Privacy Policy

Last updated September 26, 2026

Spectrum Connect helps parents and caregivers of autistic children find other families whose kids are a genuine fit, and publishes plain-language summaries of autism research. You are trusting us with information about your child. This page explains exactly what we collect, who can see it, and how to remove it.

What we collect

• Waitlist: your email, ZIP code, your child’s age if you give it, and which flyer, post or email link brought you here, if any.
• Your account: your email and password (stored hashed by our database provider; we never see it).
• Your family profile: your display name, ZIP code, languages, caregiver situation, and what you’re looking for; your child’s first name, age, developmental stage, interests, and optionally a diagnosis detail; and the Child Profile Wheel ratings you choose to give.
• What you do in the app: matches you accept or decline, messages you send, tips (“pebbles”) you write or save, and reports you file.
• Basic technical data: anonymous page-view statistics and error reports that help us fix problems.

Who can see your information

Other families never see your full profile at once. What they see depends on how far a connection has gone:

• Before either of you accepts: your display name, languages, what you’re looking for, whether you prefer meeting online or in person, and your child’s developmental stage and interests. Not your child’s name, exact age, or your city or ZIP.
• After you both accept: first names, your child’s exact age, and your city. You can then message each other inside the app.
• Later in a connection: a profile photo, if you added one, through a link that expires within an hour.

Your full Child Profile Wheel ratings are never shown to other families. Pebbles show your display name, a broad age band for your child, and the topics the tip is about.

A small team at Spectrum Connect can see profile and match information to run matching by hand during our early launch and to handle safety reports.

Our emails

Emails come from “Spectrum Connect” at spectrumconnect.us. Account and match emails (invitations, password resets, “you have a connection request,” “your request was accepted”) never include your child’s name, age, your city, or anything about the other family. They contain a link to sign in, nothing more. If you share an inbox or device, the sender name will still be visible.

Services we use

We don’t sell your information, share it for advertising, or use it to rank anything by popularity. A few providers process data on our behalf, only to run the service:

• Supabase (database and sign-in)
• Vercel (website hosting and anonymous page-view statistics)
• Resend (sending email)
• Sentry (error reports)
• JotForm (the form for reporting an error in a research article, if you use it)

Deleting your information

• If you have an account: go to Me and delete your account. This removes your profile, your child’s information and Wheel ratings, your matches, and the conversations in them (including the other family’s copy), your saved items, and your waitlist entry. Pebbles you published stay up so other parents can keep using them, but with your name removed.
• If you only joined the waitlist: email hello@spectrumconnect.us from that address and we’ll delete your entry within 30 days.

Your rights

You can ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, including under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Email hello@spectrumconnect.us. We won’t treat you differently for asking.

Children

Spectrum Connect is for parents and caregivers aged 18 and over. Children don’t use it. The information about a child comes from their parent or caregiver, who controls it and can delete it at any time.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit and access is restricted at the database level so that one family can’t read another’s records. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach that affects you, we’ll tell you.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy in a way that affects how your information is used, we’ll email account holders before it takes effect. Questions: hello@spectrumconnect.us.