Who holds what: your school or organization is the data controller and the primary safeguarder — it holds the parent relationship and the mandatory-reporter duties. Arcus is the processor and the tooling. In the early phase, Arcus staff supervise monitoring alongside you; over time, monitoring is led by your own staff with automated screening assisting.
How the rules are enforced: at the data layer. The rules below are checked where the data lives, not just hidden in the interface, and the defaults fail closed: when a permission question is ambiguous, the answer is no. A school or organization's configuration can tighten these rules. It can never loosen them below this floor.
Contact
- S.01An adult can never initiate contact with a student. Not through messages, not through mentorship, not through any path. Enforced at the query layer and re-checked at send time.
- S.02Open messaging exists only within a peer class: student↔student and adult↔adult. Adult↔student open messaging does not exist on the platform.
- S.03Even staff↔student open messaging is blocked. Contact between staff and a student happens through structured, visible channels such as appointment requests — never private open threads.Fail-closed by design: when we had to choose, we chose the stricter reading.
- S.04Students are never browsable or searchable by alumni or any external adult. An alum who opens a student's profile link gets a full block, not a redacted view.
- S.05A student's contact details and last name never reach an adult. A mentorship request shows an alum the student's first name, interest, and message — nothing more.
Discovery & mentorship
The point of the platform is students reaching the alumni who did the thing they're curious about — safely, with the school or organization in the loop the whole way.
- S.06Students discover alumni through safe professional fields only: name, field, employer, city. Never contact details, never private fields.
- S.07An alum appears in student discovery only after opting in. Alumni control their own availability to students.
- S.08Every mentorship request goes to a counselor or admin for review before the alum ever sees it. Rejected requests return to the student; nothing reaches an adult unreviewed.