Last updated: October 2, 2026

Website Privacy Policy

The short version

We collect what you type into our forms, so we can do what you asked: hold your Founding Family place, send guidance notes, or reply to you. We don't sell it, and we don't use it for advertising. Analytics load only if you accept them, and we don't record sessions.

What this policy covers

This policy covers the SparkMinds website at sparkminds.co and the forms on it. It's one part of our privacy policy; the Listening Check app has its own page.

How we handle international transfers, children's information, security and changes to this policy applies across SparkMinds, and is on the privacy overview.

The Founding Family form

When you join the waitlist at sparkminds.co/invitation, we collect:

Your name and email address
Your phone country code and phone number
Your city, state or province, and country
Your child's age range (for example, “2–3 years”)
Your child's hearing device (for example, bilateral cochlear implants)
Whether your child started wearing their first hearing device before or after their second birthday
The language or languages spoken at home (optional)
Whether your child is in listening and language therapy (optional)
A short note about your biggest challenge right now (optional)
Whether you'd like to share feedback during early access (optional)
A referral code, if a family invited you (optional)
The page you signed up from, and any campaign (UTM) tags in its web address

We also record that you gave consent for your child's details, and when. And we create your own invite code, so you can invite other families if you'd like to.

We use this information to:

contact you about your Founding Family status;
personalize your eventual SparkMinds experience;
understand which channels reach families of deaf and hard of hearing children;
understand what families need so we can design SparkMinds around it, using only combined, de-identified insights. We never use it to build advertising profiles.

We use your city, state or province, and country to connect your family with local resources and programs, and to plan where SparkMinds becomes available. We do not sell this information.

Your child's hearing details

Your child's hearing device, the age they started wearing it and their therapy status count as health information under data protection law (special category data under the GDPR). So we ask for your explicit consent with a separate, required checkbox on the form, and we use these details only for the purposes above. The same applies to anything about your child's hearing you choose to write in the optional note. You can withdraw this consent at any time by writing to privacy@sparkminds.co, and we'll delete those details.

Your welcome email

When you join, we send you a welcome email from our own mailbox, hello@sparkminds.co.

Guidance emails

If you sign up for our occasional guidance emails (the “Get occasional updates” box at the bottom of each page), we collect your email address, the page you signed up from and any campaign (UTM) tags in its web address. We use it only to send you the guidance notes and to see which pages and channels people sign up from. We don't share it, sell it or combine it with advertising.

Signing up is your consent to receive these emails, and you can withdraw it at any time: every guidance email includes an unsubscribe link, and you can always write to privacy@sparkminds.co to be removed. Unsubscribing takes you off the guidance list; it doesn't affect any Founding Family waitlist status you may have. We may use an email service provider to send these emails on our behalf.

The Collaborate form

Professionals and parent leaders can reach us through sparkminds.co/collaborate. We collect your name, email, organization, role or roles and your message, plus your phone number and roughly how many families you serve if you choose to give them, and the page and campaign (UTM) tags you came from. We use it to reply to you and to explore working together.

The Careers form

If you apply through sparkminds.co/careers, we collect your name, email, current role and message, plus anything optional you add: phone number, LinkedIn and GitHub profiles, qualifications and a link to your résumé. (We don't take file uploads.) We also record the page and campaign (UTM) tags you came from. We use your application only to consider you for a role at SparkMinds and to stay in touch about it.

Legal basis for each use

What we use	Why we may (GDPR basis)
Founding Family form: your contact and location details, your child's age range and your optional answers	Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Founding Family form: your child's hearing device, age at first device, therapy status, and anything about their hearing in your note	Your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a)), given with the checkbox on the form
Guidance emails	Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Analytics	Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), given in the privacy banner
Careers form	Steps you ask us to take before entering a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Collaborate form	Our legitimate interest in replying to professionals who contact us (Art. 6(1)(f))
Spam protection on our forms	Our legitimate interest in keeping the forms working and free of abuse (Art. 6(1)(f))

Founding Family form: your contact and location details, your child's age range and your optional answers
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Founding Family form: your child's hearing device, age at first device, therapy status, and anything about their hearing in your note
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a)), given with the checkbox on the form
Guidance emails
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Analytics
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), given in the privacy banner
Careers form
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Steps you ask us to take before entering a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Collaborate form
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Our legitimate interest in replying to professionals who contact us (Art. 6(1)(f))
Spam protection on our forms
Why we may (GDPR basis):
Our legitimate interest in keeping the forms working and free of abuse (Art. 6(1)(f))

Analytics

We use PostHog to understand how families find SparkMinds and which parts of the site help. It loads only after you accept analytics in the privacy banner. If you decline, or never answer, it never loads.

Once you accept, PostHog receives:

the pages you view, the site or campaign link that brought you there, how far you scroll, and the links to other sites you click;
clicks on our main buttons and links (such as “Become a Founding Family”);
form progress: when you start a form, finish or skip a field, and whether a submission worked. We record the field's name, never what you typed;
when you share an article or copy your invite link;
which country you pick on a country-specific article (not your time zone or location).

Like any website visit, these come with technical details such as your browser, device type and IP address, which PostHog uses to estimate your approximate location.

If you join the Founding Family waitlist with analytics accepted, PostHog links your browser to the ID of your waitlist record, so we can see which pages helped families decide. We don't send your name or email to PostHog.

We do not record sessions, and PostHog doesn't capture clicks automatically: it receives only the events listed above. We don't use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels or social media tracking pixels. PostHog stores this data in the United States.

We respect your browser's privacy signals. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, we treat that as a “no” to analytics and don't load them at all. If it sends Do Not Track, PostHog records nothing.

You can change your answer at any time with Privacy choices at the bottom of every page. If you withdraw consent, analytics stop straight away.

What we store in your browser

The site sets no cookies of its own. It keeps a few small entries in your browser's local storage so it works the way you'd expect:

Name	What it remembers	How long
`sm_consent_v1`	Your answer to the analytics question	Until you change it or clear your browser storage
`sm_ref`	The invite code from a family's invite link, so it can be credited when you join	90 days
`sm-article-country`	The country you picked on a country-specific article	Until you clear your browser storage
`ph_*`	PostHog's standard identifiers (a cookie and local storage). Set only after you accept analytics.	Per PostHog's defaults

sm_consent_v1
What it remembers:
Your answer to the analytics question
How long:
Until you change it or clear your browser storage
sm_ref
What it remembers:
The invite code from a family's invite link, so it can be credited when you join
How long:
90 days
sm-article-country
What it remembers:
The country you picked on a country-specific article
How long:
Until you clear your browser storage
ph_*
What it remembers:
PostHog's standard identifiers (a cookie and local storage). Set only after you accept analytics.
How long:
Per PostHog's defaults

Some articles give different guidance by country. On those pages we suggest a country from your device's time zone, and if you pick one we remember it in your browser so the next article opens on the same country. The time zone and your choice stay on your device; with analytics accepted, we record which country was picked (not your time zone or location).

Spam protection

To stop spam, our form endpoints briefly use your IP address as a counter, so a single address can't send dozens of submissions in a row. The counter lasts about a minute and then expires. We don't store your IP address with your submission or use it for anything else.

Who processes your information

These companies handle information for us, under our instructions, as our service providers (“processors”):

Provider	What it does for us
Vercel	Hosts the website and runs the functions that receive form submissions. Like any web host, it keeps short-lived technical request logs
Airtable	Stores form submissions
PostHog	Analytics, only if you accept them (hosted in the US)
Upstash	Keeps the short-lived spam-protection counters
Google Workspace	Our email: the welcome email and our replies come from our mailbox

Vercel
What it does for us:
Hosts the website and runs the functions that receive form submissions. Like any web host, it keeps short-lived technical request logs
Airtable
What it does for us:
Stores form submissions
PostHog
What it does for us:
Analytics, only if you accept them (hosted in the US)
Upstash
What it does for us:
Keeps the short-lived spam-protection counters
Google Workspace
What it does for us:
Our email: the welcome email and our replies come from our mailbox

Our providers are based in the United States. The privacy overview explains how we protect information transferred there.

How long we keep it

Founding Family waitlist: if you don't go on to use SparkMinds, we automatically delete your form data 12 months after your last contact with us. Your child's details follow the same schedule. If you go on to use the SparkMinds app, its own privacy policy (published before launch) will explain what happens next.
Guidance emails: until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete your address.
Collaborate messages: as long as we're in conversation, and up to 24 months after our last contact.
Job applications: up to 12 months after the role is filled, unless you ask us to delete yours sooner.
Spam-protection counters: about a minute.

If you ask us to delete your information, we will. Write to privacy@sparkminds.co and we'll remove it from our systems within 30 days (usually much sooner), except any minimal record the law requires us to keep. Deletions take effect straight away in our live systems; leftover copies in backups are purged within 90 days.

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.