MyLittleLink Terms of Service for Schools

1. Who we are

MyLittleLink is provided by My Little Link (Pty) Ltd, a private company incorporated in South Africa under the Companies Act, 2008, registration number 2026/532101/07, trading as MyLittleLink. Its directors are Shemone Olivier and Vernon Olivier.

• Physical address (the registered office, also for the service of legal documents): 195 Starling Avenue, Boskruin, Randburg, 2188, South Africa
• Postal address: 195 Starling Avenue, Boskruin, Randburg, 2188, South Africa (the same as the registered office)
• Telephone: 066 219 0352 (+27 66 219 0352), also on WhatsApp
• Email: support@mylittlelink.com
• Website: https://mylittlelink.com
• Information Officer: Vernon Olivier, privacy@mylittlelink.com
• Industry code of conduct or accreditation body: none

2. Words we use

• Child: a child enrolled at the School whose information the School records in the app.
• Guardian: a parent or other person the School has linked to a Child as a guardian in the app. Under POPIA the Guardian is normally the "competent person" who may consent for the Child.
• Staff: a person the School has given a staff role in the app (owner, principal, educator, assistant, extramural instructor).
• Users: Guardians and Staff together.
• School Data: everything the School and its Users put into the app or that the app records about them and the Children.
• Personal information, special personal information, responsible party, operator and data subject have the meanings in the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 ("POPIA").
• Tier: the Basic, Standard, Premium or Franchise package shown on our pricing page.

3. What MyLittleLink is

3.1MyLittleLink is a communication and daily-record app for schools. Staff record a child's day (meals, naps, nappies, mood, activities, photos, incidents, medication given) and each Guardian receives it privately in the app. It also carries in-app messaging, announcements, a calendar, forms, documents, attendance, medication records, and, at higher Tiers, billing, assessments and curriculum tools.

3.2What is included at each Tier is listed on the pricing page on the day you subscribe. We may add features to a Tier at any time. We remove a feature from a Tier only with 30 days' written notice, and if the feature is one you use, you may cancel under clause 6 without cost.

3.3The app is built for cheap Android phones and poor connections. A Data Saver setting lets a User ask for lighter pages and media. A User may turn it on or off at any time, and the app never overrides that choice. For a User who has not chosen, the app may switch it on after it has measured pages failing to load on that User's phone; the app says so when it happens, and the User can undo it with one tap.

3.4The app works offline for capture: a Staff member's entry made without signal is stored on the phone and sent when signal returns. Delivery to Guardians happens only after it reaches our server.

4. Your account and your Users

4.1We set up the School's account with you on the setup call. The person you name as the school owner receives the owner account. You are responsible for everything done through your Users' accounts, except where we are at fault.

4.2Staff sign in with a link we email to them (a magic link); they have no password. Guardians sign in with an email address and a password that they choose. The School decides who is invited and in which role, and must remove a User's access when they leave.

4.3The School must give a Staff role only to a person it is entitled to employ or engage in child-related work, having done the checks the law requires of it.

4.4The School must link a person to a Child as a Guardian only if it is satisfied that the person is a parent, guardian or other person with parental responsibilities and rights for that Child, or a person the Child's parent has authorised. The School must remove a link it later learns is wrong.

4.5Every message between a Guardian and a Staff member is visible to the School's principal and owner. This is a fixed design of the app and cannot be turned off. The School must tell its Users this before they use the app. (We tell them too, in the end-user terms and the privacy notice.)

5. Trial, fees and payment

5.1Every School starts with fourteen free days. Nothing is charged during the trial. If no Tier has been chosen by the end of the trial, the account pauses until one is chosen, as the Refund and Cancellation Policy explains.

5.2After the trial the fee is the monthly price of your Tier on the pricing page, per school, in South African rand. MyLittleLink is not registered for VAT, so the price carries no VAT. No setup fee, no per-teacher fee.

5.3We invoice monthly in advance. The invoice comes from My Little Link (Pty) Ltd and is emailed to the school owner on the day it is issued. Payment is due on receipt of the invoice, by EFT into the bank account shown on the invoice. The School never pays us through the app.

5.4If an invoice is still unpaid 7 days after its date, the School is locked out of the app until it is paid. We email the school owner 2 days before a lock-out. During a lock-out Guardians and Staff cannot sign in. The school owner alone can still sign in, to read the School Data and export it but not to change it, so that the School can keep meeting its own legal duties. Your School Data is kept safe and unchanged. We do not delete anything because of non-payment.

5.5We may change a Tier's price with at least 30 days' written notice. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before it takes effect and nothing further is owed.

5.6If the School uses the app's billing feature to send Guardians their invoices and statements, the fees are owed to the School, and Guardians pay the School directly, never through the app. We are not a payment service provider and do not hold the School's money.

6. Cancelling

6.1The subscription is month to month. You may cancel at any time by email to cancellations@mylittlelink.com; it ends at the end of the paid month. No cancellation fee, no penalty, no notice period beyond that.

6.2Cancellations, refunds and the seven-day cooling-off for online sign-ups are governed by our Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these terms.

6.3Clause 15 explains what happens to School Data when the subscription ends.

7. Your duties as the responsible party

The School is the responsible party under POPIA for the personal information of its Children, Guardians and Staff. MyLittleLink processes that information as the School's operator. That means:

7.1Lawful basis. The School must have a lawful basis for every category of information it records. For a Child's personal information that basis is normally the prior consent of a competent person, and for a Child's health information (allergies, medication, medical notes) it is the consent of a competent person together with the School's duties as a partial care facility or ECD programme. The School obtains and keeps that consent; the app records what the School tells it.

7.2The enrolment form. The app records, at enrolment, that the School has obtained the Guardian's agreement to the daily feed as a condition of enrolment, including that the Child will sometimes appear in photos that are mainly of other children. The School's paper or electronic enrolment form MUST actually say so. Consent to use a Child's image in marketing is never presumed and is only ever given by the Guardian in the app. No School form, notice or promise may state that a child will be kept out of photographs or out of activities.

7.3Information Officer. The School must have designated its own Information Officer under POPIA and registered them with the Information Regulator, and must give us the name and contact details so that we can direct data subject requests to them.

7.4Accuracy. The School must keep Children's, Guardians' and Staff records in the app accurate and up to date.

7.5Data subject requests. A request by a Guardian or Staff member to access, correct or erase their or their Child's information goes to the School. The app gives the School the tools to answer it (an export per Child, a correction path, and an erasure engine the school owner runs). We assist the School where the tools cannot, at no charge for a reasonable number of requests.

7.6Registration and record-keeping. The School remains responsible for its registration as a partial care facility or ECD programme and for keeping the records that registration, its funding or subsidy conditions, and the law require of it. The app is a tool for keeping some of those records; it does not replace the School's duty to keep them.

7.7Mandatory reporting. Nothing in the app changes the School's duty to report suspected abuse or neglect of a Child to the authorities. Recording an incident in the app is not a report to anyone outside the School.

8. Our duties as your operator

8.1We process School Data only to provide the service to you and only on your instructions, which are these terms and the settings your Staff choose in the app.

8.2We treat School Data as confidential. Our staff and contractors who can reach it are bound to confidentiality and reach it only when needed to run, support or secure the service.

8.3We keep appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational security measures. In outline: each school's data is separated at the database level so that one school cannot read another's; every upload is scanned for malware; children's media is stored privately and served only through a check of the viewer's role and the child's consent on every request; access to health details is logged; connections are encrypted. The privacy notice describes these in more detail.

8.4Where your data is. School Data is stored and processed in Google Cloud's africa-south1 region (Johannesburg) and, for the text-to-speech feature, Microsoft Azure's South Africa North region. We do not send Children's or health information to any processor outside South Africa. Two providers outside South Africa, both listed in section 9 of the privacy notice, receive something narrower: a phone's push notification service (Google, Apple or Mozilla) receives an encrypted message only that phone can read, and, when the emergency escalation nudge is switched on, the WhatsApp provider (Meta) receives a Guardian's own phone number and the fixed message, and no Child information, only to deliver the nudge.

8.5Sub-operators. The privacy notice lists every third party that processes School Data for us and what each one receives. We add a sub-operator only under a written agreement that binds it to at least these duties, and we tell you in the privacy notice before it starts processing.

8.6Security compromise. If we have reasonable grounds to believe that School Data has been accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, we notify the School's owner and Information Officer immediately, and no later than 72 hours after we become aware, with what we know, so that the School can notify the Information Regulator and the affected data subjects as POPIA requires. We help the School with that notification.

8.7Data subject requests. If a Guardian or Staff member sends a POPIA request to us instead of to the School, we pass it to the School's Information Officer without answering it ourselves, unless it concerns our own processing (for example a demo request or a marketing enquiry a person sent us).

8.8Return and deletion. On termination we follow clause 15. On the School's written instruction at any time we de-identify or delete School Data, except where the law or a safeguarding ledger requires it to be kept, in which case we tell you what is kept and why.

8.9Audit. Once a year on request, and after any security compromise, we give the School's Information Officer a written description of our security measures and sub-operators sufficient to satisfy the School's own POPIA duties. We do not give physical access to our systems.

9. Acceptable use

The School must ensure that its Users:

9.1keep Guardian-to-Staff conversations inside the app, and do not use the app to exchange phone numbers or move a conversation about a Child to WhatsApp, SMS or another channel. The app is built so that no phone number is shown between a Guardian and a Staff member, except that the School's owner, or a principal the owner allows, may open a Guardian's mobile number from the Child's family card to phone them, and the app records every time that happens. Do not defeat that on purpose;

9.2upload photos, videos or voice recordings of a Child only through the app's capture and tagging flow, so that the consent controls can work, and never post media of a Child anywhere else without the Guardian's separate consent;

9.3do not try to work around a consent control, an approval step, a role restriction or a school boundary, and do not try to access another school's data;

9.4do not post content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, discriminatory or that violates someone's privacy;

9.5do not upload malware or attempt to disrupt the service;

9.6do not copy, reverse-engineer or resell the app;

9.7use the medication, allergy, incident and attendance features truthfully. These records are relied on for a Child's safety.

We may remove content and suspend a User that breaches this clause, and we tell the School's owner when we do.

10. Children's media and the consent controls

10.1The app suppresses a photo, video or voice clip for every viewer if any child shown in it does not have the required consent. This "withhold whole" rule means that one child without consent hides a group photo from every family. The app tells Staff before they post which children will block a photo.

10.2The app never shows a Guardian a photo in which their own Child is not tagged, so a Guardian never sees another family's child by accident. This depends on Staff tagging every child who is in the frame. The School must train Staff to tag truthfully.

10.3When a Guardian withdraws the marketing consent, the change applies from that moment: the School must take down or withdraw material it has already published, and the app cannot recall a photo from a phone or a printed page. The daily-feed agreement cannot be withdrawn while the Child is enrolled; the Guardian's remedy is to leave the School, at which point capture stops.

10.4The app records every consent decision, who made it, in what capacity, with the exact wording shown, and never deletes those records. A withdrawal is a new record, not an edit.

11. Safety features, emergencies and medical information

11.1The app is not an emergency service and is not monitored by us. In an emergency the School must phone the Guardian and the emergency services directly.

11.2The escalation nudge, where switched on, is a single one-way WhatsApp message sent from our own number to every Guardian of the Child, only when no Guardian has opened an urgent item in the app within five minutes. It carries a fixed sentence and no Child information. It is a backstop, not a guarantee of delivery, and the School must not rely on it alone.

11.3The medication, allergy and incident features record what Staff enter. They are the School's records, not medical advice. The School remains responsible for administering medication lawfully and for the care of every Child.

11.4The emergency medication feature lets a Staff member record a dose given in an emergency before a Guardian has approved it; the Guardian is then asked to acknowledge it. The wording the School shows Guardians about this is in the end-user terms.

12. Availability and support

12.1We aim to keep the app available at all times, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Planned maintenance is done outside school hours where we can and announced in the app at least 24 hours ahead.

12.2Support: by email to support@mylittlelink.com, and by WhatsApp Business or phone on 066 219 0352, weekdays from 07:00 to 19:00 (South African time). We acknowledge a complaint within 2 business days. Please do not send us a Child's information, or a screenshot showing it, on WhatsApp.

12.3If the service is unavailable because of us for longer than the threshold in the Refund and Cancellation Policy, the School's remedy is the credit or refund in that policy.

13. Your content and our software

13.1School Data and the content your Users create belong to the School and its Users. You give us a licence to store, copy, transmit and display it only as needed to run the service for you.

13.2The MyLittleLink software, its design, trade marks and documentation belong to us. Your subscription gives the School and its Users the right to use the app for the School's purposes while the subscription lasts, and nothing more.

13.3We do not sell School Data, do not show advertising, do not share School Data with advertisers or data brokers, and do not use School Data to train any artificial-intelligence model.

13.4We may keep and use de-identified, aggregated service statistics (for example, how many posts are made per day across all schools) to run and improve the service. Nothing in those statistics identifies a School, a User or a Child.

14. Suspension and termination by us

14.1We may suspend the School's access on notice if an invoice is overdue as set out in clause 5.4, if a User's conduct threatens the service or another school, or if we are required to by law.

14.2We may terminate these terms on 30 days' written notice for a material breach that the School has not fixed within those 30 days, or immediately if the breach cannot be fixed (for example, the deliberate publication of a Child's media without consent).

14.3We may stop providing MyLittleLink altogether on at least 90 days' written notice, in which case clause 15 applies and any fee paid for a period after the closing date is refunded.

15. What happens to School Data when the subscription ends

15.1For 30 days after the end date the school owner can still sign in and export School Data from the app in a common file format, or ask us to do it, in which case we provide the export within 14 days. Guardians and Staff cannot sign in.

15.2After those 30 days we de-identify or delete School Data in line with the retention periods in the privacy notice. Safety records that the app keeps as append-only ledgers (consent decisions, medication given, incident reports, care approvals) are de-identified, not deleted: the record that something happened survives, without any name in it.

15.3The School remains responsible for keeping any record the law requires it to keep (for example its attendance register) after the subscription ends, by exporting it in time.

15.4A Guardian's or Staff member's own account is closed with the School's, unless they also belong to another school that uses MyLittleLink.

16. Liability

Please read this clause carefully. It limits what you can claim from us.

16.1We are liable to the School for direct loss caused by our breach of these terms or by our negligence, up to the total fees the School paid us in the twelve months before the event that caused the loss.

16.2We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, or loss caused by the School's or a User's own breach of these terms, by the School's internet connection or devices, or by an event outside our reasonable control such as a power or network failure.

16.3Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any liability that the law does not allow us to limit, including under section 99 of POPIA.

16.4We do not currently hold professional indemnity or cyber insurance.

17. Indemnity

Please read this clause carefully. It requires you to compensate us in some situations.

The School indemnifies us against claims by third parties, including Guardians and the Information Regulator, that arise from the School's instructions to us, from School Data the School had no right to give us, from a wrong Guardian or Staff link, or from a User's breach of clause 9, except to the extent we caused the loss.

18. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We give at least 30 days' notice by email to the school owner of any change that reduces the School's rights or increases its obligations. If the School does not accept the change it may cancel before it takes effect, without cost. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance.

19. General

19.1These terms, the Refund and Cancellation Policy and the privacy notice are the whole agreement between the School and us about MyLittleLink. If they conflict, these terms prevail, except that the privacy notice prevails on any question of how personal information is processed.

19.2Neither party may transfer this agreement without the other's written consent, except that we may transfer it to a successor that takes over the whole MyLittleLink service, on notice to you.

19.3Notices to us go to the addresses in clause 1. Notices to you go to the school owner's email address in the app.

19.4If a clause is found to be unenforceable the rest still applies.

19.5South African law governs these terms. Disputes are heard by the South African courts, and a consumer keeps every right to approach the National Consumer Commission, the Consumer Goods and Services Ombud or the Information Regulator.

19.6A copy of these terms as accepted is emailed to the school owner and kept in our records; you may ask us for it at any time.

20. Accepting these terms

The School accepts these terms when its school owner accepts them on the acceptance screen that the app shows at the owner's first sign-in. The app records who accepted, the date and time, and the version accepted.