Privacy Policy

Effective August 18, 2026.

This policy explains what personal information Explainaloud collects when you use the Explainaloud website and service, why we collect it, who else processes it, and what you can do about it. It forms part of our Terms of Service.

1. Information we collect

Information you give us

Account details: your email address, and a password if you sign up with one. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and basic profile details from Google instead; we never see your Google password.
Profile details: your first and last name, your username, your date of birth, an optional profile picture, and whether you are using Explainaloud as a student or otherwise. We collect date of birth to confirm the age requirement in our Terms. Your username and date of birth are set once and cannot be changed afterwards.
Your timezone: the IANA timezone your browser reports, such as Europe/London. We use it for one thing: working out which calendar day a recording belongs to, so a streak is counted in your own days rather than in the server’s. It is not a location, and we do not derive one from it.
Friends: who you have sent friend requests to, who has sent them to you, and which requests were accepted.
Recording days: the calendar dates on which you recorded, and how many recordings each holds. This is what a streak is counted from. It records the date, not the content.
Study content: the courses and topics you create, any source material or notes you add, and the transcripts of your spoken explanations together with the scores and gaps generated from them.
Correspondence: what you send us if you email us.

Your voice recordings

When you record an explanation, your browser captures audio and sends it to our transcription provider so it can be turned into text. We do not store your audio. It is processed to produce a transcript and then discarded. There is no recording archive in your account and no audio file to retrieve. The transcript is what we keep.

Your browser also uses its own built-in speech recognition to show captions live as you speak. On some browsers, including Google Chrome, that feature is provided by the browser vendor and may send audio to their servers under their own privacy policy, not ours.

Information collected automatically

Authentication cookies: set so you stay signed in. These are strictly necessary for the Service to function.
Usage counters: how many topics and recordings you have used on a given day, so we can apply plan limits.
Server and security logs: including IP address, browser type, and timestamps, kept by our hosting and database providers to keep the Service running and to detect abuse.

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.

2. Why we use it

To provide the Service: creating your account, transcribing and scoring your explanations, saving your work, applying plan limits.
To take payment: processing Pro subscriptions and keeping your plan status current.
To keep the Service secure: detecting and preventing fraud, abuse, and unauthorised access.
To let people find you and be your friend: matching a username or a name you searched for against other accounts, and showing an accepted friend your topic count and your streak.
To communicate with you: account and transactional email such as verification, password resets, and billing notices.
To improve the Service: understanding, in aggregate, which features are used and where things break.

Where the law requires a legal basis (for example under the UK and EU GDPR), we rely on performance of a contract for providing and billing the Service, legitimate interests for security and product improvement, consent for microphone access, which you grant in your browser and can revoke at any time, and legal obligation where we must retain records.

3. What other users can see

Most of this policy is about us and our providers. This section is about other people using Explainaloud, and it is short because the answer is short.

Any signed-in user can find you by your username, or by your first and last name, and can see your profile picture. That is what makes it possible for a friend to add you. Do not use a name or a picture you would not want another user to see.
You have a profile page at a stable address, of the form /profiles/your-username. Any signed-in user who has that address, or who finds you in search, can open it. It shows your name, your username, your picture, the month you joined, and a button to send you a friend request. Whether they send one, and whether you accept, is each of your decisions.
An accepted friend can additionally see two numbers: how many topics you have created, and your current streak. Nothing else. Not your topics, not your recordings, not your transcripts, not your scores, not your gaps, not your email address, and not your date of birth.
Nobody, friend or otherwise, can see anything you have said. Your explanations and everything generated from them are visible to you alone.
Removing a friend ends the sharing at once, in both directions. So does declining or cancelling a request.

None of this is public to the open web. Profile pages sit behind sign-in, so somebody without an Explainaloud account cannot open one, and the pages are marked not to be indexed. Search engines cannot reach them.

4. Who else processes your information

We use the following providers. They act on our instructions and may process your information only to provide their service to us.

Supabase: database, authentication, and account email delivery.
Vercel: application hosting and delivery.
Groq: speech-to-text transcription of your recordings.
Google (Gemini): generating scores, gap analysis, and study material from your transcripts and topics.
Tavily: retrieving supporting web results for a topic.
Stripe: subscription payments. Stripe collects your payment details directly; we never receive or store your full card number.
Google: if you choose to sign in with a Google account.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not permit these providers to use your content to train their AI models.

We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our Terms, or in connection with a merger or acquisition, in which case we will give you notice before your information becomes subject to a different policy.

5. International transfers

Our providers operate in the United States and other countries, so your information may be processed outside the country you live in. Where we transfer personal information out of the UK, the EEA, or another region with transfer restrictions, we rely on the safeguards offered by those providers, including Standard Contractual Clauses.

6. How long we keep it

Audio: not retained; discarded once transcribed.
Account and study content: kept while your account is open, so your history stays available to you.
Friendships: kept until either of you removes the friendship or cancels the request, at which point the record is deleted rather than marked inactive.
Recording days: kept while your account is open. A streak is worked out from them each time it is shown, so deleting a topic does not change your streak, and there is no separate stored number to correct.
After deletion: removed from live systems promptly and purged from backups within 30 days.
Billing records: retained by us and by Stripe for as long as tax and accounting law requires, typically several years, even after your account is closed.

7. Security

Your data is protected in transit by TLS and at rest by our database provider. Access to it is restricted by row-level security rules that scope every record to the account that created it, and the columns that control your subscription are not writable by your own session.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and any relevant regulator as the law requires.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of your personal information, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, receive it in a portable format, and withdraw consent. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and other US states with comprehensive privacy laws have equivalent rights, including the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them.

You can change your profile details in your account settings at any time. For anything else, including deleting your account and its content, email hello@explainaloud.com from the address on the account. We will respond within the period required by applicable law, and within 30 days in any case.

If you are in the UK or EEA and believe we have not handled your information properly, you may complain to your local data protection authority.

9. Children

Explainaloud is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, email hello@explainaloud.com and we will delete the account and its data.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The effective date at the top will change, and if the update materially affects how we handle your information we will notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

11. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: hello@explainaloud.com.