Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how The Hills Driving School LLC (“DriveBees,” “we,” “us”) handles personal information when you use DriveBees, the platform driving schools use to run their lessons, bookings, payments and websites. It also explains your choices and rights. We do not sell personal information and we do not use it for advertising.

1. Our role

• For driving schools' records. When you are a student, parent, guardian or instructor of a driving school that uses DriveBees, that school decides what information it needs and how it is used. DriveBees processes that information on the school's behalf, as its service provider. The school's own privacy policy also applies, and requests about those records are best sent to the school; we will help it respond.
• For our own customers and visitors. For information about the owners and administrators of driving schools who sign up for DriveBees, and visitors to drivebees.com, DriveBees decides how the information is used, as described here.

2. Information we collect

Information you or your school give us

• Account information: name, email address, phone number and sign-in details (sign-in is handled by our provider Clerk; we do not store passwords).
• Student information: name, date of birth, pickup address, the parent or guardian linked to a student under 18, lesson bookings, hours bought and used, driving test appointments and results, instructor notes and lesson evaluations, and the practice log a student or parent keeps.
• Instructor information: an instructor's home address, used only to match them to the towns their school covers and never shown to students or parents.
• Documents: files uploaded to the Service, such as a learner's permit, a driver education certificate, a certificate of completion, a school's license, and vehicle registration and insurance papers.
• School information: business name, license number, address, phone, cars, instructors, prices, schedules, policies, website words, pictures and videos.
• Payment information: what was bought, the amount, the date and refund status. Card details are collected by Stripe directly; DriveBees and schools never see full card numbers.
• Messages: a record of the emails and text messages the Service sends, and text-message consent and opt-out choices.

Information collected automatically

• Technical information: IP address, browser and device type, and logs of requests to the Service, used to keep it running and secure.
• Cookies: DriveBees uses only cookies that are necessary to sign you in and keep the Service secure. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not use third-party analytics.
• A school's own website tags: a driving school may choose to add its own Google Analytics or Google Ads tag to its public website pages. Those tags are the school's choice and are governed by the school's privacy policy and Google's. They run only on the school's public website pages and, on a school's own domain, its thank-you page after a payment, never on sign-in, registration, payment or student and parent pages. They may be told when a visitor clicks to register for a package, and when a purchase is completed (the package, the amount, the currency and a purchase number), but never names, email addresses, phone numbers or other contact details. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal, no advertising conversion is sent and Google is told not to use the visit for advertising. DriveBees does not receive what Google collects through these tags.

3. How we use information

• To provide the Service: registration, booking, reminders, payments, records, documents and school websites.
• To send messages about accounts, bookings, lessons and payments, and text messages where a school has turned them on and you agreed.
• To verify a school's driving school license before its website goes public.
• To provide support, investigate problems, and keep the Service, schools and users secure, including preventing fraud and misuse.
• To meet legal obligations and enforce our terms.
• To understand how the Service performs, using aggregated, de-identified information that does not identify any person or school.

We do not use schools' or students' information to train artificial intelligence models, and we do not sell or rent it.

4. Separation between schools

Each driving school's records are kept strictly separate. One school can never see another school's records, even when the same person is a student at both. DriveBees is a service of The Hills Driving School LLC, which also runs its own driving school; that school uses DriveBees as an ordinary customer with access only to its own records, and receives no information about any other school or its students. See section 4 of our Terms of Service.

5. Who can see information

• A student sees their own records; a parent or guardian sees the records of the students linked to them.
• A school's administrators see their own school's records. An instructor sees what they need to teach their own students.
• Permits, certificates and other private documents are visible only to the student, their parents or guardians, the school's administrators and the student's instructor, and are opened only through links that expire after a few minutes.
• DriveBees team members may access a school's records only to provide support, keep the Service secure, verify a license, or as the law requires. They are bound by confidentiality, and each such access through our administrative tools is logged.

6. Service providers

We share information only with providers that help us run the Service, under contracts that limit their use of it to providing their service:

• Vercel (website and server hosting)
• Supabase (database and file storage)
• Clerk (sign-in)
• Stripe (payments, under Stripe's own privacy policy)
• Amazon Web Services (sending emails and text messages)

We may also disclose information when required by law or legal process, to protect the rights, safety and property of users, schools or DriveBees, or as part of a merger or sale of the business, in which case this Policy and the commitments in our Terms continue to apply.

7. Children and teen drivers

The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. Many students are teens between 15 and 17: a parent or guardian is linked to each student under 18 and can see and manage the student's lessons and records. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

8. How long we keep information

We keep a school's records for as long as the school uses DriveBees and as the school directs. Student records are generally kept for four years after a student's last activity, unless the school must keep them longer by law or a deletion request is made sooner. When a school leaves DriveBees, it may export its records within 30 days; we then delete them within 90 days, except where the law requires us to keep them, and except for backup copies deleted in the ordinary backup cycle.

9. Security

We protect information with encryption in transit, a private database with strict rules between schools, private file storage with short-lived links, limited staff access, and audit logs. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your information, we will notify the affected school and, where the law requires, you.

10. Your choices and rights

• Access, correction and deletion. You can ask to see, correct or delete your personal information. For records a school keeps about you, contact the school or us; we will work with the school to respond.
• Text messages. Reply STOP to any text to stop them. See our Text Message Terms.
• Emails. Booking and account emails are part of the Service and cannot be turned off while you have lessons booked.

California residents

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended, you have the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose; to delete it; to correct it; and not to be discriminated against for using these rights. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not use sensitive personal information for purposes that would require offering a right to limit it. In the past 12 months we collected the categories listed in section 2, from you, your school and automatically, for the purposes in section 3, and disclosed them to the service providers in section 6 for business purposes. You may make a request yourself or through an authorized agent; we will verify the request before responding.

Residents of other U.S. states

Depending on where you live, you may have similar rights to access, correct, delete or obtain a copy of your personal information, and to appeal our decision on a request. Contact us to make a request or an appeal.

Canada

We handle personal information of people in Canada in line with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and applicable provincial laws. You may access and correct your information and withdraw consent, subject to legal and contractual limits. Our privacy contact is listed below. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or your provincial commissioner.

11. Where information is stored

DriveBees stores information in the United States. If you are in Canada, your information is processed in the United States, where it may be accessible to authorities under U.S. law.

12. The practice log

The supervised driving practice log is for a family's own tracking. It works on the honor system and DriveBees does not send it to any licensing agency.

13. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy. If a change is material, we will notify schools by email or in the Service before it takes effect and update the date above.

14. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: buzz@drivebees.com. The Hills Driving School LLC.