Privacy across the Layers family.

Who to contact

Layers is maintained by the Layers team. Email contact@thelayersapp.com for privacy or product questions. Windows and Android are the active app platforms; Mac apps and the separate Layers Talk product are discontinued.

Guard Family: parent accounts and child devices

The web dashboard and Android Controller use Firebase Authentication for parent accounts and Firebase Realtime Database for paired devices. Parent account sign-in includes an email address. Device association, pairing records and parent controls are stored in the connected service.

Paired child apps can report device information, online/connection status, protection capability, daily and per-app usage totals, alerts, and child requests. Schedules, blocked websites/apps, parent commands and audit events are stored so controls can work across the parent and child devices.

Content alerts may include a category and the relevant app, window title, or detected text depending on the platform. Screen-time reports can identify apps used. These are sensitive family activity records; discuss monitoring with the child and use the permissions appropriate for your household.

PIN values are hashed for the shared device-control contract. Apps also store pairing and control state locally so saved rules can survive a restart. A hashed PIN is still security-sensitive information.

Layers Teacher and classroom rooms

The Windows teacher app stores preferences, class lists, saved room details and trial/licence state locally. Classroom connection sends room information, presence, schedules and commands to Firebase. The Student extension can send classroom presence and help requests. Classroom connection is not wholly offline.

Speech recognition uses an online service when you enable microphone translation. Audio is sent for recognition. Translation sends the relevant text to Google’s translation service. Dictionary lookups send words or phrases to the Free Dictionary API; translation can be used to support an English definition lookup. Layers does not promise that these third-party services store nothing.

Layers Student

The extension stores its room, language, focus, schedule, text-to-speech, scratchpad and toolbar preferences in browser-local storage. Translation and dictionary features contact online services. Read-aloud uses the browser’s available speech synthesis; availability and processing depend on the chosen browser and voice.

The free browser Guard extension

The independent Guard extension stores its parent settings, blocked lists, schedule, scanner preferences, PIN hash and bounded alert history in browser-local storage. Its page scanner checks supported webpage text locally against patterns. It does not send those settings to the Guard Family dashboard.

The extension needs broad website access to apply browser protection. Its scope is the configured browser; it is separate from the Windows or Android child-device agent.

Licences and payment services

Layers is running a free closed beta in exchange for honest feedback and testimonials. Email contact@thelayersapp.com to express interest. This website does not publish prices or embed checkout. Existing Windows Gumroad licence activation sends the product identifier, licence key and a usage-count request to Gumroad’s verification API. The Windows machine fingerprint is used in local licence state; the current verification request does not include it.

The Guard dashboard and Android licence code can send a licence key and product identifier to the Layers validation endpoint. Validation is not a payment or automatic-renewal flow. If you previously purchased through a provider, its own receipt and privacy terms apply.

This website and contact drafts

The public information pages load a shared font from Google Fonts. Hosting and font providers receive the normal information associated with a web request, such as an IP address and request headers. The parent dashboard loads the libraries needed to connect to Firebase.

The contact form prepares an email draft in your browser. It does not submit your message to a website mail server. If you choose to open and send the draft, your email service handles the message. You can instead copy the draft into webmail or email us directly.

A separately maintained assistant Worker, if used by a deployed build, sends submitted chat messages to Anthropic to generate a response. The refreshed public pages do not embed that assistant. Do not send passwords, PINs, full card details, or confidential student/family records in a support chat.

Managing your information

Use the available parent and child controls to review devices, rules, alerts and requests, and unpair devices you no longer use. Unpairing is not a promise that every historical record, provider log or account record is deleted. Contact us to request account or data deletion, or to ask which records a particular build retains.

Browser-local notes and preferences can be removed through the extension or browser storage controls. Disabling or removing a child app or extension can stop its protection. Keep any information you need before clearing storage.

External service information

Service-provider details are available from Google, Firebase, Gumroad, and Anthropic. Contact the Layers team if you need help understanding which services your build uses.