Privacy policy
Last updated October 1, 2026
Ovation is a student recognition tool for schools. School staff sign in, recognise students for character, and each month the school celebrates the students who were recognised. This policy explains what information Ovation handles, why, and how it is protected. It covers the Ovation app at app.ovation.school and this website.
The short version
- Your school owns its data. We hold it only to run Ovation for the school.
- Students do not have accounts and are never asked for anything.
- Nothing about a student is public. Only staff at that school can see it.
- We never sell data, show ads, or use it to train AI models.
- The app's database is stored in Canada.
Who is responsible for the data
The school (or its school division) decides what goes into Ovation and remains the custodian of its student information. Ovation acts as a service provider on the school's behalf and processes that information only to provide the service. We will sign a data protection agreement on a school or division's terms.
What we collect
About staff who sign in
- From Google sign-in: your name, email address and profile picture. We use these only to sign you in, show your name on the recognitions you write, and show you who your colleagues are. We do not request access to your Gmail, Drive, Calendar or any other Google data.
- Which school or schools you belong to, and whether you are an admin there.
- The recognitions you write, and the settings you choose (such as sound on or off).
About students
- First and last name, and grade or homeroom, entered by school staff.
- The recognitions staff write about them, and when.
We do not collect students' dates of birth, addresses, health information, academic or discipline records, or government student numbers.
On this website
ovation.school uses no analytics, no advertising and no tracking cookies. Our hosting provider keeps standard request logs (such as IP address and time) for security and reliability.
How we use it
- To run Ovation for your school: sign-in, nominations, monthly results, certificates and hallway displays.
- To keep the service secure, including an audit trail of who changed what, which school admins can review.
- To provide support when the school asks for it (see below).
We do not use any of this information for advertising, profiling or marketing.
The wording helper (AI)
When a staff member taps “Help me word it”, the note they have written is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to suggest clearer wording. The student's name is removed before the text is sent. Anthropic does not use API inputs to train its models. Nothing is generated unless a staff member asks, and nothing is saved until they choose to save it.
Who can see it
- Staff at your school can see your school's recognitions. Data is never shared between schools.
- What the school chooses to print or show on its own screens is up to the school.
- Ovation support staff access a school's data only to help that school, for example when an admin asks for help. To do so they join the school, which shows in the school's audit trail.
Service providers
We use a small number of providers to run Ovation:
- Supabase (on Amazon Web Services, Canada): the app's database and sign-in.
- Vercel: hosts and runs the app.
- Google: staff sign-in.
- Anthropic: the optional wording helper described above.
- Cloudflare: hosts this website and our domain.
Each is bound to protect the data and use it only to provide its service to us.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is restricted at the database level so each school can only reach its own records. Staff sign in with their school Google account; Ovation never creates or stores passwords.
Keeping and deleting data
We keep a school's data for as long as the school uses Ovation. A school can ask us to export all of its data and then delete it permanently; we do this within 30 days of a written request, and we do the same when a school stops using Ovation.
Your choices
Staff can ask to see or correct their information, or to have their account removed. Questions about a student's information should go to the student's school, which controls it; we will help the school respond. Ovation is designed to support schools' obligations under Alberta's privacy legislation and Canada's PIPEDA.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell school admins before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows the latest version.
Contact
Questions or requests: hello@ovation.school.