SafeRide

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 25 September 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how SafeRide (“we”, “our”, “the app”) collects, uses, and protects information when you use the SafeRide mobile app, for both parents/guardians and bus attendants, on iOS and Android.

1. Who we are

SafeRide is operated by the SafeRide team to help school transport services, parents, and bus attendants coordinate safe pickup and drop-off of children in Sri Lanka. SafeRide is the software your school transport service (your “operator”) uses; your operator runs the actual transport service.

2. Information we collect

We only collect what the app needs to function — nothing is collected for advertising.

Category	What we collect	Why
Identity	Name, National ID (NIC)	To identify guardian accounts and verify the correct child/guardian match
Contact	Phone number, home address	To reach guardians/attendants/drivers, and to set pickup/drop-off points
Location	Precise GPS location of the school bus, taken from the bus attendant’s device while a trip is running	To show parents the live location of their child’s bus on a map during an active trip. Location is not used to automatically trigger notifications, and we do not track guardians’ own devices.
Location (background)	The bus attendant’s device continues to report the bus’s location for the duration of an active trip, including when the app is in the background or the screen is locked	So parents’ live tracking doesn’t drop out when the attendant puts their phone away mid-trip. Background location applies only to the attendant’s device; it starts when the attendant starts a trip and stops when that trip ends. It is never collected on a guardian’s device, and never outside an active trip.
Device identifiers	A push notification token, issued by Apple Push Notification service on iOS or Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android and handled through Expo	To deliver notifications from this app (for example a “bus is on the way” message sent by the attendant, or an attendance update) — used for no other purpose. We do not use advertising identifiers and do not track you across other apps or websites.
Attendance records	Boarded / dropped off / missed status per child, per day, with the time it was recorded	Core app functionality — the daily attendance history shown to guardians, and the record the attendant works from
Absence notices	Dates a guardian marks their child as not travelling, for a single day or a date range	So the attendant knows not to wait for that child, and so the child is not marked missed. Entered by the guardian; we do not ask for a reason.
Payment records	Monthly fee amounts, whether an invoice is paid or outstanding, the date your operator marked it paid, and whether it was recorded as cash or a bank deposit	To show guardians their invoice and payment history and to let them download a receipt. SafeRide does not process payments. You pay your transport operator directly, outside the app, in cash or by bank deposit; the operator then records that payment in SafeRide. There is no payment processor in the app and we never collect card numbers, bank account numbers, CVV codes or any other payment credentials.
Diagnostics	Crash reports and error diagnostics, collected through Sentry, containing device model, operating-system version, app version and the technical details of the error	To find and fix crashes and bugs. This is technical diagnostic data, not behavioural analytics — we do not attach your name or account identity to crash reports, we do not collect performance traces, and the app contains no advertising or marketing analytics tools.
Support correspondence	Messages, phone numbers or email addresses you send us when you contact support, and a log of any support action taken on your account	To answer your question and to keep an auditable record of what was changed and by whom

3. How we use information

All data we collect is used solely to operate the app’s core functionality: matching children to the correct bus and route, showing live bus location during an active trip, sending notifications your operator or attendant chooses to send, recording attendance and absences, displaying invoice and payment history to the correct guardian, and diagnosing crashes so we can fix them.

We do not:

Sell your data
Share your data with third parties for their own marketing or advertising purposes
Use your data to serve ads within the app, or use any advertising identifier
Track you across other companies’ apps or websites
Use your location for anything other than showing the live bus position during an active trip

4. Who we share information with

Your school transport service (“operator”) — the business that registered your child and that you interact with day to day. This is who you're sharing your information with in the first place; everything below is about who else can see it, and why.
Service providers strictly necessary to run the app: our hosting provider, push-notification delivery via Apple Push Notification service (iOS), Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (Android) and Expo, map and map-tile rendering via Mapbox, and crash diagnostics via Sentry. These providers process data only on our behalf and only as needed to deliver the service.
SafeRide's own support staff, the small team that builds and operates the software your transport service runs on. They can access your account and your child's information only to provide technical support to your operator — for example, resetting a password, fixing a data-entry error, or diagnosing a missed notification. This access is restricted to a named list of staff, and every action they take is logged (who, what, when). Your operator can see a record of this support activity from their own dashboard — support access is visible to the business you trust, not hidden from it.
We do not share your personal information with any other third party, except where required by law.

5. Data retention

We keep account, attendance and payment records for as long as your account is active with your school transport service, because that is the history the service and you both rely on.

Two things are deleted automatically, on a schedule, rather than relying on anyone remembering:

Raw GPS location points are removed by a scheduled job once they pass the retention window, which is currently 30 days. Live tracking needs recent positions, not a permanent movement history of a child.
Guardian accounts with no active children are marked and then permanently deleted after 30 consecutive days in that state. If a child is added or restored during those 30 days the account is unmarked and the clock resets, so the account is only removed if it genuinely stays empty.

6. Your rights — accessing, correcting, or deleting your data

You can request:

A copy of the personal data we hold about you
Correction of inaccurate information
Deletion of your account and associated data

To make any of these requests, contact us at hello@saferide.lk. You can also reach us on WhatsApp via our support page.

Requests are handled by our support team rather than by an automated process, so we ask you to contact us rather than expecting a button in the app to do it. We will confirm your request when we receive it and tell you when it has been completed. Please do not send us your password, a one-time code, or a photograph of an NIC — we never need them to identify you.

Note: some records (e.g. attendance history needed for billing disputes) may be retained for a limited period after a deletion request if required for legitimate accounting or legal purposes, after which they are permanently removed.

7. Location data — additional detail

Because this app requests background location access for bus attendants, we want to be explicit:

Background location is requested only on the bus attendant’s device, and is used only to keep the live bus-tracking map accurate for parents when the attendant’s screen locks or the app is backgrounded during an active trip. The guardian/parent side of the app never requests background location.
Location reporting starts when the attendant starts a trip in the app and stops when that trip is ended or cancelled. It is not collected before a trip starts, after a trip ends, or at any other time.
While background location is active, iOS displays its standard location indicator, so the attendant can always see that the bus is reporting its position.
Location data is used only within the app, to draw the bus on the live map for the guardians of children on that trip. It is not sold, and it is not shared for advertising or analytics purposes.

8. Children’s data

SafeRide processes information about children (name, attendance, pickup/dropoff points) as part of providing a school transport tracking service, entered and managed by the child’s parent/guardian or the school transport administrator — not collected directly from children. Guardian accounts control what information is entered.

9. Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect your data, including encrypted (HTTPS) connections between the app and our servers, and secure on-device storage of authentication tokens.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected with an updated “Last updated” date at the top of this page.

11. Contact us

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@saferide.lk.