Privacy Policy

Fruitful Futures is operated by Fruitful LLC, 82 Wendell Ave. STE 100, Pittsfield, MA 01201. It gives a student a regular half-hour conversation with an AI counselor about school, life, and what they are working towards, and gives their parent or guardian a short picture of how it is going.

This policy describes what we collect, who else sees it, and how long we keep it. The same promises appear in the consent and privacy agreement a student and their parent each complete before the first session; if you have signed that, you have read this.

Fruitful Futures is for students in grade 6 and above, with the agreement of a parent or guardian. A parent or guardian confirms the student’s grade when they consent, and a student cannot begin without that consent on file.

Some students in grade 6 are under 13, so we treat that case explicitly. The parent or guardian consent described above is the verifiable parental consent the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act requires. Setting a family up creates a student record first — the account details in section 3 — and nothing else follows until that consent is on file: no session, no transcript, no notes, no texting. A parent or guardian can ask us what we hold about their child, ask us to delete it, and withdraw their consent at any time from their own signed-in account in the app. Withdrawing does not delete anything; section 9 says what it does.

• Account and identity. A name, an email address, a school, a grade and a ZIP code for the student; a name and contact details for the parent or guardian who consents.
• The form before the first session. A parent or guardian, and then the student, answer a short form so the counselor starts out knowing the basics. The parent or guardian gives the student’s date of birth, which is how we know the student’s age. The form also asks things like when the student can meet, how the parent wants updates, a safety contact, a second parent or guardian’s contact, the language spoken at home, how the student gets around, budget comfort for activities, the household’s income range, and what the student is into. Some questions are optional, such as eligibility for free or reduced lunch.
• Learning and health needs, only if a parent tells us. One optional question on the form asks about anything that helps the counselor work with the student, such as ADHD, dyslexia, an IEP or a 504 plan. We keep that answer apart from everything else. Only the counselor uses it, it never brings it up first, and it is never shown to a family or included in anything a family receives.
• Session transcripts and audio. Sessions happen on Google Meet. A meeting assistant joins each call to produce captions, and we store the resulting written transcript so the counselor remembers the student between sessions. We also keep the audio of each call, in private storage for the family. We do not keep video.
• What the counselor writes. Notes, action items, a starting summary, the short progress notes a parent receives, and a record of what the counselor has learned about the student, such as their goals, grades, test scores and the colleges they are considering. Each item in that record is dated and points back to the session, text or form answer it came from.
• Corrections by our team. A member of our team can open a student’s record, read each item with the words it came from, and correct it or retire it if it is wrong. A correction is added beside what it corrects, and a retired item is no longer used by the counselor. Our team can also read notes written for a parent that our privacy check held back. Each time our team opens a record or changes it, that is written to a log we keep.
• Text messages, if a family turns texting on. The student’s mobile number, the messages exchanged with their counselor, and the delivery information the mobile carrier reports back to us. If a parent or guardian texts the counselor, we keep their number and their messages too, and what they tell the counselor becomes part of their child’s record. See Section 8.
• Ordinary technical data. The usual server and device information needed to run and secure the service.

A parent does not see or hear what the student says in a session. This is deliberate: it is what makes the conversation worth having. What a parent receives is a starting summary after the first session, which the student has read and approved, and after each session a short note about progress and what the student is working on — never a recap of the conversation. The student sees every note first and has a day to change it before it reaches their parent. The short note after each session is the weekly report. It goes to the parents the family has chosen to receive it, and to every parent of the student until the family chooses. The starting summary goes to every parent of the student.

Beyond those notes, a parent sees only what we have released to them, and nothing reaches them any other way. That is:

• attendance and cancellations;
• a one-line direction for each area of the student’s life, with no detail behind it;
• milestones the student reaches;
• goals the student has accepted;
• anything the family has to act on, such as a form, a payment, a deadline or a signature;
• the name, purpose and cost of any specialization;
• the student’s college list and test scores;
• financial aid information, unless the family changes that setting;
• grades, only if the family chooses to share them;
• anything the student asks the counselor to pass on.

A parent never sees transcripts of sessions or texts, summaries of them, anything the student said in confidence, the counselor’s guesses or reasoning, any learning or health need recorded about the student, internal scores, or a brother’s or sister’s record. The one exception is a risk of serious harm. Then something the student said privately can reach a parent, and the counselor tells the student first.

The same boundary applies to text messages: a parent does not receive copies of the conversation between a student and their counselor.

If a student describes immediate danger to themselves or someone else, the counselor will stop, say plainly that it cannot keep that private, point them towards an adult who is actually there, and alert a person at Fruitful Futures. We record only that a concern was raised and whether a trusted adult was available — never what was said. Fruitful Futures does not contact emergency services on anyone’s behalf and is not an emergency service.

To work at all, Fruitful Futures passes what is said to companies that process it on our instructions: the AI providers that run the counselor and search its notes, the service that produces the transcript, Google, which provides the meeting, our database host, and — if texting is on — the messaging carrier and aggregator that delivers the messages. They do not use it for anything else.

These are the companies, what each one receives, and why:

• OpenAI runs the counselor. It receives what the student says in a session (their voice, live), what is written in texts and emails to the counselor, the text of documents a family shares, and the notes the counselor keeps, so it can reply, check for safety concerns, write summaries and search its notes.
• Recall.ai joins each meeting as the meeting assistant. It receives the meeting’s audio and produces the captions and transcript.
• Deepgram, when our team turns it on for a session, receives the student’s voice during that session to tell when they have finished speaking.
• Google provides the meeting (Google Meet) and, when a student shares a Google Doc, lets the counselor read it and leave comments on it.
• Supabase is our database host. It stores accounts, transcripts, notes, messages and recordings of whole classes, and handles signing in.
• Amazon Web Services stores the files a family uploads and the audio recording of each meeting.
• Vercel hosts the website and app, so every request to them passes through it.
• Twilio, if texting is on, receives phone numbers and the text of each message so it can deliver texts and pass on replies.
• Resend sends and receives our email. It receives email addresses and the content of each email, including any attached document.
• Stripe handles payment when a parent buys a membership or more meeting time. It receives the parent’s email address and the card details they enter on Stripe’s own page; we never see the card number.

We do not sell personal information and we do not use these conversations for advertising.

Text messaging and mobile data. We do not share your personal data with third parties for marketing or promotional purposes. In particular, no mobile information — including a phone number and any SMS or text-message opt-in or consent data — will be shared with or sold to third parties or affiliates for marketing purposes. Text-message originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third parties, except the messaging provider we use strictly to deliver the messages you have asked to receive.

We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our terms, or to prevent fraud or harm.

• Transcripts and texts are deleted after 12 months; the rest is kept until you ask us to delete it. The word-for-word transcript of each session and the text messages are deleted automatically 12 months after they were made. The same 12 months applies to what the counselor saved from those conversations in the student’s own words: its running summary of a text conversation, topics it set aside from one, the line of evidence behind a change to a specialization, and how a student said they like to open a session. A question a student texts for the counselor to look up, and the answer, are deleted after seven days. Everything else is kept until a parent asks us to delete it, or a student asks once they are 18: the record that each session happened, form answers, the notes and records written from the sessions, and the audio of each call. After an account has been closed for 30 days, we may delete its notes and documents, so we can’t guarantee they will be kept. We may also keep some of it for internal use. In practice, a closed account’s information is erased 30 days after it closes, unless our team has placed a hold on it for a reason they write down, such as a legal matter, a dispute, a safety concern, or because the family asked us to keep it. Nothing in a student’s record is overwritten. A correction is added beside what it corrects, with its date, so there is a history of what we knew and when.
• Deleting it. A parent can ask us to delete it at any time, and a student can ask once they are 18, by writing to their counselor’s email address. A named member of our team checks each request before anything is deleted. We then wipe everything that identifies anyone, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, messages, transcripts, audio and files, and keep only anonymous counts, such as how many sessions took place and what they cost to run. We also keep the record that consent was given or withdrawn and a log of when our team looked at or changed the record; neither holds what anyone said in a session.
• The meeting service’s copy. The service that joins the call keeps its own copy of the transcript and audio for up to twelve months. A deletion request does not reach that copy sooner.
• What the law requires. We may still retain limited records for legal or tax reasons.

Texting is optional, it is off unless a parent or guardian turns it on, and a family can use Fruitful Futures in full without it. Turning it on is a separate step from the consent agreement: the parent switches it on, gives the student’s mobile number, and confirms that number with a one-time code. Nothing is sent to a number that has not been confirmed that way. A phone number belongs to one person in our records, so a number that already belongs to someone else cannot be confirmed for the student.

The texts the counselor starts are shaped by the student’s own pattern: whether they have followed through on what they said they would do, whether their replies and engagement are holding steady or falling off, and which topics they engage with or go quiet on. The counselor uses that to choose how brief, gentle or direct a text is, and to hold back the earliest reminder for a student who seems to be pulling away. It is worked out from that student’s own records only, and a parent does not see it.

Texting is for students who are at least 13. A grade does not establish an age, so we go by the student’s date of birth, which the parent or guardian gives on the form before the first session. If we do not have a date of birth, the parent or guardian confirms the student is 13 or older when they turn texting on, and we do not text a student whose age nobody has confirmed. A date of birth under 13 overrides that confirmation. We do not text students under 13 at all, whatever their grade.

Message and data rates may apply and message frequency varies. The student can reply STOP to any message to end it, or HELP for help; the parent switches it off in the app, where they switched it on. Full program terms are on our text message page.

A parent or guardian can withdraw their consent at any time, from their own signed-in account in the app. Any parent of the student who can consent can do it, and one is enough. Withdrawing deletes nothing: what is already recorded stays. While a consent is withdrawn the counselor does not meet with the student, does not text them, and no new note goes to a parent. Notes already sent stay where they are.

Consent is complete only when a parent has signed and the student has also acknowledged. A student can end any session whenever they want and can skip any question without giving a reason. Either of you can ask for a copy of what Fruitful Futures holds by writing to your counselor’s email address; deleting it is covered in section 7.

If we change this policy materially we will ask a family to review and agree again before their next session, rather than relying on a notice nobody reads. The consent agreement carries a version for exactly that reason.