Privacy policy

IVSA (International Virtual School Alliance) is an alliance and directory of accredited online schools. References to "we," "us," and "our" mean IVSA. References to "you" mean any visitor, family, agent, embassy contact, school administrator, or partner who interacts with our services.

We collect three categories of data:

• Public school data imported from regulatory and government sources (e.g., Ontario private school registry). This is open data; we surface it.
• Account data from school administrators who claim or join: name, work email, role, school affiliation, billing information (handled by Stripe), and verification documents.
• Inquiry data from families, agents, and embassies who contact a school: name, email, phone (optional), student grade, country, and message. We log IP address and user agent for spam protection only.

• To run the directory and route inquiries to the school you contacted.
• To verify member schools and operate their dashboard.
• To send transactional emails (claim confirmations, verification updates, lead notifications, billing).
• To prevent abuse, fraud, and spam.
• To improve the product through aggregated, anonymized usage analytics.

We do not sell personal data.

To run IVSA we use these processors. Each is contractually bound to handle data only on our instructions:

• Vercel — hosting and edge network.
• Supabase — Postgres database, authentication, file storage.
• Stripe — payments and subscription billing. We never see full card numbers.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.
• Anthropic — automated qualification of inbound parent inquiries (the inquiry text is processed; no persistent record is stored on Anthropic's side).

We share inquiry details with the specific IVSA member school you contacted. We never share your personal data with other schools or third parties for marketing.

We use a small number of essential cookies:

• Session cookies for authenticated dashboard users.
• CSRF tokens.
• Privacy-respecting analytics on aggregate usage.

We do not run third-party advertising trackers or behavioral retargeting pixels.

Depending on where you live, you have rights over your personal data, including:

• Right of access — request a copy of what we hold.
• Right to rectification — correct inaccurate data.
• Right to erasure — request deletion (subject to legal retention).
• Right to portability — receive data in a structured format.
• Right to object or restrict processing.

To exercise any of these, email accessibility@ivsa.org or use the contact form. We respond within 30 days.

We keep account data for the life of the account plus 12 months. Inquiry data is retained for 24 months unless the school exports it sooner. Billing records are retained for the period required by tax law (typically 7 years).

IVSA's services are designed for school administrators, families, and adult agents — not directly for children. Schools may capture student data through their own systems; that data is governed by the school's privacy policy and IVSA does not store or process it.

Our infrastructure is hosted in regions including the United States and Canada. By using IVSA you consent to your data being processed in those regions. Where regional law requires, we use standard contractual clauses for transfers.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be highlighted at the top of this page and, where practical, communicated by email to account holders. The "Last updated" date above always reflects the current version.

Questions or requests: accessibility@ivsa.org.