Child safety

1. Designed for minors, not adapted for them

Products built for adults and later opened to children carry adult assumptions — public profiles, open messaging, engagement mechanics. PrepShorts started from the opposite end: a Class 6 student on a family phone is our default user, and every feature must be safe for that student before it ships. The result is a short list of things the product simply does not have, and a shorter list of carefully-shaped things it does.

2. What does not exist in PrepShorts

• No advertising of any kind, and no in-product purchases aimed at students.
• No public community. No profiles visible to strangers, no comments, no forums, no follower counts.
• No student-to-student messaging. The only person a doubt reaches is a verified teacher at the student’s own school.
• No public leaderboards. Progress is private to the student, their teachers and their school; struggle is never made a spectacle.
• No engagement bait. No streak-shaming, no midnight notifications, no mechanics that reward time-in-app over topics understood. The video even pauses and waits while the student goes and does the activity.

3. The doubt channel, shaped carefully

Doubts are the one place a student writes freely, so they get the most care. A doubt goes only to teachers of that student’s school, pinned to the video minute it came from. Teachers answer inside the same channel, and an answer can be shared to the whole class so one brave question helps forty students. School offices can review the doubt log for their own school. If a doubt ever discloses something that suggests a child is at risk, our policy is to inform the school’s designated safeguarding contact — teachers and schools remain the responsible adults, and our job is to route the signal to them fast.

4. Who the adults are

Teacher accounts exist only under a school code and are approved by the school office — PrepShorts has no mechanism for an unattached adult to register as a “teacher” and reach children. Schools verify their own staff exactly as they do for the classroom; we verify the school itself before issuing its code, with a call to the office. PrepShorts’s own staff access student data only under the role-based, logged regime described on the data-protection page.

5. Content standards

Every video and check is reviewed against the printed NCERT chapter before publication — nothing off-syllabus, nothing sensational, nothing that needs a parental warning. Videos are served by PrepShorts itself rather than embedded from a video platform: there is no comments section, no recommendation rail beside the player, and no autoplay into a video nobody chose. If an error or an inappropriate frame slips through, the reporting route below takes it down first and investigates second.

6. Data, briefly

The privacy policy covers this fully, but the child-specific commitments bear repeating: we collect the minimum and never sell any of it; there is no advertising inside the product, though the website and app do load Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel to measure visits and our own advertising, as §11 of the privacy policy sets out; and parents can see, correct, export or delete their child’s data with a single email. One thing is not finished and should be said here rather than found out: sign-up collects no parent’s email or telephone number, so for a child who joins without a school code there is no in-product step at which a parent verifies the account. Where a school code is used, the school’s own enrolment carries that. Building the step for everyone else is open work.

7. Reporting a concern

If you see anything in PrepShorts that worries you — a video frame, a check question, a doubt reply, anything — write to safety@prepshorts.com. Safety reports are read first, ahead of every other queue, acknowledged within 24 hours, and acted on before they are argued about: content is taken down while we check. Schools have a direct line to the same team. Nothing about a child is ever discussed publicly.

8. What we ask of schools and parents

Keep sign-in details private; use real names on the roster so teachers know who they’re answering; tell us when a teacher leaves so the school can retire their account; and treat the doubt channel as part of the school’s own conduct world. Safeguarding is a chain — PrepShorts is one link, holding its part tight.

9. Changes to this page

2 September 2026. A line-by-line pass of this document against the database that actually stores the data. Section 6 said parental contact is part of every minor’s sign-up. It is not: no parent’s email or telephone number is collected anywhere. Where a school code is used the school’s enrolment carries that consent; for a child who joins alone there is no in-product verification step yet, and the section now says so.