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Privacy

What we hold, and why.

Howl is a place for a professor to talk to their class. This page says exactly what that involves, in the order you’d want to ask.

Effective October 19, 2026.

The short version

  • We don’t sell your data, and we don’t run ads.
  • There is no advertising or analytics SDK in the app, and no third-party tracker on this website.
  • We never ask for your location, contacts, microphone or photo library. The one permission the app asks for is the camera, to scan a class’s QR code.
  • You can delete your account from inside the app, and ask us by email for a copy of everything we hold about you.

If you join the waitlist

When you put an address into the form on this site, we store:

  • Your email address, and a normalised copy of it so the same address can’t be added twice.
  • Where you teach, if you choose to fill it in afterwards. It is optional and the form says so.
  • Which form you used and, if you arrived from a link with campaign parameters on it, those parameters.
  • A one-way hash of your IP address, used to rate-limit the form. It is hashed with a secret we hold and then truncated. Your actual IP address is never written down.
  • Your browser’s user-agent string, and the time you signed up.
  • Your email choices: whether you asked for updates or unsubscribed, and when.

We use that address to email you about Howl’s launch and updates: when professor access opens, and news about Howl along the way. The form says so where you sign up. Every email we send will have a working unsubscribe link, and leaving takes one click. You can also email us and you’re off. If you joined before the form said this, you’ll only hear about the launch unless you ask for updates too.

If you use the app

  • Your account. You sign in with Apple or Google. They give us an identifier for you, and your name and email address. With Apple you can use Hide My Email, so we never see your real one. We do not ask for a password and could not store one.
  • Your profile. Your name, your school, and whether you’re a professor or a student. There is no profile photo; people appear as their initials.
  • Your school email. Signing up needs one. Either you sign in with your school’s Google account, or you type your school address and we email it a 6-digit code to type back. We keep that address so we know you’re at the school and so one address can’t list two accounts, and we keep a code only as a scrambled copy, for 15 minutes. Nobody else is shown the address. Other people at your school can then find you by name, see whether you’re a professor or a student, and message you. People outside your school can’t. You can turn off “Show me in search”, so only people in your classes find you, and “Messages from anyone”, so nobody new at your school can start a conversation with you.
  • Your classes. The names and details you give them, such as meeting times, who is in them, and whether each person is a professor, a TA or a student.
  • What gets posted. Messages, announcements, questions, assignments, polls, sign-ups and direct messages: the text, who sent it, when, replies, reactions, poll answers, and who has seen or acknowledged what. A raised hand, an absence notice or an extension request is seen only by the student who sent it and the class’s professor and TAs, along with their answer.
  • Notifications. If you allow them, an address for your phone that Apple or Google uses to deliver them. It is removed when you sign out. A notification shows the class, who sent it (never the name on an anonymous message) and the start of what they said, on your lock screen if your phone shows them there.
  • On your phone only. Your weekly schedule, when you last read each class and conversation, and conversations you hid. They stay on the phone and are not sent to us.
  • Files you share. A file you attach is stored with Google, up to 25 MB, under the class it was sent to. Anyone who has the file’s link can open it, so share files only in classes you’d show them to. The app uses your phone’s own file picker and only sees the file you choose.
  • Your availability. If you set a status or turn on Away Mode, the status, when it ends, and your time zone, so your class sees the right hours.

Anonymous questions, precisely

When a student asks anonymously, the name is removed on our servers before the message goes to anybody else. Nobody in the class can see who asked, and neither can the professor or a TA. Their app is never sent the name, so there is no screen anywhere that could reveal it.

The record in our database does still identify the sender. We keep it so that Howl can act on a report of abuse or a threat, and because a question that genuinely cannot be traced is a question nobody can be protected from. If a message is reported, the sender is shown to us at Howl, not to the class or the professor. If you are weighing whether to ask something anonymously, that is the honest answer: hidden from everybody in your class, not erased from our systems.

What we don’t do

  • We do not sell personal data, and we have never shared it for advertising.
  • There is no advertising SDK and no third-party analytics SDK in the app.
  • This website sets no cookies for ordinary visitors. It keeps campaign parameters in your browser’s session storage so the signup form knows where you came from, and that is cleared when you close the tab. The only cookie we set is a session for our own staff dashboard.
  • We do not track you across other apps or websites.
  • We do not read your email, and we are not connected to your inbox.

Who else touches it

Four companies, all acting on our instructions and none of them permitted to use your data for their own purposes:

  • Google, for Firebase — sign-in (including Sign in with Google), our server functions, the database and file storage. Data is stored in the United States (us-central1).
  • Apple, for Sign in with Apple and for delivering notifications to iPhones.
  • Resend, which delivers the email carrying your sign-up code to your school address. It sees that address and the code, nothing else.
  • Our web host, which serves this site and stores the waitlist requests that reach it.

There are no advertising networks, no data brokers, and no analytics vendor. If that ever changes, this page changes first.

How long we keep things

Messages expire by kind, and this is a property of the product rather than a policy we apply afterwards:

  • Announcements are kept, so somebody joining in week three can still read week one.
  • Ordinary chat expires after seven days.
  • A question leaves the feed once it has been answered.

Expired messages come out of the feed and are reachable on the History screen until the class is archived. Waitlist addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove them.

Your rights

Wherever you are, you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. If you are in the UK, the EU or a US state with its own privacy law, you also have the right to complain to your regulator, and you do not have to go through us first.

To delete your account, open the You tab in the app and tap Delete account. For anything else, email tyler@meethowl.com and we will answer within 30 days. Deleting your account removes your profile, your memberships and the messages you sent. Where a message you sent is part of a conversation other people are relying on, we may keep the text and remove your name from it — we will tell you which applies.

Students, professors and universities

A professor signs up on their own and gives their class a join code; no administrator has to enable anything. That is a description of how the product works, not advice about your institution’s rules, and some universities do require software touching student data to be reviewed first. If yours does, we will help — email us and we will send whatever your IT or privacy office asks for.

We are not claiming FERPA compliance or a SOC 2 report. Neither has been audited, and we would rather say so here than have a university discover it later. Under FERPA the institution is the responsible party. We can work with institutions to complete their required privacy and data-processing review.

Children

Howl is built for higher education and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect their data; if you believe a child has an account, email us and we will delete it.

How it is kept

  • Sign-in is handled by Apple or Google. We never see or store a password.
  • The app reads nothing from the database directly except a counter for each of your classes that says only that something changed. Every message, name and answer goes through a server function that checks who you are and what your class allows before it does anything. Files can only be uploaded by a signed-in account, into a class.
  • Traffic is encrypted in transit, and data is encrypted at rest by Google.
  • Sensitive requests are rate-limited, and nothing secret ships inside the app.

No system is perfect. If you find a security problem in Howl, email us and we will take it seriously and credit you if you want the credit.

Changes

If we change this page in a way that matters, we will say so at the top and tell anybody on the waitlist by email. The date at the top is the date the current version took effect.

Contact

Email tyler@meethowl.com.