Children's Privacy

Minimum age

Geocentric is not intended for individuals under 16. You must be at least 16 years old to use the Services. If we learn that an individual under 16 has provided personal information through the Services, we will take appropriate steps to address the account and associated data in accordance with applicable law.

We ask you to confirm your age before you use the Services, and again if you clear your browser data. This is a self-declaration, not verification: we do not collect identity documents, dates of birth, or any other proof, because collecting that from young people to check whether they are young would create the very risk we are trying to avoid.

We set the floor at 16 rather than 13 because we have not built verifiable parental consent infrastructure, and because the service can retain and train on conversations where a user opts in. A higher floor is the honest response to both.

Authorised internal testing

Some work genuinely cannot be done without the people it concerns. Evaluating whether a model is suitable for younger users, or whether its safety behaviour holds up against how a fifteen-year-old actually talks to it, requires a fifteen-year-old. Geocentric may engage people under 16 for that work, including paid engagements, and this section says exactly how.

How access is granted

Authorisation is issued by Geocentric to a named individual, as an access key. It is not a checkbox and not a self-declaration: the key is verified by our server before access is granted, and an unrecognised key gets nothing. We can withdraw a key at any time.

What we require first

• A written agreement with the tester's parent or guardian, in place before the key is issued, covering the scope of the work and the handling of their data.
• Compliance with applicable law on the engagement itself, including the child labour, working hours and permit rules of the tester's jurisdiction where any payment or work direction is involved.
• A defined scope. Testers are given specific work, not open-ended access.

How tester data is handled differently

• Never retained for training. Exchanges from an authorised tester are excluded from every training set regardless of any opt-in setting, and the serving code skips retention for them entirely. This is enforced in code, not by policy alone.
• Same 30-day deletion. Tester transcripts expire on the same schedule as everyone else's.
• Deleted on request. A parent or guardian can ask us to delete their child's transcripts at any time, and we will, without waiting for the expiry.
• No wider collection. A key does not cause us to collect anything additional. There is still no account, no profile, and no analytics.

Where a tester is under 13, COPPA's verifiable parental consent requirements apply to the personal information we would collect from them, and we will satisfy those requirements before issuing a key rather than treat the written agreement above as a substitute.

This exception exists so that safety work involving young people can be done properly and on the record. It is not a route for a member of the public under 16 to use the service, and we do not issue keys on request.

Why this is not a children's service

COPPA asks whether a service is directed to children under 13, using several factors together — subject matter, visual and audio content, use of animated characters, language, advertising, and evidence about the actual audience. We have considered them rather than assuming an age statement settles the question.

Geocentric's subject matter is model training, evaluation, and systems engineering. Our audience is developers, researchers and technically interested adults. We do not advertise anywhere, and we do not advertise to children. We do use an illustrated character as part of the company's visual identity, and we take the point that illustration is one of the COPPA factors — but a single stylised brand character on a site about transformer training and optimizer memory does not make the service child-directed, and we do not use it to appeal to children.

Our minimum age of 16 sits above COPPA's threshold. We do not treat that as a shield: if evidence indicated that children were in fact using the service, our obligations would change, and we would act on that rather than point at this page.

What we would hold about a minor

By default, nothing. There are no accounts, no profiles, and no analytics, and conversations are not retained unless the user turns on the training setting. Conversation history stays in the browser on the device. What necessarily reaches us is the prompt in transit and standard network metadata.

We do not collect from anyone, of any age, the categories that warrant the most care: biometric identifiers, voice recordings, photographs or video, precise location, or government identifiers. There is no file or image upload. The persistent identifiers involved are limited to Cloudflare's security cookies, our own consent cookie, and the browser's own local storage.

Minors and model training

We train on conversations only from users who have turned on the opt-in setting described in the Privacy Policy. Someone under 16 is not permitted to use the Services as a member of the public and is therefore not in a position to give that consent, and an authorised tester's conversations are excluded from training outright.

If we learn that a consented conversation came from someone under 16, we delete the stored copy and exclude it from future training runs. As set out in the Privacy Policy, we cannot remove what an already-trained model has learned, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Retention

Information about young people should not be kept indefinitely, and nothing here is kept indefinitely: prompts and responses are deleted within 30 days of collection, and the other periods in the Privacy Policy apply to everyone. If we identify information belonging to someone under 16 held without appropriate authorisation, we delete it rather than retain it pending a request.

If you are a parent or guardian

If you believe someone under 16 has used the Services without authorisation and that we hold information about them, write to contact@geocentricai.com. Tell us enough for us to find the records — the approximate dates and the network they used are usually what helps. We will confirm what we hold, delete it, and tell you what we did.

If your child holds a tester key, the same address reaches us for questions about the engagement, for their transcripts, or to withdraw from it. Withdrawing costs them nothing and we will not ask why.

You can remove conversation history yourself immediately by clearing site data for chat.geocentricai.com in the browser they used. That data is on the device and deleting it does not depend on us.