FoldLens Junior privacy
Plain-language summary for students, parents, and teachers. The full Fold Commons privacy posture lives at /privacy — this page covers what is specific to FoldLens Junior.
What FoldLens Junior collects from a student
Nothing. No account. No name. No email. No phone number. No location. No analytics. No advertising identifiers. No third-party SDKs of any kind.
The only piece of information the app keeps on the device is the user's broad age band (under 13, 13–17, 18+), stored locally in iOS settings storage. This stays on the device and is used only to set the most-restrictive feature posture for younger users. It is never sent to a server.
What teacher mode syncs
Teacher mode is an opt-in toggle in the Settings screen. When a teacher turns it on, they can bookmark proteins for tomorrow's class. Those bookmarks — a list of protein slug IDs like insulin or p53 — sync between the teacher's own devices via iCloud Key-Value Storage.
The bookmark list never contains student data. There is no student roster, no grade book, no progress tracking, no submitted work. iCloud KVS is per-iCloud-account, encrypted in transit by Apple.
The COPPA + state ASAA posture
FoldLens Junior is designed to be safe for school deployments serving children under 13, including under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and state-level Age-Appropriate Social Apps Acts (Texas, Utah, Louisiana, and similar):
- An age gate appears on first launch. Under-13 receives the most-restrictive default flag posture.
- No language-model auto-trigger for users under 13. Every Apple-Intelligence explanation is gated behind an explicit tap.
- External links to other websites (AlphaFold Database, glossary deep links) are disabled by default for under-13 — they degrade gracefully to inline text.
- No advertising of any kind. The app is free forever; there is no upsell.
- No "social" features. There is no inter-user messaging, no leaderboard, no shared identity surface.
What the app fetches from the internet
To render a protein structure, the app downloads structural data for that protein from the AlphaFold Database, operated by EMBL-EBI. This fetch contains no information about the user — it is an anonymous public API request, identical to what any web browser visiting alphafold.ebi.ac.uk would send.
Network requests on cellular or institutional networks may be visible to the network provider. We don't operate any servers that see who is using the app.
Open source posture
FoldLens Junior's source code is private during build-out and goes public at v1.0 under the Apache 2.0 license, where anyone can read exactly what the app does and confirm that it matches this posture.
Contact
Privacy questions: privacy@foldcommons.org. General contact: hello@foldcommons.org. Fold Commons is a non-profit organisation; full org info on the governance page.