Privacy Policy
This policy covers the two mobile apps we publish — STL Transportation (for parents and guardians) and STL Transportation Driver (for our drivers) — and the systems behind them.
STL Transportation is a school and institutional transportation company serving school districts across the greater St. Louis region — St. Louis City, St. Louis County, surrounding Missouri districts, and parts of Illinois. We built these apps so a family can see where their child's vehicle is and know the moment their child is picked up and dropped off.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it with advertisers. There is no advertising, no analytics-for-sale, and no third-party tracking in either app.
Who is responsible for this information
Student transportation records are created in the course of work we perform for school districts. For students transported under a district contract, the district is the owner of the student's education records, and STL Transportation acts as a service provider — a "school official" with a legitimate educational interest, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 34 CFR § 99.31(a)(1). We use student information only to perform the transportation service the district engaged us to perform, and we follow the district's instructions and its records-retention direction.
If you are a parent or guardian and you want to review, correct, or restrict your child's education records, the district is the right place to start; we will support any request the district makes of us. For questions about the apps themselves, contact us directly using the details at the end of this policy.
What the parent app collects
| Information | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Your name, email address, and phone number | To create your account, confirm you are the right adult for a given student, and let dispatch reach you. |
| Your password | Handled by Google Firebase Authentication. We never see or store your password. |
| Which students you are linked to | This is the entire basis of what you are allowed to see. You see your students and nothing else. |
| A push notification token | So your phone can receive pickup and drop-off alerts. It identifies a device, not a person. |
| Messages you send to dispatch | To answer you, and to keep a record of what was communicated about a student's ride. |
The parent app does not request or collect your location. Location permission is explicitly blocked in the parent app's build configuration. The map shows the vehicle's position, not yours.
What the driver app collects
| Information | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| The driver's name, phone number, and assigned vehicle | To run routes and so dispatch and families know who is driving. |
| Vehicle location while a route is active | To show families where the vehicle is and to give dispatch an accurate picture of the fleet. |
| Pickup and drop-off times the driver records | This is the operational record of when a student got on and off the vehicle. It is retained as a safety record and cannot be altered or deleted after the fact. |
| A push notification token | For route and dispatch alerts. |
About driver location specifically
- Location is collected only while a route is under way — from the moment the driver starts a stop until the last drop-off of that route. The app requests "while using the app" permission only; it never asks for "always" access.
- From version 1.1, collection continues while the app is in the background or the phone's screen is off during that route, so the vehicle stays on the map between stops. The phone shows a persistent notification (Android) or the location indicator (iOS) for as long as this is happening, and it stops automatically at the last drop-off, at sign-out, or if the app is closed.
- The app does not collect location when no route is running, and never uses it for advertising or analytics.
- Location is associated with the vehicle, and is used to place that vehicle on a map for the families assigned to it and for dispatch.
- Where a vehicle already reports its position through our Verizon Connect fleet telematics system, that source is used and the phone is only a fallback.
What families can and cannot see
This is the part that matters most, so we will state it plainly. A parent account can see only the students that have been explicitly linked to it by our dispatch office, and only the vehicle, driver, trips, and messages connected to those students. A parent account cannot see any other family's child, another family's messages, or the fleet as a whole. This is enforced on our servers by security rules — not merely hidden in the app — and those rules are covered by an automated test suite that we run before every change to them.
How we use information
- To operate transportation service and show it accurately to the families we serve.
- To send pickup, drop-off, and service notifications.
- To let a parent and our dispatch office communicate about a student's ride.
- To maintain safety and incident records, including a record of when a student boarded and left a vehicle.
- To meet our obligations to the school districts that contract us, and to comply with law.
We do not use this information to build advertising profiles, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.
Notifications and your lock screen
Push notifications are written so that sensitive detail does not appear on a locked phone. Notification previews use a student's first name only and do not include home addresses or the contents of dispatch messages. On Android, notifications from these apps are marked private so their content is hidden until the phone is unlocked.
Who we share information with
We share information only in these situations:
- The school district that arranged the transportation, which owns the student record.
- Service providers who operate parts of the system for us, under contract and only for that purpose: Google Firebase (authentication, database, notifications, hosting of app functions), Expo (push notification delivery), and Verizon Connect (fleet GPS telematics).
- When required by law, or when necessary to protect the safety of a child, a driver, or the public.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
How information is protected
- All data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and encrypted at rest by our infrastructure provider.
- Access is controlled by server-side security rules that limit each account to its own data.
- Both apps blur their contents in the phone's app switcher, so a student's name is not visible in a multitasking preview.
- Signing out clears the app's local cache, so the next person to use a shared driver phone cannot see the previous driver's data.
- Accounts are created by our dispatch office. There is no public sign-up in the driver app.
No system is perfectly secure, but these are the specific measures we take, and we test them rather than assume them.
How long we keep information
Account information is kept while the account is active. Trip and safety records — including pickup and drop-off times and incident records — are retained for as long as the applicable district contract, state law, and our insurance obligations require, and may outlive the account itself. Dispatch messages are retained for the current school year plus one year unless a district directs otherwise.
Deleting your account
You can delete your parent account at any time from inside the app: Settings → Delete my account. You can also request deletion at stltaxicabs.com/delete-account or by emailing info@stltaxicabs.com.
Deleting your account removes your name, email, phone number, push token, your links to students, and your messages to dispatch. It does not delete the underlying student transportation record, which belongs to the school district, or the safety record of when a student boarded and left a vehicle — we are not free to erase those. Deleting your account also ends your ability to see your child's vehicle in the app.
Children
These apps are for adults. The parent app is used by parents and guardians; the driver app is used by our drivers. Neither app is directed to children, and we do not knowingly allow a child to create an account. Students are the subject of the information in the app; they are not its users.
Your rights
You may ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, using the contact details below. For information that forms part of a student's education record, we will route the request to the responsible school district, which is the correct custodian. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that meaningfully affects what we collect or who we share it with, we will update the date at the top of this page and notify account holders in the app.
Contact us
Email info@stltaxicabs.com
Web stltaxicabs.com
Mail STL Transportation, 2648 Dr. Martin Luther King Dr., St. Louis, MO 63106