Last updated: October 2, 2026

Privacy Policy

Our policies, product by product

This page covers what applies across SparkMinds. Each product has its own page with exactly what it collects, where that goes and how long we keep it:

• Website & forms: sparkminds.co, including the Founding Family form, guidance emails, the Collaborate and Careers forms, analytics and what the site stores in your browser.
• Listening Check app: our iOS app, which keeps all its data on your phone.

The SparkMinds app hasn't launched yet. We'll publish its own privacy policy here before it does.

These policies don't cover other websites or services we link to.

Who we are

SparkMinds, Inc. is a Delaware corporation that builds support for families of deaf and hard of hearing children. We decide how and why your personal information is used, which makes us the “controller” of it under data protection law. Our contact details, including our mailing address, are under Contact us.

Why we are allowed to use your information

Data protection law (including the GDPR) asks us to name a legal basis for each use of personal information. We rely on four:

• Your consent, for example when you join the Founding Family waitlist, sign up for guidance emails or accept analytics. You can withdraw it at any time.
• Your explicit consent, for information about your child's hearing, which the law treats as health information. You give it with a separate checkbox, and nothing about your child's hearing is stored without it.
• Steps you ask us to take before a contract, for example considering your job application.
• Our legitimate interests, where they don't override yours: keeping our forms free of spam and abuse, and replying to professionals who write to us.

The website policy lists the basis for each form and use.

International transfers

SparkMinds is based in the United States, and the service providers that store information for us do so mainly in the US. If you're in the European Economic Area or the UK, your information is therefore transferred to the US. Where the law requires it, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK's addendum to them) in our providers' data processing terms. You can ask for a copy of these safeguards at privacy@sparkminds.co.

Children's information

Our website is for adults. We don't knowingly collect personal information directly from children. Information about a child reaches us only from their parent or caregiver, who chooses to share it, and for anything about the child's hearing, gives explicit consent first.

If you think a child has sent us their own information, write to privacy@sparkminds.co and we'll delete it.

The Listening Check app is used by caregivers on behalf of their children, and what they enter stays on their phone. SparkMinds doesn't receive it.

Security and data breaches

• Information sent to and from our website is encrypted in transit (TLS, the “https” in the address bar).
• The providers that store information for us encrypt it at rest.
• Only the SparkMinds team members who need your information to do their work can see it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your information at risk, we'll tell you without undue delay: what happened, what was affected and what we're doing about it. Where the law requires it, we'll also notify the data protection authority within 72 hours of learning of the breach.

Changes to this policy

We'll update these pages as SparkMinds changes, and each page shows the date it was last updated. If a change affects how we use information you've already given us, we'll ask for your consent again wherever the law requires it.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you and ask us to fix or delete it. Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR in the EEA and UK, or California's privacy laws), you may also have these rights:

• Access: get a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correction: have us fix information that is wrong or incomplete.
• Deletion: have us delete your personal information.
• Restriction: ask us to pause using your information while we sort out a concern, for example if you've told us it's inaccurate.
• Portability: receive your information in a machine-readable format.
• Objection: object to uses of your information based on our legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent: where we rely on your consent (analytics, guidance emails, the details you shared about your child), you can withdraw it at any time. That doesn't undo anything we did before you withdrew it.
• California: we don't sell your personal information, and we don't share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We honor the Global Privacy Control signal. We won't treat you differently for using any of these rights.
• Complain to a regulator: if you're in the EEA or UK, you can complain to your local data protection authority. The European Data Protection Board lists them at edpb.europa.eu; in the UK it's the ICO at ico.org.uk. We'd be grateful for the chance to put things right first.

To use any of these rights, write to privacy@sparkminds.co. We may ask for a detail or two to confirm it's really you. We'll reply within 30 days, and it's free unless a request is clearly excessive or repeated. We don't make decisions about you by fully automated means.

Contact us

• Privacy questions and requests: privacy@sparkminds.co. Our privacy lead, Dr. Uma Soman, reads this inbox.
• Everything else: hello@sparkminds.co
• Mailing address: SparkMinds, Inc., P.O. Box 17135, 3100 E Tatman Ct, Urbana, IL 61802, United States

We haven't appointed a formal Data Protection Officer; at our current scale we're not required to, and we'll revisit this as SparkMinds grows.

© 2026 SparkMinds, Inc.