School specific social media masked as a "scheduling" app, with dangerous amounts of sensitive student information.
What is Saturn?
Not just the planet! But also a scheduling app, called Saturn – Time Together. It’s intended to keep high school students organized and connected with classmates. You create an account, find your school, link your schedule, and it helps you stay on track with your classes, assignments, group projects, and more. In reality, it’s school specific social media masked as a “scheduling” app, with dangerous amounts of sensitive student information.
How does Saturn Work?
You create your Saturn account, set your age (must be 13 or older, intended for students 9th-12th), verify your phone number and/or link with Snapchat, select your location status (don’t allow), then find your school. Important to note, Saturn won’t list schools unless 20 or more students have requested for their school to be on the app.
Once you’re in, you can upload your school schedule so your calendar is accurate. This is the most useful and most fearful feature of the app. Based on your schedule, the app tracks where your classes are, when they start, and when they end. This is extremely practical, and extremely exploitable. Why? Because this information isn’t as protected as you might think…
Does Saturn have Privacy Risks?
Yes, there are privacy risks. In our testing, we were able to make an account aged at 13 and select a school that had 800+ students using Saturn. To our surprise, before requiring any further verification, we could see a post made at the end of the previous school year, and could even post an event ourselves (including the ability to add pictures). We could also see the name of the user who posted this event and the names of those who went to it. We haven’t verified anything but our phone number at this point, so this was rather alarming to see names of students and organized events. We didn’t think it would let us post, and yet it went through, viewable to the “whole school.” (Don’t worry, it only said “Hello!” and we deleted it right after)
But just consider this for a moment. All we have done at this point was type a code into our phone and select a school… We could be anyone. Yet we have the ability to see a few people, events, and even post onto a school page with 800+ students.
Saturn’s Privacy Controls Need Big Improvements:
Upon tapping the “People’‘ tab at the bottom, we got a list of ALL 800+ STUDENT’S NAME AND GRADE. ANYONE with a phone number can select a popular school, and begin seeing the full names and grades of students that have public accounts on Saturn:
And most of these accounts show their Snapchat Avatar if they linked their Snap, which looks like most of them did. Saturn doesn’t let you switch schools, or at least not before you are verified, but it’s a very easy process to delete your account and switch into another school. Someone could make many accounts and have access to thousands of students names and grades.
Privacy is not valued on Saturn. The whole point of the app is to share as much school- and student-specific information as possible with other teens who haven’t been through a rigorous verification process. Additionally, Saturn encourages students to connect all of their social media accounts to Saturn, including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and also Venmo.
Is there Direct Messaging on Saturn?
Yes, but thankfully, we couldn’t DM any of these students without verifying a school email. However, we could invite any of the students to be friends with us on Saturn. Which is a red flag because you can link other social media accounts, Venmo, and websites to your account. Predators often use popular apps kids are on, and then try to direct them to apps where there are less restrictions. Saturn seems like a no brainer for predatory activity.
Worst Case Scenarios on Saturn:
We hate to go here, but we have to consider worst-case scenarios as a real possibility and ask some difficult questions. What if a shooter or predator downloaded this app, found your kid’s school, and found their name and grade?
Or worse, what if they got access to a school email (or perhaps someone who is already a student) and they found the school schedules of many students? This app has the power to reveal where specific students are at any given time during the school day.
Does Saturn have Parental Controls?
Not that we can see. We aren’t able to access much without verifying a school email, but from the little information available on Saturn having parental controls, “no” seems to be an accurate answer. Here’s a list of some the problematic wording found in their Privacy Policy:
Bottom Line: Is Saturn Safe for Kids?
No, Saturn is not safe for teens because it introduces unnecessary risk into the already noisy, chaotic lives of teens, and has too many risky, unproven features.
Our Instagram Reel summarizing these risks was widely shared.
If your child already has a Saturn account, please ensure their account is private and they aren’t sharing their schedule with anyone they don’t know. Don’t let them accept any friend requests from people “at their school” unless they know them personally.
Improvements? Saturn must:
Verify all students who want to “belong” to a school,
Prevent posting anything to the “whole school,” and
Default to private accounts.
Allow entire schools be blocked from the app at the request of an administrator.
Please keep your kids safe this school year.
Questions, Schedule a Counseling Session, or Need to Enroll Call: (949) 303-9016
