Children's privacy at MathMax

Can my child play without an account?

Yes — every maths level in the curriculum, with no account and no payment. A plan buys the extra fighters, the extra stages and playing other people; it never buys the maths.

Played this way, progress is stored by the browser on that device and never reaches our servers. We do not know who is playing, and there is nothing for us to keep, show or delete.

What do you collect from a child who does have an account?

A first name, the grade an adult chose for them, a username and passcode the product generated, a display name you can set, and the results of the maths they play. Alongside that, the settings any account needs — language, time zone, colour theme — and, if they play with friends, who those friends are.

There is no email address, no phone number, no date of birth, no photograph, no address, and no free-text field anyone could write one into. A child's account is deliberately not addressable: we cannot email a child, because we have no way to.

Results are recorded only while the household or school holds an active plan and a lawful basis is on record for that child. Without both, nothing new is written against the account.

Do you ask my child how old they are?

No. We never ask a child their age, and a child cannot tell us one.

When you create a child's account you choose their grade, because you know it exactly and their age only approximately. We derive a protection level from that grade, and it is clamped so it can never come out as "adult" — not at the top of the ladder, not ever.

Nor can a child change it themselves. If a signed-in child account sends us an adult age, the request is refused and the account is unchanged. Correcting a grade downward tightens the protection; advancing a grade never loosens it.

Is anything on the page watching my child?

No. There is no advertising, no analytics, no session recording and no behavioural tracker on any page your child can reach.

The children's sign-in page loads nothing from a third party at all, and neither does the game or their progress page. One third party exists anywhere in MathMax: the spam protection on the adult sign-up and password forms, which no page a child uses ever loads.

What is the username you gave my child?

A vegetable, a colour and three digits, run together in lower case — carrotblue417, and so on.

It is generated, never derived from your child. It carries nothing about their real name, their class or their school, and a classmate's username cannot be guessed from it. This matters because a login name gets read aloud in a classroom and printed on a slip.

Who can see it?

You, if you are their guardian. In a school, the teachers responsible for them. Nobody else.

Every time an adult opens a child's report we write a record of it — who looked, at whom, when, in which role, and under which filter. That record exists so the trail can be reconstructed afterwards.

Does a teacher see the same things I do?

No, and deliberately less. A parent sees more of their own child than a teacher sees of a pupil, and a teacher sees only the play that happened under the school — not what the same child plays at home in the evening.

A teacher can review and export within their scope, and change nothing. They cannot delete a pupil's record — that belongs to you, or to the school as an entity — and they cannot correct one either: a correction is made by the child's guardian, or by writing to us.

Does my child know I can see it?

Yes. Their own progress page tells them, in their own words: the grown-ups who look after them — at home, and their teacher if their school uses MathMax — can see how their maths is going, it is a bit like someone looking in a school book, and it is this page and nothing else.

It also tells them that if they would rather you did not look, they should say so, because that is a conversation for the two of you and not a setting for us to decide.

Is there a public leaderboard?

No. There is no public ranking anywhere in MathMax, for children or adults.

There used to be a plan for one, and it was dropped rather than made safe for children. No public surface names a player next to a result.

Can a stranger find or message my child?

No. A child does not appear in any search — not by username, not by name, not by any other means — so nobody can browse or stumble their way to your child.

A child is only ever matched with people already inside a trusted circle: approved friends, family members, and classmates — their own class, or their whole school where the school has chosen that. They are never placed in the open matching pool that adults use, and no room code or link exists that a stranger could use to reach them.

How does my child get a friend, then?

Through you, and only through you. Your child cannot start a friendship themselves: they cannot search for anyone, they cannot type in an invite code, and they are never asked to accept a request. You add the friend yourself, signed in as you, on the online-play screen where your family's connections are listed — by giving us the exact player name the other family gave you.

Your side is settled by the act of adding them; the other child's grown-up still has to approve before the connection does anything. Someone who guessed a player name could start that same request, and it would sit there doing nothing until an adult they have never met approved it. You can see and remove any of your child's connections in the same place, at any time.

One adult in a household does this: the one who owns the family plan. Another grown-up in the family adds their own friends and cannot add or change your children's.

There is no chat in MathMax. Children play maths against each other; they do not exchange messages.

Can I turn friends off for just one of my children?

Yes. Playing with friends is a switch on each child, not on the whole household, so a six-year-old and a twelve-year-old under the same roof can have different answers.

Turning it off is a pause, not a delete. Their friends are kept, and they come back when you turn it on again. If another family's grown-up approves a connection while it is off, that approval waits rather than being refused.

Can a friend be for one of my children and not another?

Yes. When you add a friend you choose which of your children it is for, and you can change that afterwards. So the family next door can be your ten-year-old's opponents without also being your five-year-old's.

Taking a friend away from one child is a pause, not an ending. The connection is kept and so is the other family's approval, so putting that child back happens straight away and nobody is asked anything.

Giving a friend to a child who never had them is the other way round, and we say so at the time: there is no approval to reuse, so the other child's grown-up is asked, exactly as they were the first time.

Ending a friendship altogether is a different act from narrowing who it is for, and it is labelled separately. Removing really does end it: adding that person back later means asking the other family again.

Can my child make themselves visible?

No. A child cannot lower their own privacy — there is no control offered to them that would make them findable or put them in open matching, and the product never nudges them toward one.

Nor can anyone widen it on their behalf: for a child those settings are locked, not merely defaulted. What an adult decides is whether your child plays with friends at all, and which friends they have — and that adult is the one who owns the family plan.

What can a school change about this?

A school can make it narrower, never wider. It can turn versus play off entirely, keep it inside a class, or open it to the whole school — and no option reaching beyond the school exists or would be accepted.

What a school cannot do is reach past itself. Contact with strangers falls outside the educational purpose its authority over pupil data rests on, and a school is neither the child nor the child's representative — so there is no wider option for it to select. That decision belongs to the guardian, on the child's own home account.

Do you sell or advertise to children?

No, and there is no path by which it could happen — not with consent, not with a setting, not at all. Children's and students' data is used to run the game and to show it to the adults responsible for that child, and for nothing else.

We do not sell personal data, we run no advertising, and we do not profile a child for any purpose unrelated to their maths.

You show a "mental age" — is that profiling my child?

It is a teaching indicator, and we treat it as one that needs explaining rather than one to be quiet about.

It is decision-support for the learner and the adult reading it, never an automated decision about the child. It produces no consequence outside the game, it is presented with a human in the loop, and it exists to point at what to practise next. A teacher never sees it against a named pupil at all — only a class average — because the phrase means something different in a classroom than at a kitchen table.

How long do you keep it?

While it is needed, and then not. An account with no recorded activity for three years has its play history deleted; a school account nobody claimed is closed after about eighteen months, sized to the school year.

When a child leaves a school, the school's authority over their data ends with the membership — automatically, without anyone having to ask. Their record is frozen rather than deleted: no supervisor can read it, nothing new is written to it, and it comes back if a new basis is established. If nobody establishes one, it is deleted when the window expires.

Can I see, correct, export or delete my child's data?

You can always read what we hold and export it. Correcting their name and deleting their data are done by whoever owns the family plan: one adult is accountable for each child's account, so a child's record cannot be erased by another household member acting alone.

Deletion means deletion: it erases the stored history rather than hiding it, and it overrides the ordinary rule that keeps a lapsed account's stats in place for a return.

If you are your child's guardian but not the person who owns the plan, write to privacy@getmathmax.com and we will act on your request. We answer within one month.

What if my child is at a school that uses MathMax?

The school is responsible for obtaining the authorisations and consents required for its pupils, including under Article 8 GDPR where that applies, and we process pupil data on the school's instructions for its educational purpose.

You can still exercise your child's rights. If the school holds the relationship, ask them first; if you would rather come to us, write to privacy@getmathmax.com.

How do I ask you something not answered here?

Write to privacy@getmathmax.com. We answer within one month, and we will tell you if a complicated request needs longer.

If you are choosing MathMax for a school and need the regulatory detail, the companion page linked below sets out the regimes we operate under — GDPR and its Article 8 ages, COPPA, FERPA, the Age Appropriate Design Code and the rest — and what we do about each.