Legal

Privacy policy

Last updated 5 November 2026

This policy explains what personal data Bus Register uses, why, where it is kept and your rights. It covers this website (busregister.com) and the service schools use at their own address (for example yourschool.busregister.com). It is written to meet the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) and the French Loi Informatique et Libertés, and, for schools in the United Kingdom, the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code (the Children’s code).

Who we are

Bus Register is run by Bus Register. You can reach us about your data, or our data protection contact, at contact@busregister.com.

Two roles

When you use this website or ask for a demo

We decide how your data is used: we are the data controller.

When a school uses Bus Register

The school decides what data about its pupils, parents and staff goes into Bus Register and why: the school is the data controller. We are its processor (article 28 GDPR): we only use that data to run the service for the school, on its written instructions, and we sign a data processing agreement with every school. For questions about a school’s data, contact the school first (its data protection officer, if it has one); we help it answer you.

A school that connects its own database keeps its pupils’ data on its own server: we then only process it while running the service for the school, and store none of it.

Children’s data

Bus Register holds data about pupils, who are children, and some prefects who use it are children themselves. We treat that data with particular care:

• Only what’s needed. A pupil’s name, class, bus and stop, the days they don’t ride, and one emergency phone number are enough to take a bus register. We don’t ask for dates of birth, addresses, photos of pupils, health data or anything else.
• Only who needs it. Each school decides who can see what, with roles it sets itself. A prefect sees their own bus’s list and nothing else.
• No profiling, no adverts, no tracking. Children’s data is never used for marketing, profiling, automated decisions or to train anything. There are no third-party trackers or analytics.
• Private by default. Profile pictures are optional and only visible to people signed in at the same school.
• Kept no longer than needed. Schools choose how long registers are kept; older registers and pupils who have left are then deleted automatically.

What we use, and why

Demo requests

• What: your name, work email, phone (optional), role, school, country, the rough size of your school’s transport and your message.
• Why: to answer your request, arrange a demo and send a quote. The legal basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time, and our legitimate interest in replying to schools.
• How long: up to three years after our last contact, unless your school becomes a customer.

Inside a school’s Bus Register (on the school’s behalf)

• Pupils: name, year group and class, school email and reference if the school adds them, bus and stops, the days they don’t take the bus, notes the school adds, and each register: who was on board.
• Parents: the emergency phone number the school gives for each pupil.
• The school’s staff and prefects: name, job title, email, an optional profile picture, their role, a one-way hash of the password, when they last signed in, and what they did (the school’s activity log).
• Legal basis: the school’s, usually its public task or legitimate interest in keeping pupils safe on its buses.
• Kept: as long as the school chooses (its Data & privacy page), and never longer than it uses Bus Register. When a school leaves, we delete all its data within 30 days.

Our own team

Bus Register’s team accounts hold a name, job title, email, optional profile picture, password hash and, if they turn it on, authenticator app. Our team can only open a school as support if the school allows it, with a reason the school sees.

Running the site safely

• Page statistics: which pages are visited and how fast they load, counted on our own server. Visitors are counted with an anonymous ID that changes every day; IP addresses are not stored with them. Kept for 180 days.
• Security log: the IP address and browser of requests our firewall blocks or finds suspicious (attacks, password guessing), and failed sign-ins, to protect the service. Kept for 90 days. The email typed in a failed sign-in is not kept.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and working well.

Where the data is: France, or your own database

The site and its database are hosted in France, by LWS (Ligne Web Services), in data centres in France. Data is stored only there, in the European Union. It is not transferred outside the EU. For schools in the United Kingdom, the UK recognises the EU as giving adequate protection, so no extra transfer safeguards are needed.

Schools can also keep their pupils’ data in their own database. Bus Register keeps running on our servers in France, and the school’s IT manager connects the school’s own MySQL or MariaDB database from its Data & privacy page. Its pupils, parents’ numbers, buses, stops, registers and activity log are then stored only there, and read from there, over an encrypted connection, while someone uses Bus Register. Accounts and roles stay with us. The school is responsible for that server, and can move its data back to us at any time. See using your own database.

Who else is involved

• Hosting: LWS (Ligne Web Services), in data centres in France. All data is stored there.
• Maps: stop addresses typed by a school are looked up with the French government’s address service (IGN Géoplateforme) or, outside France, Photon (Komoot, on OpenStreetMap); stop positions are sent to Valhalla (FOSSGIS, Germany) to draw roads; map images are loaded by your browser from OpenStreetMap, which sees your IP address. No pupil data is sent to these services.
• Payments: schools pay through Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd., Ireland). Card and bank details are typed into Stripe’s own secure pages and go straight to Stripe: we never see or store them. Stripe receives the school’s name and its billing contact, never any pupil data.
• Email: if you reset your password or ask for a demo, the email goes through our mail provider.

We never sell data, and never use it for advertising.

Cookies

We only use the cookies needed for the site to work: one that keeps you signed in, one that protects forms, and, if you ask for it, one that keeps you signed in on your device. There are no advertising, tracking or third-party analytics cookies, so there is nothing to consent to (in line with the CNIL’s guidance and the UK’s PECR).

Security

Every school’s data is kept apart and only reachable at its own address by its own accounts; everything travels over HTTPS; passwords are hashed; repeated wrong passwords lock accounts; each school controls who can do what with its own roles; our own team can add an authenticator app to their sign-in; and they need the school’s permission to open a school as support. If a personal data breach ever affects a school, we tell it without undue delay so it can meet its 72-hour duty to report it. More on our security page.

Your rights

Under the EU GDPR and the UK GDPR you can ask to see your data, to correct or delete it, to restrict or object to its use, and to receive it in a portable format. If your data is in a school’s Bus Register, ask the school: it can correct, export or erase it directly, and we help it with anything it can’t do itself. For anything else, write to contact@busregister.com; we answer within one month.

You can also complain to a data protection authority: in France, the CNIL (cnil.fr); in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk); or the authority where you live.

Changes

If we change this policy, we update the date at the top, and tell schools of any change that matters before it applies.