The Academy's beneficiaries are youths from under-developed communities, and the program may include participants under the age of 18. We treat this as the single highest-stakes privacy area this policy covers, for a simple reason set out in the Academy's own program design: privacy beats transparency when the two are in tension, and beneficiaries are the vulnerable people at the center of the system.
- We do not collect date of birth as a matter of course (Section 7.6). Where a beneficiary's minority status is known, or reasonably should be known from context, we treat them as a child for consent purposes regardless of whether a birth date is on file.
- Public visibility, photo, and story consent for a beneficiary who is a minor must be given by a parent or legal guardian (Appendix A, Appendix C), in addition to seeking the young person's own age-appropriate assent.
- Beneficiary accounts (a self-service login for beneficiaries) are deliberately not built. Every authenticated surface is also a potential attack or leak surface, and at the program's current scale, staff already work with beneficiaries directly enough that a portal adds little benefit for real added risk. This will be revisited only if a concrete need arises — most plausibly, a beneficiary wanting to manage their own consent directly, or the program outgrowing what staff can track personally — never simply because the technology becomes easy to build.
- Case notes and any other sensitive internal information about a beneficiary are never shared outside the small set of staff roles that need them, regardless of the beneficiary's age.
- Public and donor-facing figures are always shown in aggregate and suppressed below any threshold that could single out one person — a rule applied with extra weight where the underlying group might include minors.