Youth Mode is real, and we take it seriously

Most AI training apps put an age question on the signup screen and move on. Corsa was built the other way round. A large share of the athletes we serve are under 18: NICA mountain bikers, high-school cross-country runners, young triathletes. So "Youth Mode" isn't a label we bolt on. It changes what the app does, and this month it changed what happens before a young athlete even gets an account.

This post is for parents and coaches. It explains what Youth Mode does, what we shipped in September to meet two youth-protection laws, and what we deliberately don't do with a young athlete's data.

What Youth Mode does

When an athlete under 18 signs up, the app switches into Youth Mode automatically. Three things change.

The language. No jargon. No "Z3 for 90 minutes." Every workout comes with a plain-language "why," and effort is logged on a five-emoji scale from Very Easy to Very Hard. Heart-rate numbers and training-stress scores stay hidden until they're actually useful.

The limits. Youth athletes get their own set of hard safety limits: smaller week-to-week volume increases, more frequent recovery weeks, a lower share of high-intensity work, and more full rest days. These are not preferences a teenager can switch off. The AI cannot hand a 14-year-old an adult interval session, because the guardrails run after the plan is generated and trim anything that crosses the line.

The defaults. The home screen answers one question, "what do I do today?", in under ten seconds. Complexity is there for the athlete who grows into it, not the one who just joined a team.

What changed this month, and why

Two laws now shape how apps serve minors, and they work differently.

Texas's App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) puts the app stores in charge of age and parental approval for everyone under 18. Since June, Apple has been asking parents in Texas to approve apps for their children. Our job as a developer is to read those signals and respect them. As of this month, Corsa does. If a parent withdraws approval for Corsa in their Apple family settings, training features in the app pause immediately, and they resume when approval is granted again. The account, the profile, and the ability to delete the account stay reachable the whole time, so a family is never locked out of their own data.

COPPA, the federal children's privacy law, covers athletes under 13, and it puts the responsibility on us, not the store. The rule is specific: an app may not collect a child's personal information until a parent has given consent in a way that reasonably proves they are the parent. A checkbox and a typed name don't count.

For most of the summer, our answer was blunt. We closed signups to anyone under 13 rather than run a consent flow we weren't confident in. That meant 12-year-old NICA riders couldn't join, which bothered us, because they are exactly who Youth Mode was designed for.

Since September 10, under-13 signups are open again, with a consent process built to meet what the rule asks for:

1. The child stops at the age screen. A 7-to-12-year-old enters only a parent's email address. No profile, no training data, nothing else is collected at that point.
2. The parent gets a plain-language notice. It lists exactly what Corsa collects, why, and who else receives it, by name. It also lists the parent's rights: to review, correct, revoke, or delete.
3. The parent verifies consent with a $1 card transaction. This is one of the methods the Federal Trade Commission recognises for confirming that the person consenting is an adult account holder. The receipt goes to the parent. The dollar is a verification fee, not a purchase, and we don't refund it because the transaction itself is the proof.
4. Only then is the athlete's profile created. The training plan, the schedule, the injury notes, all of it comes after consent, never before.

If a parent does nothing, the pending account is deleted after 14 days.

The parent portal

Consent isn't a one-time gate. Every parent who approves an under-13 account gets access to a parent portal at app.corsa.coach/parent. There's no password to remember; we email a sign-in link that works once and expires in thirty minutes. From there a parent can:

• see what information Corsa holds about their child, by category;
• correct the date of birth;
• start, cancel, or apply a coupon to the subscription, which is billed to the parent's card, not the child's;
• withdraw consent, which pauses training immediately;
• delete the account and all of its data on the spot.

If consent is withdrawn and not restored, the account is deleted after 30 days. We keep only the consent record itself, the parent's contact details and the transaction reference, for three years afterward, as proof that consent was obtained. Then that goes too.

What we deliberately don't do

Some of the most important protections are things that never happen.

• No advertising, ever. Not to children, not to anyone.
• No selling or sharing personal data for anyone else's purposes.
• No location data. Under-13 accounts can't connect Garmin, Strava, or Wahoo, whose activity records carry GPS coordinates we would never use. Apple Health on the child's own device is allowed, because that data stays under the family's control.
• The AI never sees who the athlete is. When we ask Claude to build a plan, it receives the athlete's age, sport, goals, schedule, and training history. It does not receive a name, an email, or any account identifier.
• No training our models on athlete data. Full stop.

An honest note on what "meeting the requirements" means

We want to be precise about the claim we're making. Corsa's Youth Mode is designed to meet the requirements of SB 2420 and COPPA, and we've built the technical controls those laws describe: store-signal handling, verifiable parental consent, parental review and deletion, written retention rules, and data minimisation. That is a description of how the product is engineered. It is not a certification, a seal, or an endorsement from any regulator or third-party program, and we won't imply otherwise.

We're a small company. That cuts both ways: we can't afford a compliance department, but we also can't afford to be careless with a 12-year-old's data, and we don't want to be. If you're a parent with a question, or a coach wondering how this fits your team's rules, email hello@corsa.coach and you'll get an answer from the person who built it.

For coaches

If you run a youth team, here's the short version to share with families:

• Athletes 13 and over sign up directly. Youth Mode is automatic.
• Athletes 7 to 12 need a parent to approve the account. It takes about a minute on a phone and includes a $1 card verification.
• Parents can review, pause, or delete their child's account at any time from the parent portal.
• Corsa shows no ads, sells no data, and collects no location.

The riders who were locked out this summer can sign up now. We're glad to have them back.