements the rest of the policy for California residents and is provided under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended ("CCPA"). Note that information collected on behalf of a school as part of a student's education record is generally governed by FERPA and California's student-privacy statutes rather than the CCPA; we describe rights here for the accounts and situations where the CCPA does apply.

Categories of personal information we have collected in the past 12 months:

Sources, purposes, and disclosures are described in sections 4, 6, and 9.

Sale and sharing. We have not sold personal information, and we have not shared it for cross-context behavioral advertising, in the past 12 months, and we do not do so now. We have not sold or shared the personal information of consumers under 16.

Sensitive personal information. We do not collect sensitive personal information as the CCPA defines it, so the right to limit its use does not arise.

Your rights: to know, to access, to a portable copy, to correct, to delete, and not to be retaliated against for exercising them. Exercise them as described in section 14. You may use an authorized agent; we will ask the agent for written authorization and may ask you to confirm it directly.

Retention is described in section 12.

Shine the Light. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes.

18. Other US state privacy rights

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws — including Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, and others as they take effect — have rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of their personal information, and to opt out of targeted advertising, sale, and certain profiling. We do not conduct targeted advertising, sale, or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects, so those opt-outs have nothing to act on; the access, correction, deletion, and portability rights are the ones in section 14 and we honor them for everyone regardless of where they live.

If we deny a request you may appeal by replying to our decision; we will respond to an appeal in writing, and if we deny the appeal we will tell you how to contact your state attorney general.

19. Third-party sites and research content

scienium shows you research papers, patents, abstracts, and plain-language health explainers retrieved from public sources, and links out to publisher websites, science-fair organizations, and other third-party sites.

We do not control those sites, they have their own privacy policies, and following a link takes you outside scienium. Health information shown in scienium is general reference material, not medical advice.

20. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as scienium changes. When we do:

• we update the effective date and version at the top;
• for any material change — a new category of data, a new purpose, a new category of recipient, or a shorter retention period — we will give notice in the app and by email to account holders and to schools before the change takes effect, with at least 30 days' notice where practical;
• for a school-directed deployment, a material change that would expand how student data is used requires the school's agreement, not merely notice; and
• we will never apply a materially different use to information already collected without the consent required by law.

Continued use after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy, except where consent is required.

21. How to contact us

Questions, privacy requests, security reports, and school agreements:

• Email: hello@scienium.app
• Postal: Rig Saini, 2841 Pruneridge Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95051

Please tell us whether you are a student, parent, teacher, or administrator, and which school or class the question concerns, so we can route it correctly.

Appendix A: Service providers

Each provider receives only what its function requires, is bound by a contract limiting its use of that data to providing services to us, and is prohibited from selling it. This list is current as of the effective date.

We also query the following public research sources. We send them search terms and record identifiers, never a student's identity: OpenAlex (including records from PubMed and arXiv), Semantic Scholar, PatentsView, and MedlinePlus.

Appendix B: Data categories at a glance