Acceptable use
An account here holds the records of several hundred children. This is the short list of things that would put those records — or another school's — at risk, and what happens if one of them happens.
Who may hold an account
A school or a trust, opened by somebody authorised to bind it. Staff accounts are issued from inside the school's own account, by somebody holding the permission to do it — which asks for their password again even an hour after they signed in.
Accounts belong to people
Every member of staff sets their own password on an invitation, and nobody at the school — or here — can read it. That only means anything if one login is one person, so:
- Do not share a login, or keep a shared "office" account that four people use.
- Remove people who leave. A former teacher with a working password is the most common way a school's records walk out of a school.
- Do not use somebody else's account to do something your own cannot.
One school's data stays in one school
Do not attempt to reach another school's records, or to test whether you can. The isolation is enforced inside the database rather than by hiding buttons, so an attempt returns nothing — but an attempt is still a breach of this policy, and it is the one thing we act on immediately rather than after notice.
What not to put in
- No card numbers, CVVs or bank credentials. Timelino is not a payment gateway and has nowhere safe to keep them. A parent records what they paid and attaches proof; that is the whole of it.
- Nothing a school has no reason to hold. Medical detail beyond what a school needs to keep a child safe, caste or religion beyond what a board requires, photographs of children in a free-text note — none of it belongs in a field that was not built for it.
- No malware, and nothing you do not have the right to upload.
What not to do with it
- Do not use a child's record to profile, market to, or pressure a family — including about fees. The defaulter list exists so the office can ask; it is not a mailing list.
- Do not scrape or bulk-pull outside the export the product gives you. The CSV export is unlimited, runs on your own authority, and is faster than anything you would write.
- Do not resell access, or open an account on behalf of a school that has not asked.
- Do not probe, load-test or attempt to break the service. If you have found something, tell us — see below.
Found a security problem?
Write to hello@timelino.com with enough detail to reproduce it. We will not threaten you for reporting something in good faith, and we will tell you what we did about it. Please do not test against a real school's data — ask us and we will give you somewhere to test.
What we do about a breach of this
For most things: we tell the account holder, in writing, and ask for it to stop. For use that endangers another school's data, or a child's safety, we suspend the account first and explain afterwards. Suspension is not deletion — the 90-day export window in the refunds policy still applies.