"Free" isn't free when your families are the product

In short: Every tool your group uses costs money to build and run. When nobody pays with money, the bill is often paid with attention and information, and in a group with kids, that’s your families’ information. You don’t need to be a privacy expert to check. A few minutes with a tool’s privacy policy will tell you most of what you need to know.

At the start of the season, you set up the group’s tools. A chat for quick questions. A sign-up sheet for snacks. A form for emergency contacts and allergies. A shared album for photos. Every one of them was free, and every one asked families for something: an email address, a phone number, a child’s name and birthday, a photo of the team.

After practice, a parent asks, kindly enough: “Who actually gets all that?”

And you realize you don’t know.

Somebody always pays

Apps and websites cost real money to run: servers, storage, engineers, support. If your group isn’t paying, someone else is, and it’s worth knowing who. Some free tools are paid for honestly and openly: by a paid plan that some users buy, by a school’s license, by a nonprofit’s donors. Others are paid for with advertising, and much online advertising runs on information about the people who see it.

When the Federal Trade Commission studied nine of the largest social media and video streaming companies, its staff reported: “Many Companies relied on selling advertising services to other businesses based largely on using the personal information of their users.” The services were free to use, the report said, but “consumers effectively pay through their data and information.” It also found that the services often treated teens “as if they were traditional adult users.”

That study looked at big platforms and their practices in 2019 and 2020, not at the tools your group uses. But it’s a clear picture of one way “free” gets paid for, and a good reason to ask the question.

Most of us skip the fine print, and that’s understandable

If you’ve never read a privacy policy before clicking “agree”, you’re in good company. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, just 9% of American adults said they always read a privacy policy before agreeing to it, and 36% said they never do. In 2023, 56% said they always, almost always or often click “agree” right away, without reading.

It’s not hard to see why. The FTC’s staff wrote that the privacy notices of the services it studied “can frequently be lengthy, vague, and generally unhelpful.”

When it’s only your own information, skipping the fine print is your call. When you’re choosing a tool for thirty families and their kids, you’re making the call for all of them. That’s not a reason to feel guilty. It’s a reason to spend five minutes on it.

How to check a tool in about five minutes

The FTC’s advice to parents of children under 13 is a good place to start: “Start by reading how the company plans to use your child’s information.” Here’s a quick way to do that:

1. Find the privacy policy. It’s usually linked at the bottom of the website. If there isn’t one, or you can’t find it, that tells you something already.
2. Search the page instead of reading all of it. Use “Find on page” for these words, and read the sentences around them:
   • “sell” and “share”: do they sell or share personal information, and with whom?
   • “advertising”, “advertisers” and “targeted”: do they show ads, and do they use what they know about you to choose them?
   • “third parties” and “partners”: who else receives the information?
   • “children”, “under 13” and “teens”: what happens when a child’s information is involved? Do they ask a parent first?
   • “AI” and “train”: can what you post be used to train AI models?
   • “delete”, “download” and “export”: can you get your information out, and remove it when you leave?
3. Check who can see what inside the tool. Can every member see everyone else’s phone number and email address? Can you turn that off? In a group with kids, this matters most: here’s what your group chat knows about the kids in it.
4. Work out how it makes money. Is there a paid plan? Ads? If you genuinely can’t tell how a free tool pays for itself, it’s worth asking before you put families’ information into it.
5. Collect only what you need. A snack sign-up doesn’t need a child’s birthday. Emergency contacts and allergies belong somewhere private, not in a general-purpose free form.
6. Tell families what you use and why. A short note at the start of the season (“here’s where we keep your information, and here’s who can see it”) builds a lot of trust.

If your group is connected to a school, check the school’s rules too. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools put free online educational services “through the same (or a similar) approval process as paid educational services.”

Why we built Grouperly the way we did

We’d rather just tell you how Grouperly pays for itself.

• We make money two ways. Grouperly Plus costs $10 a month or $100 a year, for the whole group. And on the Free plan, online payments carry a 1% Grouperly fee on top of Stripe’s card fee. Pricing has the details.
• No ads, ever. We don’t show ads to anyone, and we don’t collect information for advertising.
• We never sell your information. We don’t work with data brokers, and no AI model is trained on your information.
• We collect what’s needed to run your groups: your account, the rosters and content your groups create, and a little technical information to keep accounts secure.
• Your group’s information stays with your group. Today, your group’s messages, photos and calendar are private to your group, and adults’ contact details are shown to other members only if your group allows it. Group public pages, coming soon, will show only facts about the group and what its leaders choose to publish, never the member list. Nothing a child posts is ever public.
• Kids under 13 don’t sign up on their own. On Grouperly Plus, a child can have their own login once a parent consents.
• You can always leave with your things. Download your roster as a spreadsheet, your documents as a ZIP file, your photo albums and your money records. Each member can download their own data, or delete their account.

Our Privacy Policy and Children’s Privacy Notice say exactly what we collect, why, and who can see it. Run the five-minute check on them too. We’d welcome it.

Ask the question

Free tools aren’t the enemy. Plenty of good ones are free for honest reasons, and your group’s budget is real. The point is simply to ask, before you hand over thirty families’ information: how does this pay for itself? Your families are trusting you with the answer.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission staff, A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services (September 2024)
• Pew Research Center, “Americans’ attitudes and experiences with privacy policies and laws”, in Americans and Privacy (November 15, 2019), and “How Americans protect their online data”, in How Americans View Data Privacy (October 18, 2023)
• Federal Trade Commission, “Protecting Your Child’s Privacy Online”
• U.S. Department of Education, Privacy Technical Assistance Center, Protecting Student Privacy While Using Online Educational Services: Requirements and Best Practices (February 2014)