ClassDojo

Is ClassDojo safe?

Yes, for what most families use it for: messages with a teacher, photos from the classroom and behaviour updates. Children's areas carry no ads, children's data is barred from advertising, and the platform holds a 93% rating and a Privacy Verified Seal from Common Sense's privacy programme. We score ClassDojo 73/100, ahead of Google Classroom (69) and level with the better children's apps in our list.

The weaker points sit on the parent side. Apple's privacy label shows that a parent's name, email address, phone number and purchase history can be used for ClassDojo's own marketing, and the school, not the parent, decides how long a child's photos and posts stay on the service.

What ClassDojo collects about children and parents

ClassDojo is used in two ways, and the data rules differ between them.

• Children (school student accounts and Dojo Islands). The privacy policy, last updated on 27 August 2026, says children's personal information is "never used or disclosed for third-party advertising", that no cookies are placed in logged-in student areas, and that children's data is not used to train ClassDojo's AI tools. For children under 13, a parent or the school gives consent under COPPA.
• Parents and teachers. Here ClassDojo behaves more like a consumer app. The App Store label lists no tracking, but links name, email address, phone number, purchase history and product use to the account, and lists all of them under "Developer's Advertising or Marketing". The policy says ClassDojo may share limited data about adults with platforms such as Google or Facebook to find new customers or to stop showing its ads to existing ones. Adults can also see contextual ads, chosen without personal data, for ClassDojo's own and other educational products.

Google Play's data safety section goes further than Apple's label. It lists device IDs, names, email addresses, user IDs, approximate location and in-app messages as shared with other companies, for purposes such as analytics and app functions. ClassDojo's policy describes these companies as service providers it needs to run the service, including OpenAI and Anthropic for its AI tools under a zero-retention contract.

Who controls the data: the school or the parent?

For school accounts, ClassDojo acts as a processor and handles data only on the school's instructions, its GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary help page says. That keeps ClassDojo's commercial use in check, but it shifts control away from families.

• Class Story and portfolio photos are kept until the school asks for them to be deleted.
• Behaviour feedback points are deleted or de-identified after 12 months, a one-year rule ClassDojo first adopted in November 2014 after a New York Times article questioned how long it kept records of children's behaviour (K-12 Dive).
• Messages a parent deletes disappear from both screens, but stay in the teacher's downloadable history to meet student-record rules.
• IP addresses are deleted from logs after six months.

Parents can delete their own account from the app's settings or on the web, and can download their message history from the website. A ClassDojo Plus subscription has to be cancelled first.

No regulator has fined or ordered ClassDojo. The strongest criticism came from research: in August 2022 the Digital Futures Commission at the London School of Economics published a report arguing that ClassDojo and Google Classroom were not meeting UK data protection rules for children. ClassDojo holds iKeepSafe's COPPA Safe Harbor membership and FERPA certification, both voluntary programmes.

Messages, Dojo Islands and the risk of contact

Class messaging is closed. Parents talk to their child's teachers, and teachers can open group chats with several families. That makes harassment by strangers unlikely, though group chats can still carry the usual parent arguments, and messages can be translated automatically.

Dojo Islands, the 3D play world for children aged 5 to 12, is the part that needs a parent's attention. At home, with parental consent, a child can play on Camp Dojo Island alongside other children of a similar age, and invite friends through QR codes or links that expire after a short time. Parents can set "Who can they play with?" to "Do not allow outside class" in the child's settings, and teachers decide whether the class island is open always, during school hours or never.

Account security

ClassDojo encrypts data in transit and its databases at rest, and stores passwords salted and hashed, according to its privacy policy. Parents and teachers can turn on two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary, and get an email whenever a new device or browser signs in. The company runs a bug bounty with reports sent to [email protected]. We found no reported breach of ClassDojo, but also no published independent security audit like the ISO 27001 certificates other education platforms show.

How to set up ClassDojo safely

1. Turn on two-step verificationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary in your parent account, since it holds messages and photos of your child.
2. If your child uses Dojo Islands at home, set "Who can they play with?" to your own class unless you want them meeting other children.
3. Ask the school how long it keeps Class Story photos, and how to have them deleted when your child leaves.
4. Send access or deletion requests about school data to the school first, since ClassDojo deletes student data only on the school's instructions.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (80) is ClassDojo's strongest factor after its clean regulatory record (87): messaging is closed to strangers, and children's play can be limited to the class. Privacy (66) is the weakest, because adults' contact and purchase data feeds ClassDojo's own marketing and Google Play lists wide sharing with service providers. Security and control both score 72, held back by the lack of a published audit and by the school's control over children's content.