Privacy policy

A rider’s record holds a first name and a grade, and nothing else. There is no field anywhere in the product for a child’s last name, birthdate, home address, or medical information: not optional, absent. If a feature ever seems to need more than that, our position is that the feature is wrong.

All information about a rider is provided by their own parent or guardian when they join a bike bus, with a recorded consent step. Children do not create accounts and we do not collect information from children directly.

This design keeps us on the right side of the line that children’s privacy law (in the US, COPPA) draws: we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, ever. A rider’s minimal record is created by their parent, about them, with consent.

Rider first names are visible only to the people involved in that bike bus: its organizers and ride captains (who need a roster to run a ride) and, in shared ride views, the other families riding in the same group. They never appear on public pages or in search engines.

If you join a bike bus (a family): your name, email address, an optional mobile number, which stop you board at, an optional note, your riders’ first names and grades, and the time you gave consent. Joining creates an account so you can manage your own details.

If you organize a bike bus: your name, email, and what you publish: the bike bus’s name, description, route, stops, times, and any contact details you choose to make public. Publishing is deliberate: a field that will appear publicly says so where you type it.

If you raise your hand for a bike bus at a school that has none: your email address and which school. Nothing about a child, because you are not signing anybody up for anything. Your address is never shown on that page, never given to the person who eventually starts a bike bus there, and never used for anything except telling you if one does. The page shows a count and no names. Every email we send about it carries a one-click link that removes you without signing in.

If you only browse: standard server logs and the analytics described below. Searching for a school does not identify you.

If you sign up for updates or an interest form: your email address and what you told us you were interested in.

A family’s mobile number is collected for one purpose: so the people running that bike bus can reach the family about a ride. It is shown to that bike bus’s organizers and ride captains and to nobody else. It never appears on a public page, in a roster other parents can read, or in data given to search engines.

Separately, an organizer may choose to publish a contact number for their bike bus. That field states, where it is entered, that the number will be public. We never publish a number that was given to us for something else.

Text messages are optional, and agreeing to them is a separate decision from everything else on the join form. If you check the SMS box we record your mobile number, the moment you agreed, and the exact version of the wording you were shown, so the record can say what you were told rather than only that you said yes.

We use it to send the evening-before ride reminder with its RSVP link, to tell you about a schedule change or a cancellation, and to act on a stop request. Nothing else.

Giving your mobile number so an organizer can call you is not permission to text you. Those are two different decisions and the product treats them that way: a number we hold with no SMS consent recorded against it is a number we do not text.

We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes. We do not share it with affiliates for their own marketing either. The only outside parties who handle it are the ones who carry the message: our messaging provider and the phone carriers.

Message frequency varies with the ride schedule and updates; most bike buses ride once a week. Message and data rates may apply.

You can stop at any time by replying STOP, END, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL or QUIT to (464) 245-3287. Reply HELP for help. Stopping the texts does not take you off the bike bus. The program is described in full at About these texts.

Visibility follows the shape of a bike bus. The public sees what an organizer published: the route, stops, times, and the contact details they chose to publish. A bike bus’s organizers and ride captains see its roster: rider first names, grades, boarding stops, attendance, and family contact details. Families in the same bike bus see a shared ride view with rider first names, but not other families’ contact details.

Service providers who process data for us: our hosting platform (Vercel), our database provider (Supabase), our email provider, our payment processor (Stripe; card details go to Stripe directly and never touch our servers), and our newsletter provider for addresses you gave for that purpose. Each receives only what its job requires.

We would disclose information if a law required it. Beyond that, nobody else gets it.

Three things, and only one of them asks permission.

A session cookie keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary (without it you could not stay signed in) so it is always set and there is nothing to consent to.

Vercel Analytics counts page views without cookies and without profiling anyone, so it needs no consent either.

Google Analytics does set cookies, so it is off until you say yes. Nothing of it loads (no script, no cookie, no request) unless you accept the banner. Declining changes nothing about how the site works, and you can change your mind any time with the Cookie choices link in the footer. Your choice is remembered for a year.

Maps and videos other people made. Some bike bus pages show a route map the organizers drew in Google My Maps, and some articles carry a video. Those load from Google and YouTube, who can see that your browser asked for them and may set their own cookies when it does. The map loads only if you scroll far enough down the page to reach it, the video loads only if you press play, and either can be closed. Neither is ours and neither is analytics: they are the map and the film themselves.

We do not run advertising trackers and we do not sell analytics data. If we can retire Google Analytics for something lighter, we will.

Ride records are records: attendance and RSVPs stay with a bike bus so its organizers have an honest history, and riders who leave are deactivated within those records rather than rewritten out of them. Everything else lives as long as both the account it belongs to and the bike bus it was added to.

You can update or remove your own riders, your stop, and your contact details from your account, or leave a bike bus entirely. To delete your account and its data, email hello@schoolbikebus.com and we will do it, confirm it, and tell you what (if anything) had to be kept and why (for example, a payment record we are required to retain).

When a bike bus is deleted, its roster goes with it. The owner of a bike bus can delete the whole bike bus, and that is the one action on this site that reaches information other people entered. It is scheduled rather than immediate: the page comes off the directory right away, and thirty days later the bike bus and everything attached to it is removed. That means its routes, stops and times, its ride days, its photos, its short link, and the roster, which is every family record and every rider’s first name and grade that families added to it.

Nobody has to find out afterwards. We email every organizer when a deletion is scheduled, if it is called off, and on the day it runs, and we email every family on the roster when it is scheduled rather than on the day, so the thirty days are long enough for somebody else to take the bike bus over or for a family to keep a copy of anything they want. The owner can call it off at any point in that window, and nothing is removed until the window closes.

Deleting a bike bus does not delete the people who rode with it. Your account, your sign-in and any other bike bus you belong to are untouched; what goes is your place on that one roster. Two other things outlive a deletion on purpose, because removing them would do harm rather than prevent it: the record that a school has already used its one free Pro trial, which keeps the email address that claimed it and nothing about the ride, and any text-message opt-out, which is tied to a phone number rather than to a bike bus, so that erasing it could never become a way to start messaging somebody who had asked us to stop.

One honest limit, because a promise to destroy every copy everywhere is not one we can keep. Our database provider keeps daily backups of the whole database on a rolling window, currently up to seven days, so a copy of something deleted can sit in a backup for a few days after it has gone from the live site. We do not restore one to bring a deleted bike bus back, and nothing in those backups is served to anyone.

Wherever you live, we honor the same set: ask what we hold about you, get a copy, correct it, delete it, or object to a use of it, by emailing the address above. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights, and we do not sell personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of selling.

Our servers and database are in the United States. If you use the service from elsewhere, your information is processed in the US under this policy.

Data is encrypted in transit, access is role-based (a ride captain sees a roster; only a bike bus’s own organizers see its families), and the sensitive fields described above are restricted at the database layer, not just hidden by the interface. No system is perfect; if a breach affected you, we would tell you plainly and promptly.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date above changes and the revised version is posted here. We do not email every account holder about a revision, so the date at the top is the thing to check. We will not quietly weaken the children’s-information rules; that section only gets stricter, and if that ever stopped being true it would be the one change worth writing to you about.

Questions? hello@schoolbikebus.com. See also our terms of service.