The company: A free, peer-led tutoring platform built on trust

Schoolhouse is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by Sal Khan of Khan Academy, on a mission to unlock every student's potential through free, peer-led tutoring and real human connection. High schoolers make up the platform's primary user base — both as students seeking help and, once approved, as peer tutors running live sessions over Zoom with people they may have never met.

With roughly 223,000 people having attended live sessions on Schoolhouse, the platform has become a meaningful space for peer-to-peer learning. That combination — a largely underage user base, high engagement through live video calls with strangers, and a global reach — means trust and safety is a foundational area of concern.

The challenge: Banned users trying to slip back in

Because most of Schoolhouse's users are minors, keeping bad actors off the platform is critical. Before Fingerprint, the platform relied on IP-based blocking to stop suspended users from returning. But IP bans alone weren't enough for the more determined cases.

"We knew that IP banning wasn't going to be enough for slightly more sophisticated bad actors," said Max Karpawich, a software engineer at Schoolhouse who works closely with the trust and safety team. "Those are more rare, but when they do happen, the consequences can be severe."

Most of the platform's suspensions, Karpawich noted, come from far less sophisticated cases — typically younger users acting out rather than coordinated abuse.

But the platform has also seen a smaller number of more determined attempts — users trying to get around IP-based blocks specifically to return after a suspension. It's those cases where IP checks alone start to fall short.

The solution: Stopping banned users before they get back in

Schoolhouse integrates Fingerprint at a specific, narrow point in its platform: the account application process. When someone applies to join, Schoolhouse generates a device fingerprint for that device.

If a suspended user later tries to create a new account, Schoolhouse checks the new signup's fingerprint against its records, in addition to checking for duplicate IPs. A device ID match blocks the new account before it ever reaches the platform.

"Should somebody go and try to create an account with a shared fingerprint of somebody that's suspended, we can block them immediately and move them to a manual review process before they even get into the platform, which is great," Karpawich said.

Schoolhouse found Fingerprint through its own research into trust and safety vendors. "Device fingerprinting was a technique we could employ in our arsenal to strengthen our trust and safety systems," Karpawich said. "We did some research into the landscape, and Fingerprint rose to the top as an authority."

The impact: Fewer repeat offenders, zero added friction

Since turning the feature on, Schoolhouse has blocked 93 banned users from returning to the platform in just 71 days — an average of approximately 1.3 cases per day, or roughly 39 cases per month.

"We've seen some fingerprint matches and blocks of folks trying to return to the platform after suspension," Karpawich said. "That has been fantastic." He added that Schoolhouse's trust and safety team, who work closely with Fingerprint day to day, "are very excited about that safeguard actually kind of working."

Beyond ban evasion specifically, Karpawich framed Fingerprint as one piece of a broader balancing act Schoolhouse has to manage: keeping onboarding frictionless for the "happy path" student who just wants to learn or start tutoring, while still protecting a platform where high schoolers connect live, one-on-one, with strangers.

"We want to minimize the friction for the highly motivated high schooler who wants to seek out tutoring," he said. "But there's also this immense and fundamental need to protect them, and to keep those experiences safe while still having it be accessible for folks. Fingerprint is a very useful tool to keep the more unwanted folks from coming back."

Why it matters: Safety without sacrificing access

As Karpawich noted: "As the place where so many students choose to extend their education through live peer tutoring and conversation, Schoolhouse has a responsibility to make sure their interactions on our platform remain safe. Within our Trust & Safety systems, Fingerprint's device detection has been great at helping us keep users who have violated our community policies from coming back."

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