Privacy Policy

Effective July 29, 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, date of birth, and whether you are using Explainaloud as a student or otherwise. We collect date of birth to confirm the age requirement in our Terms.
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 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. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.
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.

6. 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.

7. 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 jovanny.shek@gmail.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.

8. 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 jovanny.shek@gmail.com and we will delete the account and its data.

9. 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.

10. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: jovanny.shek@gmail.com.