Privacy Policy
Last updated: 9 August 2026
Skilmore is a South African platform for real-time interactive learning, trivia, and engagement. This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we use and share it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to the Skilmore website and to the Skilmore services you reach through it — including Skilmore Schools, ChaTrivia, Skilmore Self-Study, Skilmore Labs, and Skilmore Events.
Skilmore is operated by a small team based in Cape Town, South Africa. Where this policy refers to "we", "us", or "Skilmore", it refers to the operator of the Skilmore platform. We only collect the information we reasonably need to provide the relevant service.
Who This Policy Covers
This policy covers the different ways people use Skilmore, including:
- Adults who create accounts (for example, ChaTrivia players, self-study learners, tutors, and company administrators)
- Parents or guardians who set up accounts for their children
- Learners, including children under 18, who take part in Skilmore educational services and revision chatrooms
- Teachers, tutors, and school or organisation administrators
- People who contact us or request a trial or demo
Information We Process
Depending on which service you use, we may process the following categories of information.
Account information
- Name or first and last name (for account holders and, in self-study, for a parent's child)
- Email address (for account holders such as adults, parents, tutors, and administrators)
- Username and display name
- Password, which is submitted to create or access an account (see “Security” below)
- For child self-study logins: a username and a short numeric PIN set by the parent, and an optional grade
- Date of birth or an age confirmation for services that are restricted to adults (for example, ChaTrivia)
Educational information
- School or organisation you belong to, where relevant
- Grade or class, where provided
- The programme selected in self-study (currently homeschooling)
- Participation in revision rooms, quizzes, and related educational activity
Chatroom information
- Messages and interactions you send in Skilmore chatrooms, together with room participation and related timestamps
- Ordinary chat messages are handled in real time and are not intended to be permanently stored as chat history. However, when a message is captured through moderation, safety, security, or incident-handling processes, the message text and related moderation information may be retained (see “Chatroom Monitoring and Moderation” and “Data Retention”)
- Moderation actions taken, warnings, and related records
Technical and session information
- Authentication and session information, including a secure login token stored in your browser so you stay signed in
- Your device's time zone, and a country or region indicator where you provide it or where it is needed to show correct pricing and payment options
- An approximate location derived from your internet connection, used to select the appropriate currency and payment method (see “Cookies, Analytics and Location” and “Third-Party Service Providers”)
Support information
- Information you provide when you contact us, request a trial, or ask for support — such as your name, email, company name, team size, and the content of your message
Payment information
Some Skilmore services are paid (for example, self-study subscriptions and Skilmore Labs or corporate plans). Payments are handled by third-party payment providers — Stripe and PayFast. When you enter card details, they are provided directly to the payment provider. Skilmore does not receive or store your full card number. We may receive limited billing details such as your name, email, the plan you chose, and a payment reference or token that lets us manage your subscription.
Children and Learners
Some Skilmore educational services are designed for learners, and some learners are under 18. This section explains how we handle information relating to learners and children. Services that are intended for adults — such as ChaTrivia — ask users to confirm they are 18 or older before signing up.
Where Skilmore processes information about a learner who is a child, the following applies:
- What we collect. Typically a name, a login username and display name, a login credential (a password or, for self-study child logins, a numeric PIN), an optional grade, and the learner's association with a school, organisation, or family account, together with participation in revision rooms and quizzes. We do not currently collect a date of birth for child learner accounts. We ask parents, guardians, teachers, and tutors to provide only the information that is reasonably necessary for the learner to take part.
- Why we collect it. To create the learner's login, place them in the correct educational programme and rooms, support learning activity, and keep the environment safe and moderated.
- How it is used. Only for the educational service, for safety and moderation, for security and abuse prevention, and to meet legal obligations.
- Who can access it. The parent or guardian who set up the account (for self-study), the learner themselves, the teacher or tutor facilitating participation where applicable, the relevant school or organisation administrator, and authorised Skilmore administrators who manage and moderate the platform.
- Chatroom activity. Skilmore revision chatrooms are moderated environments intended for revision, schoolwork questions, educational discussion, and educational quizzes — not general social networking or unrestricted private messaging. Chatroom activity may be reviewed by authorised Skilmore administrators for safety, moderation, security, and enforcement of the rules (see “Chatroom Monitoring and Moderation”).
- Data minimisation. Learners should not post unnecessary personal information in chatrooms — for example, home addresses, phone numbers, or other identifying details that are not needed for revision.
- Consent and authority. Where required by applicable law, Skilmore will obtain appropriate consent, authorisation, or another lawful basis before processing a learner's personal information. In self-study, a parent or guardian is asked to confirm they are the parent or legal guardian and to consent to the child's participation. A teacher or tutor may collect parent or guardian consent before a learner takes part in a school or tutoring context.
- Additional safeguards. Additional safeguards may apply to learner accounts, and some adult-only features are not available to them.
Parents and guardians can contact us about a learner's information at any time at support@skilmore.com. We explain how we handle these requests under “Your Rights and Requests”.
How We Use Information
We use personal information for purposes that include:
- Creating and managing accounts, and authenticating users
- Providing educational services, revision chatrooms, trivia, quizzes, and leaderboards
- Enabling communication between authorised participants
- Administering schools, organisations, and family or team accounts
- Moderating chatrooms, investigating reports, maintaining security, and preventing abuse
- Providing customer support and responding to your enquiries
- Processing payments and managing subscriptions, where applicable
- Sending service-related messages, such as email verification and account notices
- Maintaining, improving, and troubleshooting the platform
- Complying with legal obligations
Chatroom Monitoring and Moderation
Skilmore chatrooms — including revision chatrooms — are moderated environments. Authorised Skilmore administrators may review chatroom activity where reasonably necessary. This may include reviewing activity for learner safety, enforcing chatroom rules, preventing bullying or harassment, investigating complaints or suspected misuse, maintaining security, preventing abuse, protecting users, and complying with legal obligations.
Moderation uses a combination of automated tools and authorised human moderators. It may involve flagging, blocking, warning, muting, or removing a participant from a room, reviewing potentially inappropriate content, investigating reports or incidents, and enforcing room rules. When moderation acts on a message, a moderation record may be created that includes the original message text and related moderation information, so that authorised Skilmore personnel can review it.
You should not expect communications in a Skilmore revision chatroom to be completely private from authorised Skilmore personnel. The use of automated tools does not mean that every message is read by a person.
Schools, Teachers, and Tutors
Where Skilmore is used in a school, tutoring, or organisation setting:
- A school, organisation, teacher, or tutor may provide learner information to Skilmore, or facilitate a learner's participation
- A teacher or tutor may collect parent or guardian consent before a learner takes part
- Skilmore administrators manage the platform, the chatroom rules, and moderation
Skilmore determines how the platform itself operates, including moderation and security. Schools, teachers, and tutors are responsible for how they choose to use Skilmore with their learners and for collecting any consent required in their context.
Cookies, Analytics, and Location
Skilmore uses a small amount of browser storage that is necessary for the service to work — for example, to keep you signed in and to remember your currency preference. To show the correct currency and payment options, the site may look up an approximate location based on your internet connection using a third-party lookup service (see “Third-Party Service Providers”).
The public Skilmore website includes Google AdSense, which may set cookies or similar identifiers for advertising on the website (see “Advertising”). You can control cookies through your browser settings, though disabling necessary storage may prevent parts of the service from working.
Advertising
We distinguish between three different contexts for advertising:
- The public marketing website. The public Skilmore website uses Google AdSense to display advertising. Advertising providers may receive information such as cookie identifiers, device and browser information, and general location as part of serving and measuring ads, in line with their own policies.
- ChaTrivia (adults 18+). Advertising within our services is configured for ChaTrivia, which is an adults-only (18+) service, and may include advertising such as banner or rewarded ads.
- Educational learner services. Our advertising configuration is not enabled for Skilmore Schools or Self-Study learner services, and we do not use learner or child accounts to serve personalised advertising. Where required by law, we will not permit personalised advertising to children.
How and Where Information Is Stored
Skilmore relies on the following infrastructure to store and operate the platform:
- MongoDB — our main database, used to store persistent application information such as user and learner accounts, school/organisation and parent relationships, moderation records, audit records, room configuration, and other platform data
- Redis — used for ephemeral, real-time functionality such as chat transport, presence, live session state, and temporary rate-limiting information
- Cloudflare R2 — object/file storage used for profile photographs where applicable, school newsletters, and training or educational documents
Third-Party Service Providers
We use service providers where necessary to operate the platform. We take appropriate steps to protect personal information shared with them, and they are expected to handle it consistently with their obligations to us and with their own policies. In addition to the storage infrastructure above, these include:
- Render — cloud hosting and application infrastructure for our website and services
- SendGrid — sending transactional emails, such as email verification, password-reset, and support-related emails
- Stripe — card payment processing for subscriptions and plans
- PayFast — payment processing, primarily for South African customers
- Google — services that may include OAuth/sign-in and, where applicable, advertising technologies
- OpenAI — used for AI-assisted generation of educational and trivia questions from uploaded learning documents. For this purpose, extracted text from an uploaded document is sent for processing. We do not send learner identity information for this purpose, though an uploaded document could itself contain personal information
- Slack — used for opt-in organisational or corporate trivia functionality, where player display names and scores may be shared with an organisation's Slack workspace. This is not used to routinely share school learner information
- ipapi.co — used by our website to look up an approximate location for currency and payment-method selection; it is not used as a service for learner data
Payment providers are used for adults and organisations who purchase paid plans. We do not sell personal information.
International Processing
Some of our providers and infrastructure are located outside South Africa. This means personal information may be processed or stored outside South Africa where the relevant service provider or infrastructure is located. This can include, depending on the service, our hosting and database infrastructure, object/file storage, email delivery, payment processing, AI-assisted question generation, and organisational notification providers. PayFast, used for South African payments, is a South African provider.
Where we transfer personal information across borders, we will handle it in accordance with applicable legal requirements. We give particular care to information relating to learners and children.
Data Retention
Skilmore retains personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, to provide the relevant service, to meet legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, maintain security, and protect the platform.
Ordinary chat messages are handled in real time and are not intended to be kept as permanent chat history. Moderation and security records — which may include message text captured through moderation, together with related information — may be retained separately for as long as reasonably necessary for safety, moderation, security, abuse prevention, accountability, and legal purposes. We have not set a single fixed retention period for these records.
When an account is closed or deleted, some information may be retained where we have a lawful reason to do so — for example, moderation, security, or audit records — and not all information is removed immediately. Backups may also persist for a period before being overwritten. If you would like to know what happens to a specific account or its information, contact us at support@skilmore.com.
Security
Skilmore implements reasonable technical and organisational measures appropriate to the nature of the information processed. These include storing account passwords and child PINs as bcrypt hashes rather than as plain text; token-based authentication using signed session tokens (JWTs) with expiry and revocation controls; role-based access controls and administrator permissions; rate limiting; and encryption of information in transit between your browser and our services. Card details are handled by our payment providers rather than stored by Skilmore.
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please use a strong, unique password and keep your login details confidential.
Audit and Security Records
Skilmore keeps audit records of platform and administrative activity. Some of these records contain personal information necessary to identify the action performed (such as an account identifier), and privileged administrative audit records may include an IP address and browser (user-agent) information. Internet-protocol information may also be used, generally in a limited or non-identifying form, to support rate limiting and abuse prevention. We may retain these logs where necessary for security, accountability, abuse prevention, and legal purposes.
Your Rights and Requests
Depending on your circumstances and applicable law, you — or a parent or guardian acting for a learner — may be able to request:
- Access to personal information we hold
- Correction of inaccurate or incomplete information
- Deletion of information
- To object to certain processing
- To withdraw consent, where processing is based on consent
- Answers to questions about a learner's information
These requests are handled by contacting us at support@skilmore.com — there is currently no automatic, self-service way to export or delete personal information directly from your account, so please reach out and we will handle your request according to applicable requirements. We will respond within a reasonable time. In some cases we may need to verify your identity or your authority to act for a learner. We may not be able to delete information where we have a lawful reason to retain it (for example, moderation, security, or audit records), and we will explain this where it applies.
Security Compromises
Skilmore has procedures for responding to suspected security compromises involving personal information. Where a compromise occurs, we will act to address it and will comply with applicable legal notification requirements.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. Where material changes require additional notice or consent under applicable law, we will provide the appropriate notice.
Contact
For privacy questions or requests, contact us at support@skilmore.com. For account and billing queries, you can also reach us at accounts@skilmore.com.