Privacy for parents

Your child's school uses an app called School Run to run its school buses. It does three things: it shows the school where its buses are, it lets the adult on the bus tick your child off at their stop, and it sends you a message when something happens that you would want to know about.

The school runs it. The school decides who is on which bus, who at the school can see what, and what messages you get.

• Their name, their class, and their admission number if the school uses one.
• Which bus route they are on, and the stop they use.
• Whether they got on and off the bus each day, at which stop, at what time — and which member of staff ticked them off.
• Your name, and your phone number and email address.
• A photo of your child, but only if the school chose to add one. Many schools do not.

That is the whole list. There is nowhere in School Run to record your child's health, their religion, their exam results or anything about your family's finances.

Your own children, and nobody else's. When you sign in you see the children linked to your account: whether they are on the bus today, and their record of past days.

You cannot see other families' children, other parents' phone numbers, or the school's full list. The app checks this every time you open a page, not just when you sign in.

Because the school switched them on. You may get a message when the bus is close to your stop, when your child gets on, when they get off, when a run is running late, or when the route changes.

Messages about your child go to your child's own guardians and to nobody else. There is a limit on how many you can get in a day, so a faulty bus sensor cannot flood your phone.

If you are getting too many, too few, or messages about a child who is not yours, tell the school's transport office. They control it; you do not need an app setting to change it.

• Staff at your school — the transport office, and the matron or driver on your child's own bus.
• The company that sends the text messages. Your school picks and pays that company, and the message with your child's name and your phone number goes through it.
• The email service, if you get notifications by email instead.
• The company that runs the app and the bus trackers, which keeps it working and can see the data in order to do that.

That is everyone. Your child's information is not sold, is not shared with advertisers, and is not used to train any kind of artificial intelligence. There are no tracking or advertising cookies on these pages.

No. The bus is tracked, not your child.

The GPS box is fitted to the vehicle. There is nothing on your child, no tag and no app on their phone. School Run knows where the bus is; it knows nothing about where your child is before they get on or after they get off.

And it never guesses. The app will not decide your child boarded just because the bus reached your stop — a person has to tick them off.

• The record of messages sent to you: about 120 days, then deleted automatically. The wording of each message is never stored at all — only that one was sent, and whether it arrived.
• The record of your child getting on and off the bus: kept for years — the school's intention is around 7. This is deliberate. If a question is ever asked about how your child was handled on a particular day, this is the only record that can answer it, and it needs to still exist.
• Your child's details and your contact details: kept while your child uses the bus service. When they leave, they are marked as having left rather than erased, because deleting them would also destroy the record above.

If you want something deleted sooner, ask the school — it is their decision to make.

Kenya's Data Protection Act gives you rights over information about you and your child. You can ask the school:

• to tell you what it holds and what it uses it for;
• to give you a copy of it;
• to correct anything that is wrong — a misspelt name, the wrong stop, the wrong phone number;
• to delete anything that is false or misleading; and
• to stop, or limit, a particular use of it.

Ask the school in writing. They may need to check who you are and that you are that child's parent or guardian before they answer — which is the right thing for them to do, because the answer to "where was this child" must not go to a stranger.

The school may say no to deleting a boarding record that is accurate. That record is their evidence of how your child was looked after, and it protects your child as much as anyone.

If the school does not deal with your concern, you can complain to Kenya's Office of the Data Protection Commissioner at odpc.go.ke.

School Run is a tool that helps the school run its buses. It is not a promise that your child is safe or a guarantee of where they are.

A tick on a screen means a person pressed a button. People miss things. GPS boxes lose signal. Text messages get delayed, and sometimes do not arrive at all.

If you are worried about your child right now, do not sit and refresh the app. Phone the school's transport office.

Your school's transport office. For everything: a message you did not expect, a stop that is wrong, a child linked to the wrong parent, a request to see or correct something, or a worry about a bus.

The school holds your child's record and answers for it. Their number and email are the ones on your school's own communications.