Child safety

Version 1.0 · last updated 2026-08-24

Why this page exists before the risk does

Lrnon has no public rooms, no comments, no direct messages and no way for one learner to reach another. The safest possible position, and the current one.

The design for Lrnon includes topic rooms and a questions board. This page is written first, deliberately. A safeguarding policy produced after a feature ships is a reaction; produced before, it is a constraint on what may ship at all. What follows is that constraint.

What is open today

• Learning — every age, no account needed, no personal data collected.
• Accounts — optional, for syncing progress across devices. Under 18 requires guardian consent.
• Volunteering — open to under-18s with guardian consent, and we never publish their name or contact details.
• Feedback — reaches one person by email. It is not published.

Nothing a learner writes is visible to another learner. There is currently no mechanism by which a stranger could contact a child through this site.

Conditions before any public posting opens

Rooms, a questions board, or any other learner-to-learner surface will not open until all of the following are true. This list is a commitment, not an aspiration.

1. A named person is responsible for safeguarding, with a deputy, and the role appears on the roles page rather than sitting in the unstaffed column.
2. Posts are moderated before or immediately after publication, with a queue somebody actually reads daily — not a report button and hope.
3. No private messaging, ever. Public rooms only. Grooming needs privacy; a site with no private channel removes the mechanism rather than trying to detect it.
4. No profile fields that identify a child — no age, school, location, photo or contact details. Display names are generated, not chosen.
5. Reporting is one click from every post, works without an account, and reaches a person rather than a queue nobody owns.
6. A written escalation route, including when to contact local authorities, decided before it is needed rather than during.
7. Retention and deletion rules for anything a child posts, published on this page.

Until every one of those holds, the community page marks these spaces as planned and they stay closed. A room nobody is watching is worse than no room.

Guardian consent

Where the law treats a person as a child, we ask a parent or guardian first. India's DPDP Act sets that at 18 and requires verifiable consent; the GDPR sets 13–16 depending on the country and COPPA covers under-13s in the US. We apply whichever is stricter for the person.

Consent is a reply from the guardian's own email address — never a checkbox on a child's screen, which verifies nothing. It can be withdrawn at any time, immediately, with no reason required. The full mechanism is on the privacy page.

What we will never do

• Show advertising to anyone, at any age.
• Profile or behaviourally target a child. DPDP prohibits it; we would not want it regardless.
• Sell, share or license learner data.
• Publish a child's name, photograph, school or location — even with consent.
• Use anything a learner writes to train a model.

Sky, and why it is off

Sky is the site assistant. It is currently disabled and will not reach learners until it has been reviewed by hand at length. When it does run it answers only from Lrnon's own pages, refuses medical, legal, exam-authority, financial and personal-safety questions outright, and hands those to a person instead. It never asks for a name, phone number, school or payment details.

Reporting a concern

Write to lrnon.org@gmail.com with "child safety" in the subject. It reaches the people who run Lrnon and is treated ahead of everything else. Saying "child safety" in the subject is what lifts it out of ordinary correspondence, so please do, even if you are not sure the concern is serious.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. We are a learning website; we are not an emergency service and will not pretend otherwise.