Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data Best School Tools (“we”, “us”) collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have. It applies to bestschooltools.com and the tools, classrooms, lessons, and subscriptions on it.

We are the data controller for teacher and account data. When a school or teacher uploads or generates student work through the service, we process that student data on their instructions — see the Student Data Addendum.

1. Who we are

Best School Tools is an online platform of AI-assisted teaching tools. Contact: [email protected]. If you need a postal address for a formal notice, email us and we will provide one.

If you are in the UK, the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 apply. If you are in the EEA, the EU GDPR applies. If you are in the United States, COPPA, FERPA (for school-provided student records), and state privacy laws may also apply.

2. The data we collect

Account data

When you register we collect username, email address, password (stored hashed), role (teacher or student), and later subscription status. If you sign in with Google we receive your Google account name, email, and Google user id — we do not receive your Google password.

Content you create

Tool inputs and outputs (lesson plans, rubrics, quizzes, emails, rewritten text, and similar), classroom names, join codes, lesson files, and history of generations. If you use marking or interactive lessons we may store student names entered by the teacher or student, answers, scores, and related files.

Payment data

Subscriptions are processed by Stripe. We receive confirmation of payment, customer and subscription ids, and plan status. We do not store full card numbers.

Technical data

IP address, browser type, pages requested, and diagnostic logs. Session cookies keep you signed in. A cart cookie may store items before you log in. See the Cookie Policy.

Communications

Emails you send us, enterprise contact-form fields (name, work email, phone, school), and your email-preference choices.

We do not require a date of birth. We do not sell personal data.

3. Why we use it (lawful bases)

4. AI processing

Most tools send the text you (or a student, via a teacher-set activity) submit to OpenAI so we can generate a response. We use this only to provide the feature you asked for. We do not use your content to train our own models. We do not sell prompts or outputs. OpenAI’s processing is subject to their terms and privacy policy. Do not paste secrets, full medical records, or other data you are not allowed to share with a processor.

YouTube Summarizer also calls Google’s YouTube API to fetch public video metadata and captions where available.

5. Who we share data with

We share data with the service providers required to run the product, not with advertisers as a data sale:

We may also disclose data if required by law, to protect the service, or as part of a genuine business transfer (we would still require the buyer to honour this policy).

6. International transfers

If you are in the UK or EEA, some providers above are in the United States. Those transfers rely on the provider’s contractual safeguards (such as Standard Contractual Clauses) and, where applicable, their participation in an adequacy framework. You can ask us for more detail at [email protected].

7. How long we keep data

• Account, generation history, classrooms, and lesson records: for as long as the account is open, then deleted or anonymised within 90 days of a verified deletion request (unless we must keep a record of a transaction or a dispute).
• Sessions: up to 7 days of inactivity, then expired.
• Anonymous cart cookies: up to 7 days.
• Stripe records: as Stripe is required to keep them for tax and fraud.
• Server logs: typically up to 90 days, unless needed for security investigation.
• Email preference and unsubscribe records: until you ask us to remove them, so we can honour opt-outs.

8. Children and students

The service is aimed at teachers and at students using it under a teacher or school. We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to create their own unpaid consumer accounts. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email [email protected] and we will delete it.

We do not operate a general parental-consent signup for children under 13. Schools and teachers must not require under-13 students to create personal accounts. If a school needs under-13 students to use a lesson, the school is responsible for any consent their law requires and should use the Student Data Addendum.

We do not use student work to train models and we do not sell student data.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or export your data, to object to certain processing, and to withdraw consent. Email [email protected]. We may need to verify the request. You may also complain to your data protection authority (in the UK, the ICO at ico.org.uk).

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are used in the CCPA/CPRA. You may request access or deletion using the same email.

10. Security

We use HTTPS, HTTP-only session cookies, hashed passwords, and access controls on the server. No online service is perfectly secure. Do not submit highly sensitive personal data (for example Social Security / National Insurance numbers, full payment card numbers, or passwords for other sites) into the tools.

11. Changes

We will post updates on this page and change the date above. If a change is material we will also email the address on the account where we can.

12. Contact

Privacy requests: [email protected]
Related documents: Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, Acceptable Use, Student Data Addendum.