Privacy Policy: The Tower (PHS Tower app)

Version 3.0
Effective date: August 10, 2026
Last updated: August 10, 2026

This Privacy Policy describes how The Tower, the student newspaper of Princeton High School ("The Tower," "we," "us," or "our"), handles information in the PHS Tower mobile app for iOS and Android (the "app").

The app is published under the bundle/application ID com.towerphs.phstower.

If you have any questions about this policy, email phstowersenioreditors@gmail.com.

What changed in version 3.0. Version 2.0 described an app with no sign-in at all. Signing in is back, on completely different terms, and the class schedule with it.

You now sign in by confirming a Princeton Public Schools email address, and your account is stored on your phone rather than on our servers. We do not keep a copy: no profile row, no password, not even your email address, which is used once to send your code and then forgotten. The class schedule is back on the same basis, written to your device and never uploaded.

The account, profile and class-schedule records created under version 1.0 were deleted from our database on August 10, 2026, not merely hidden. Nothing you entered in that version still exists on our side.

1. The short version

You can read the whole paper without signing in. Signing in is only for the class schedule.
If you do sign in, your account lives on your phone, not on our servers. We keep no copy of it and no record that you signed in.
We hold no record of you. No table in our database is keyed to a reader. There is no row anywhere with your name on it.
The app is free, contains no advertising, and contains no third-party analytics, tracking, or advertising SDKs.
We do not request access to your location, camera, microphone, photo library, contacts, calendar, health data, or files.
We do not sell or rent personal information. We have almost none to sell.
Your class schedule never leaves your phone, and the app never learns where you are in the building.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Your account, which we do not keep

Signing in means confirming that you control a Princeton Public Schools email address. We send a six-digit code to it, check the code, and then forget the address: the record of your request is deleted the moment you enter the code, and no account is created on our servers.

What the app keeps is held on your phone, in the operating system's secure storage (the iOS Keychain, or encrypted preferences on Android): a token saying that somebody confirmed a school address, and the address itself, so the app can show you which account you are signed in as. The token contains no name and no identifier that we could trace back to you.

Two things follow from storing it that way, and they are consequences rather than fine print. Signing in on a second device creates a separate account rather than syncing. And we cannot look up, recover, export or reset your account, because we have nothing to look it up in.

The app requests no Google permissions and holds no password.

This is a deliberate design constraint rather than a feature that happens to be missing. Storing identifiable student information on a third-party platform is what brings an app inside the scope of student-privacy obligations such as FERPA; the app is built so that there is nothing of the kind to protect.

2.2 Your class schedule, and the map that is not coming back

The class schedule is back, and it is stored only on your phone. Which classes you take, and who teaches them, is typed in by you, written to your device, and read back from it. It is never uploaded, we never receive it, and no other reader can see it.

What the app downloads is the opposite kind of thing: the school's own bell times, day types, terms, calendar and staff list. That is institutional information, identical for every student, and it tells us nothing about you.

The app has no access to Princeton Public Schools' student records, registration systems, or official rosters. The map of the school building was removed and will not return.

2.3 Content you submit to us

Letter to the Editor and the "Join the Tower" interest form are Google Forms owned by The Tower's own staff account and displayed inside the app. Responses go to Google and to the Tower's editors; they are covered by Google's Privacy Policy in addition to this one. They are never stored in the app's database.

Whatever you type into a form is what we receive. The app attaches nothing to it: no name, no email, no identifier, because it has nothing to attach.

Letters selected for publication may appear in The Tower in print or online, normally under the name you gave on the form. Please do not include information in a letter that you would not want our editors to read.

2.4 Push notification information

The app uses OneSignal to deliver push notifications about new issues and stories. When the app starts, OneSignal registers your device and processes:

a push token and a OneSignal device identifier,
basic device information such as device model, operating system version, language, and time zone,
your IP address, from which an approximate (typically country- or region-level) location may be derived, and
a subscription tag we set (audience = all) so editors can send general announcements.

We use this only to send and route notifications, and to know how many devices are subscribed. It identifies a device, not a person: we have no way to connect a push token to a student, because we hold no student records to connect it to. You can decline the notification permission when prompted, or turn notifications off at any time in your device's system settings for the PHS Tower app.

2.5 Information stored only on your device

The following stay on your device and are never transmitted to us:

Saved articles / bookmarks: stored locally so your reading list works offline.
Game state, such as crossword and Minesweeper progress.
Cached images and PDF pages, so the app loads faster and uses less data.

Deleting the app removes all of this local data from your device.

2.6 Information collected automatically by our providers

When the app fetches articles, images, issues, or fonts, our service providers receive ordinary technical information required to serve a network request, including your IP address, device type, and the time of the request. This happens with:

Supabase, which hosts our article database and article images/PDFs,
Google Fonts, from which the app loads certain typefaces at runtime,
Google, for any Google Form shown in the app, and
OneSignal, as described above.

We do not use this technical information to identify individual readers, and we could not connect it to a name if we tried: we do not have your name.

2.7 Information we do not collect

The app never asks for a location permission and contains no location-tracking code. It does not collect or request: an account or identity of any kind, GPS or device location, camera or microphone access, your photos, your contacts, your calendar, health or fitness data, financial or payment information, browsing history outside the app, or device identifiers used for advertising (IDFA / Android Advertising ID). The app displays no ads and contains no ad SDK.

The one exception to "no location" is the approximate, country- or region-level location that OneSignal may infer from your IP address, described in section 2.4. That is a by-product of your device connecting to the internet rather than something the app measures or asks permission for, we do not use it to target or identify you, and we do not receive any more precise location than that.

Note: the "camera" in the app's Vanguard reader is a purely software view control that pans and zooms the page image. It does not use your device's physical camera, and the app never requests camera permission.

3. How we use information

We use the information described above only to:

show you the newspaper and let you save, search, and share articles;
send notifications you have opted into;
keep the app secure, diagnose crashes and bugs, and prevent abuse; and
comply with the law and with school district policy.

We do not use information for advertising, and we do not sell, rent, or trade it.

4. Who we share information with

We share information only with the service providers that make the app work, and only to the extent needed:

Provider	What it handles	Its privacy policy
Supabase, Inc.	Article database, images/PDFs	https://supabase.com/privacy
Google LLC (Forms, Fonts)	Embedded forms, fonts	https://policies.google.com/privacy
OneSignal, Inc.	Push notification delivery	https://onesignal.com/privacy_policy
Apple Inc. / Google LLC (app stores)	App distribution and push transport	Apple / Google policies

We may also disclose information if we are legally required to do so, or where Princeton Public Schools policy or law requires disclosure: for example, in response to a lawful request, or to address a credible threat to someone's safety.

Other students: the app shows other readers nothing about you. There is no classmates list, no profile, no shared schedule, and no way for one reader to learn anything at all about another through the app.

Members of The Tower's editorial board and its faculty advisers can read letters and form responses submitted through the app's Google Forms, as part of normal newsroom operations.

5. Data retention

Reader records: none exist, so there is nothing to retain.
Letters and form submissions are held in The Tower's Google account as part of the newspaper's editorial record. Published material remains published.
Push notification records are kept while your device stays subscribed. Uninstalling the app or disabling notifications ends the subscription.
On-device data stays until you clear it or uninstall the app.
Sign-in codes are deleted as soon as you enter the code, and in any case within 15 minutes, when they expire.
Your account stays on your phone until you sign out, delete it, uninstall the app, or the school year ends, whichever comes first.

Records created by version 1.0 of the app (accounts, profiles and class schedules) were deleted from our database on August 10, 2026.

6. Your choices and rights

You can, at any time:

Read anonymously: everything except the class schedule works without signing in.
Sign out, from the account circle at the top of the screen. Your class list stays on the device, so signing back in restores it.
Delete your account, from the same place or from the account screen. This removes the sign-in, your class list and your saved articles from the device.
Turn off notifications: decline the prompt, or disable notifications for PHS Tower in your device settings.
Delete on-device data: uninstall the app.
Ask us anything about your information by emailing phstowersenioreditors@gmail.com. We will respond within a reasonable period, normally within 30 days. For most requests the answer will be that we are not holding anything of yours.

Deleting your account takes effect immediately and needs no request to us, because the account is on your phone rather than on our servers. For the same reason we cannot delete it for you, and we cannot restore it afterwards. If you submitted a letter through the form and want it withdrawn, email us, though publication in The Tower cannot be retracted after the fact. Push notifications are tied to your device rather than to any identity, so turn them off in your device settings or uninstall the app. Saved articles and game progress stay on your device until you uninstall.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the EU/UK GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act, including rights of access, correction, deletion, portability, and the right to object to certain processing. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising as those terms are used in California law. To exercise any right, use the contact address above; we will not discriminate against you for doing so.

Where the GDPR applies, our legal bases are: consent (notifications) and legitimate interests (running and securing the app, publishing the newspaper), plus legal obligation where applicable.

7. Children's privacy

The app is intended for Princeton High School students, their families, and the surrounding community, and is rated for users 13 and older. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us personal information, email phstowersenioreditors@gmail.com and we will delete it promptly.

Because many of our readers are minors, we keep collection to a minimum by design: no server-side accounts, no ads, no tracking, no advertising identifiers, and no location data.

8. Security

Traffic between the app and our servers uses standard HTTPS/TLS encryption. The app can only read from our database; it has no ability to write to it. Access to submitted letters is limited to Tower editors and advisers.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, which is precisely why the app holds no student information in the first place. There is no store of reader data here for a breach to expose.

9. Where your information is processed

Our service providers (Supabase, Google, OneSignal) operate servers in the United States and may process and store information there and in other countries. If you use the app from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the app changes. When we do, we will increment the version number and revise the "Last updated" date above, and post the new version in the app and at the policy URL listed on our App Store and Google Play listings: the URL itself stays the same. Material changes will be announced in the app. Continuing to use the app after an update means you accept the revised policy.

11. Contact us

The Tower: Princeton High School
151 Moore Street, Princeton, NJ 08540
Email: phstowersenioreditors@gmail.com

The Tower is a student publication of Princeton High School, Princeton Public Schools.