Trust & Safety at Haven

Every teacher on Haven verifies their identity with a government-issued document before they can publish a course or send a single message. This is handled by Persona, a specialist identity verification provider.

Haven never sees or stores your identity document. We receive only the result.

A teacher can message a student only if that teacher is verified and that student is enrolled in one of their courses. That is the whole rule. Students cannot message each other. Teachers cannot message students who have not enrolled with them. Nobody can message a stranger, and there is no way to search for a person and open a conversation.

This is enforced by the database itself, not by hiding buttons in the app. If someone constructed a request to reach a conversation they should not have, the database refuses it.

Most harm on learning platforms does not happen on the platform. It happens after a conversation moves to a private channel where nobody is watching.

So Haven automatically scans every message for phone numbers, email addresses and links to external sites, and flags them for our moderation team.

Profile photos and course thumbnails are held privately until a moderator approves them. They do not appear anywhere public before that — not on a profile, not in the catalogue, not at a hidden URL.

Teachers and students under 18 are shown by first name and last initial. A photo is optional and never displayed by default.

A parent or guardian must consent before anyone under 18 uses Haven. Linked guardians can request their child’s account information and conversation history by emailing support@havencourses.com.

We create guardian links by hand, after verifying the relationship. We deliberately do not use self-service invitation links for this. A link that grants access to a child’s private messages is only as safe as the person holding it — and the person most likely to ask a child for that link is exactly the person this protection exists to stop. It is slower our way. It is also correct.

Any message, user or course can be reported from inside the product. Reports go to a moderation queue that a human reviews. You can also block another user, which ends the conversation immediately.

We would rather tell you what is missing than let you assume it exists.

The safety rules on this page are enforced in Haven’s database, not in its interface. Access controls sit at the data layer, so a rule cannot be bypassed by manipulating the app, changing a URL, or calling an internal endpoint directly.

There are 216 automated tests whose entire job is to confirm that things which should be impossible remain impossible, and they run every time any part of Haven changes.

We mention this because “we take safety seriously” is something every platform says. This is what we did about it.