Keeping Students Safe on Saturn

Over the last few weeks, Saturn has been growing faster than ever. We’re honored to give students an easy and fun way to manage the school day. Saturn started in the halls of a Connecticut high school—we built it to solve real problems that students face every day. We are committed to creating an amazing company that puts students first.

Our rapid growth has invited reasonable questions from students, parents, and schools about who we are, what we do, and how we aim to keep school communities and students safe. We want to be clear: our most important job is keeping students safe—and we take this responsibility very seriously. We’re constantly working to make Saturn safer for every user on the platform.

A big part of this commitment is aiming to make sure that everyone who is part of a school community on Saturn is actually a student at that school. Verification is important not only for safety but also for protecting the integrity of each community on the platform. Verifying students on Saturn relies on a combination of different processes and dozens of signals, including contact book overlap and/or school email verification.

Our teams are constantly working on improving the verification system and widening our utilization of email verification where possible. 

As part of this ongoing effort, we’re releasing a suite of improvements in our app, submitted to Apple today:

We’re strengthening verification:

We’ve raised the bar for the amount of contact overlap users must have with other students at a school to be verified. New features in our backend system will also proactively flag and block phone numbers that we deem suspicious from registering for Saturn. If a user fails to verify using our improved protocol, their account will be restricted from participation in any school community and eventually removed.

Unverified users are walled off from verified users and their information:

Users who are not verified can’t view any class details, students’ profiles (including their list of classes or links to their connected social profiles), or access or post to the school’s Bulletin. 

These improvements are part of an ongoing effort, and we will continue to release new features to make the platform even safer.

We take seriously the trust that millions of students have put in us to help them take control of their days and feel more productive and fulfilled. We hope to continue to earn that trust every day as we help America’s high school students better manage their time and safely engage with their communities.

Our latest release walls off unverified users from verified users and their information.

For more information about user safety on Saturn, visit www.joinsaturn.com/safety-center