Safety and privacy, answered plainly.

Only the families you choose. Being in the same class shows other parents in that class your name, and nothing else: not your child’s name, not your profile, not your contact details.

Your child’s PlayProfile and your family’s profile are seen by the families you connect with and switch them on for. You can switch any of them off again at any time.

They get more protection than anything else in Frankie.

• They are shared one family at a time, by you, and never with a whole class.
• They are encrypted separately from the rest of Frankie, with their own key, so they are unreadable even to someone holding a copy of the database.
• Every time another family opens them, that is recorded.
• You can stop sharing at any moment, and it takes effect straight away.

Yes. In the app, go to Me, then Sharing history. It lists everything you have shared, with which family, when it started and when it stopped, and each time your child’s medical details were opened. It is a permanent record: Frankie’s own software has no way to edit or delete it.

No. Frankie never shows your email address to another family, the P&C or a class rep. Other parents see the name you chose. Frankie doesn’t ask for your phone number at all.

No. Frankie is for parents and carers. Children don’t have accounts, can’t sign in and can’t be messaged. A child appears only as a profile their own parent wrote, shown to the families that parent chose.

No. We never sell family information, and we never use what we know about your family or your child to target advertising. The app contains no tracking software.

Because it comes from the school, not from the parent. Typing “Room 2B” into Frankie doesn’t put anyone in Room 2B’s chat. A family joins a class chat only from the class list your school provides, and leaves it when the child leaves the class.

Every account also has to prove it owns its email address, with a code we send to it, before it can do anything at all.

The people in the conversation. Messages are encrypted on their way to and from your phone, and where they are stored in Australia.

They are not “end-to-end” encrypted, and that is deliberate. When a parent reports a message, the Frankie team needs to be able to see what was reported in order to act on it. That is the only time a person at Frankie reads a message: the reported one and the few around it. A P&C can never read parents’ private chats.

• The hidden details a phone adds to a photo, including where it was taken, are removed before it is stored.
• Only the people in that chat can open it. A photo’s link doesn’t work for anyone else.
• When you delete a photo it disappears from the chat at once, and every copy is gone from our storage within 30 days.

Three things, all from inside the chat.

• Report a message or a whole conversation. It goes to the Frankie team, never to the person you reported, and it can’t be withdrawn or deleted by anyone else.
• Block a parent, which stops them messaging you directly.
• Leave a group chat you no longer want to be in.

Someone you haven’t connected with can only send you a request first. You decide whether to accept it.

Never what a message says. A notification tells you there is something new and where, such as “Room 2B” or “Ava’s 7th: Ellen invited you”. It never contains message text, photos, medical details or anything about a child.

We never store your password, only a scrambled version that can’t be turned back into it. Passwords must be at least 12 characters. Repeated wrong guesses are blocked, both against one account and from one person trying many accounts.

Sign in on another device, go to Me, and you will see every device signed in to your account. Sign the lost one out and it is cut off immediately. A phone that hasn’t opened Frankie for 30 days is signed out by itself.

Not usefully. A new account can do nothing until the person types back a code sent to its email address. If someone signs up with your address, they get nowhere, and it doesn’t stop you signing up with it yourself later.

In the app, go to Me and choose Leave Frankie or get a copy of your information.

• A copy: one page with everything Frankie holds that is yours, including your children’s details and the messages you have sent, to save or print.
• Closing your account: your profiles, your children’s profiles and medical details, your photos and your sign-ins are removed straight away. It can’t be undone.

Messages you sent in other people’s chats stay, without your name, so their conversations still make sense. Reports you made are kept so they can still be acted on.

As little as it needs to run an event.

• The names of parents who put their hand up for a volunteer shift.
• How many families have read a notice, class by class. Never which families.
• How many families a notice will reach. Never a list of them.

A P&C never gets email addresses, phone numbers, children’s details or parents’ private chats. It reaches families by sending a notice, not by holding a contact list.

The school. The P&C can ask for someone to be added, and the school confirms it. Nobody can give themselves a committee role, and a P&C can’t send anything to families until the school has confirmed it is that school’s P&C.

Every change to a committee and its class reps is kept in a permanent record showing who made it and when. So is every notice: what was sent, by whom, and to which classes.

No. Frankie doesn’t connect to any school system and holds no school records: no attendance, reports, enrolment files or staff information. School notices stay where they are.

What Frankie holds about a child is a name, a class and, optionally, a birth year, plus whatever their own parent chooses to add.

Frankie is free for pilot schools. Register your interest to be considered for the pilot.

It is limited on purpose. Only the committee’s executive can send to the whole school, a P&C can send five general notices a day, and every notice is signed by the P&C and recorded. A class rep can only reach their own class.

The P&C website signs people out after 12 hours unused, because it is often used on a shared computer.

In Australia. Accounts, profiles, messages, photos, backups and the keys that encrypt them are all kept in Amazon Web Services’ Sydney data centres. Nothing is copied to another country for storage or backup.

One thing, and only in passing. To make a phone buzz, a notification has to travel through Apple’s or Google’s notification service, and the service that hands it to them, which run overseas. The notification holds a sender’s name and the name of a chat or event. It never holds message text, medical details or anything about a child.

The code we email you at sign-up is sent from Sydney.

• In transit: everything between your phone and Frankie is encrypted. The app refuses to connect any other way.
• In storage: the database, photos and backups are encrypted.
• Medical details: encrypted a second time, field by field, with a separate key that is rotated every year.
• The database: has no address on the internet. Only Frankie’s own servers can reach it.

Reported messages are seen by the Frankie team members named to review them, and by nobody else. Being on that list is granted deliberately, person by person, and recorded.

Every action taken inside our hosting account is recorded in a log that is kept for seven years and can’t be quietly altered. Administrator sign-ins need a second step, not just a password.

We test it as an outsider would, every time anything changes. An automatic check signs up as a stranger who knows another family’s details and tries every door in Frankie. Every one must stay shut, and a new feature can’t be released unless it is covered by that check.

The software libraries Frankie is built on are checked for known security flaws every week. We also run a full internal security review regularly, most recently in October 2026.

• The Australian Privacy Principles, treating children’s health details as sensitive information.
• The Australian Government’s Information Security Manual and the Essential Eight, as our security guide.
• The eSafety Commissioner’s Safety by Design principles.
• The National Principles for Child Safe Organisations.
• WCAG 2.2 AA for accessibility.

Not yet. Frankie is new and is starting with a small group of schools. So far the security work has been checked by our own reviews and automatic tests, not by an outside assessor.

Before Frankie is offered more widely we plan to have an independent penetration test by an accredited tester, a formal privacy impact assessment, and to work towards ISO 27001 certification. We are also preparing for the Children’s Online Privacy Code, due in December 2026.

If your school or department needs something specific before going ahead, tell us. We keep a detailed compliance checklist and are happy to walk through it.

We have a written plan for it, and we practise it. If your family’s information were exposed, we would tell you and your school plainly, aiming for within 72 hours of confirming it: what happened, what information was involved, and what you should do. We would do that whether or not the law required it.

We would also notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, and the police where a crime or a child’s safety is involved.

Please email ferg@myfrankie.com.au with “Security” in the subject. You will hear back from a person, and we would much rather know.