Privacy Policy

RoboSTEM Foundation Inc (“RoboSTEM”, “we”, “us”) is a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Saratoga, California. This policy covers robostem.org and the pages under it. Our apps have their own short policies, linked from inside each app, and the tools we link to (OpenScout, Vsim, Discord, YouTube, Instagram) are covered by their own.

The short version: the site has no accounts, no advertising and no cookies. We count page views without identifying anyone, and the only personal information we ever receive is what you choose to send us in an email.

What we collect

Page views. When you open a page, your browser sends one small request to our own server with the page address, the site that referred you and your screen width. On the server we record the day, the page, the referring site, your country, your device type and your browser. To tell repeat views from new visitors within a single day, we compute a one-way hash of your IP address and browser signature together with a secret that changes every day. The hash is stored, the IP address is not, and because the secret rotates, nothing links one day to the next. We do not run Google Analytics or any third-party analytics script, and we skip the count entirely if your browser sends a Do Not Track signal.

Email you send us. The contact form on this site opens your own email program. Nothing is submitted to our servers. If you write to contact@robostem.org, outreach@robostem.org or a volunteer's address, we receive whatever you include and keep the conversation in our mailbox for as long as it is useful for working with you.

Hosting logs. The site is served by Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived technical logs (IP address, request, time) to run and protect the service. Cloudflare's handling of that data is described in its own privacy policy.

Nothing else. No cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting, no pixels, no advertising identifiers, no accounts.

What we do with it

Page counts tell us which programs and articles people actually read so volunteers can spend time on the right things. Email lets us answer you, arrange programs, volunteering and partnerships, and send tax receipts for donations. We never sell, rent or trade personal information, and we never use it for advertising.

Who else sees it

Nobody, except services that need it to do their jobs for us: Cloudflare hosts the site and the analytics database, and Google Workspace handles our mail. Links to YouTube, Discord, Instagram, Google Forms and OpenScout take you to those services, and their policies apply from that point. We would disclose information if the law required it, and we would tell you if we could.

How long we keep it

Anonymous page counts are kept indefinitely, since they cannot identify anyone. Email is kept while the relationship it belongs to is active, and deleted or archived afterwards. Donation records are kept for as long as nonprofit accounting rules require.

Students and children

Our programs serve students, many of them under 13. Registration for programs happens through schools, parents or guardians, not through this website, and this website does not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, email us and we will delete it.

Your choices and rights

You can browse the site without sending us anything identifiable. You can turn on Do Not Track to opt out of even the anonymous page count. If you have emailed us, you can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will do so unless a legal or accounting duty prevents it. We do not sell personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of under the CCPA. Residents of the EU and UK have the same rights under the GDPR, and our legal basis for the little processing we do is legitimate interest in running a small nonprofit and answering people who write to us.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. We will not quietly start collecting something new.

Contact

RoboSTEM Foundation Inc, P.O. Box 2251, Saratoga, CA 95070. Privacy questions go to contact@robostem.org.