AI at OurNews

Your school’s data and AI

• At this stage, OurNews runs no AI processing on School Content.
• If AI-assisted features are introduced to the platform in the future, processing will be transient, run in a region matched to your school’s, under zero-retention terms, and never used to train any model. These commitments are made in our Data Processing Terms.
• If AI-assisted features are introduced to the platform, they will be opt-in/opt-out.
• The AI provider will be named on our sub-processor list before it processes any School Content, with 30 days’ notice.

AI features

Any future AI implementation in OurNews will be guided by this policy: AI proposes, people decide. Nothing AI-generated should be published without a human in the loop.

What AI is never used for in OurNews

• No facial recognition on School Content, at any time, for any purpose.
• No automated decisions about individuals, and no profiling of students, families or staff.

How OurNews itself is built

We build OurNews using modern AI agentic engineering tools. We have strict guidelines, checks and balances to ensure our development approach is safe and sustainable:

• Development happens against test data, not school data.
• Every change is reviewed by a human before merge, and every merge is made by a human. Agents are mechanically blocked from merging their own work. Every change also produces a preview deployment for review. Accountability for every merge sits with a named human by design.
• Automated checks run on every deployment, including build verification and tenant-isolation checks.
• Production credentials live in the hosting platform’s secret store, are never committed to code (mechanically scanned on every push), and agents are prohibited from reading the environment files their sessions can reach.