NisabaCircle
Privacy
What NisabaCircle stores, why, who can see it and how long it is kept. Everything below is taken from the software itself — the database schema and the services that read and write it — rather than from an intention. Where the software does not decide something, this page says so instead of guessing.
Who is responsible for your data
NisabaCircle is operated by Maytham Alrubaye, an individual rather than a company. The postal address for formal correspondence, and the jurisdiction whose law applies, are unresolved — both are decisions nobody has recorded yet, and neither is invented here. Your school decides who may join it, what groups exist, and how long its records are kept; those are the school's decisions, not ours.
What is stored
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address, account status, and whether your identity has been verified | Signing in. Your email address is your sign-in identity and comes from the identity provider |
| Your display name | So people who may already see your account know who you are |
| Your school and group memberships — the role, the status, who decided it and why | Deciding what you can see, and keeping a record a school can answer for |
| Messages you send, in groups and one to one | Delivering them. Message bodies are stored; they are not end-to-end encrypted |
| Photographs and videos you attach — the file, its type, size and digest, and the result of scanning it | Sharing them with the people in that conversation |
| Call records — who called whom, when it started, when it was answered, when it ended, and how | A school's record that a call happened |
| Sign-in records and registered devices | Security, and ringing your phone for a call |
| Content reports and safeguarding cases | Safeguarding |
Live calls are never recorded
No audio and no video from a live call is ever recorded, stored, transcribed or analysed. What a school keeps about a call is who, when, how long, and how it ended.
There is no recording feature to switch on, for anybody — not for a school, not for an administrator, and not for us.
Photographs and videos you attach — these are stored
Unlike a call, an attachment is kept. The file itself is stored, not merely a reference to it, and it is subject to the retention period below, to your school's evidence holds, and to safeguarding review.
Only images and video are accepted — JPEG, PNG, WebP, MP4 and QuickTime, and nothing else; a file whose container is not recognised is refused rather than relabelled. There are no documents and no PDFs. A photograph may be up to 8 MiB; a video up to 64 MiB and five minutes. Every upload is scanned for malware before anybody can fetch it.
A video's duration is read from the file and kept as part of the record. The pixels and the audio are never decoded on our servers, analysed, or transcribed. Playing one on your phone decodes it on your phone, from a file in the app's own private storage, and produces nothing that is stored or sent anywhere.
Who can see what
- The people in the conversation. A group's messages are visible to that group's members. A one-to-one is visible to the two people in it. Nobody else reads either as a matter of course — with one exception, which is the next point.
- The exception: safeguarding review. Your school's administrators and safeguarding leads can review content that has been reported, open a safeguarding case, and read the messages and attachments that case covers — including a one-to-one. This applies to any conversation at their school. A teacher cannot, whatever group they run.
- Administrators can see call records — who, when, how long, how it ended. Never any audio from the call, because none is ever recorded. A photograph or video attached to a message is a separate matter: those are stored, and a safeguarding case can show them.
- No public directory. Sharing a school is not sharing a group: you are only ever offered people you already share an approved group with.
- Schools are separated from one another. No school's administrator can see another school's records.
How long it is kept
Your school sets its own periods. It may keep things longer than the defaults below; it may not set anything shorter than the floor, because those exist for safeguarding reasons a school cannot waive.
| What | Default | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Message content | 24 months | 24 months |
| Photographs and files | 24 months | 24 months |
| Call records | 12 months | 12 months |
| Sign-in and session records | 12 months | 12 months |
| Accounts after their last membership | 12 months | 12 months |
| Safeguarding records | Never removed by routine cleanup; removing them requires an explicit legal basis | |
These periods are unresolved. They are the software's current defaults and an engineering starting point pending legal review. They are not a legal commitment, and this page may not be published as one until that review has happened.
An evidence hold placed for a safeguarding or legal reason keeps the records it covers past any of the above, including past a deletion request.
Your choices
- Block someone. A block stops a one-to-one in both directions, and the person blocked is not told.
- Report a message. It goes to your school's safeguarding lead.
- Delete your account. What that does, exactly.
What we do not do
- No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
- Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anybody for their own purposes.
- No analytics or tracking SDK is present in the application.
- No phone numbers are asked for or stored.
We do not claim end-to-end encryption. Data is protected in transit and at rest; message bodies are readable by the service, which is what makes safeguarding review possible.
Contacting us
Write to privacy@nisabacircle.com about anything on this page, or to ask what is held about you. For anything about your own school's decisions — who is in a group, how long that school keeps things — speak to your school first; those are its settings to make.
Last reviewed: unresolved: date of legal review.