Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

PrepForIELTS is operated by SERGEI SUSLOV PR, registered in Serbia. We are the data controller for everything described below. Contact: [email protected].

2. What we store

• Your account: the email address, display name and avatar URL supplied by Google or Apple when you sign in, plus which provider you used.
• Your writing: the questions you draw, your plans, your essays, the evaluations and re-scores produced from them, and the edits you make in the fix loop. For essays used to improve the evaluator (§3), also the marks a teacher or examiner gives them.
• Usage counters: how many evaluations you have run today, so the daily limit works.

We do not ask for, and have no use for, your test date, your visa case, your address or your payment details.

3. Why we store it

To show you your own work across sessions, to produce and re-produce your evaluations, to enforce the daily limits, and to make the evaluations more accurate, as described below.

Using essays to improve the evaluator

We may use the essays you submit, the questions they answer and the evaluations produced from them to test and improve how PrepForIELTS marks essays. That includes training (fine-tuning) language models on them and measuring how close our bands come to an examiner’s.

• A qualified IELTS teacher or examiner we engage may read and mark a selection of essays, so there is a human band to compare against and learn from.
• The essay text, the question and those marks may be sent to a language-model provider to train a model that is used only for PrepForIELTS.
• The copies used for training and measurement do not carry your name, email or avatar. We keep an internal reference to your account only so that we can remove your essays later.
• We never publish your essays, show them to other users, or use them as examples in the product.

We do this on the basis of our legitimate interest in making the service’s evaluations accurate. You can object at any time (§11), and objecting does not change anything you can do in the app. Essays you submitted before we added this section are not used for training unless you tell us we may.

An essay is used as you wrote it, so leave out personal details you would not want someone to read, such as your full name or where you live.

4. Who else sees it

• The language-model provider that performs an evaluation receives the essay text and the question. It does not receive your name or email. When we train a model (§3), the provider that trains it receives the essays, questions and marks used for training, again without your name or email.
• Teachers or examiners we engage to mark essays (§3) receive the essay and the question only, and are bound to keep them confidential.
• Polar processes payments as merchant of record. Card details go to Polar directly; we never see them.
• Google Analytics receives page-view and click events from the public pages, including your IP address, approximate location and device details. It also receives an event when an account is created, when someone signs in, and when a purchase completes — carrying the sign-in method used (Google or Apple), the plan bought, its price and the order reference. It does not receive your essays, your name or your email.
• Google Ads receives a signal when an account is created, so we can tell which adverts bring people who actually sign up. It carries the sign-in method and nothing else about you.
• Microsoft Clarity receives a recording of how pages are used — clicks, scrolling, and a replay of the page as your browser drew it — together with your IP address and device details. Text you type into a field is masked before it leaves your browser. It does not receive your name or email.
• Sentry receives technical error reports when something breaks — the error, the stack trace and the URL. We have configured it not to send request bodies or headers, so your essays and session cookie are not included.
• Nobody else. Your essays are never shown to other users, and are not used as public examples.

5. Analytics

The public pages use Google Analytics 4 to count page views and clicks so we can see which parts of the site are useful, and to count sign-ups and completed purchases so we know whether the site works. Those two events carry the sign-in method, the plan and the amount paid — never your identity. GA4 stores cookies on your device (_ga, _ga_*) and uses them to recognise a returning browser, and it shares data with Google as an independent controller.

We also use Microsoft Clarity for heatmaps and session replay: it records which parts of a page were clicked and scrolled, and can replay a visit to show where people get stuck. Clarity masks the contents of form fields, so what you type into an essay box is not captured. Text already displayed on a page can appear in a replay. Clarity stores its own cookies (_clck, _clsk) and Microsoft acts as an independent controller for what it receives.

Analytics are on by default. A notice at the bottom of the page tells you cookies are in use the first time you visit; dismissing it records that you have seen the notice.

You can opt out at any time with Google’s browser add-on, from Clarity’s opt-out page, or by blocking cookies for this site. Blocking them does not affect writing, evaluation or any other part of the service.

6. Error reporting

When something goes wrong we send the error and its stack trace to Sentry so we can fix it. These reports are configured to exclude request bodies and headers, so they do not contain your essays or your session.

7. Cookies

Cookie	Purpose	Necessary?
_ielts_prep_key	Keeps you signed in	Yes
_ielts_prep_oauth	Carries the sign-in state, expires in 10 minutes	Yes
_ga, _ga_*	Google Analytics measurement	No — see §4
_gcl_*	Attributes a sign-up to the advert that brought you	No — see §4
_clck, _clsk	Microsoft Clarity heatmaps and replay	No — see §5

The first two are strictly necessary for the service to work.

8. Age

You must be 16 or older to use PrepForIELTS. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has created an account, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

9. Deleting your data

Delete your account from Settings, under Danger zone. That removes your essays, plans, evaluations, re-scores, fix history and share links, your name and avatar, and the record of any plan you bought, and signs you out everywhere. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.

We keep a closed record of the account: your email address, the Google or Apple account identifier you signed in with, and the date you deleted it. Nothing else is kept with it. It exists so the account cannot be signed in to again or re-created with the same sign-in.

Deleting your account also removes your essays from the copies we keep for training and measurement (§3), and they are left out of any training after that. A model that has already been trained on them is not retrained.

10. Where data lives

The application runs on Fly.io and the database is managed Postgres, both in the United States. Our sub-processors — the language-model provider, Polar, Google, Microsoft and Sentry — are also United States companies. Teachers or examiners who mark essays (§3) may work in other countries.

If you are in the EEA or the UK, this means your data is transferred outside that area. Those transfers rely on the sub-processors’ own standard contractual clauses and, for teachers and examiners, on standard contractual clauses in our agreements with them.

11. Your rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, or send it to you in a portable form. Most of this you can do yourself: your work is visible in the app, and deleting your account removes all of it at once, keeping only the closed record described in §9.

You can also object to your essays being used to improve the evaluator (§3). Write to [email protected] from the address on your account: we will remove your essays from the copies we keep for training and measurement and leave them out of any training after that. Your account and your evaluations are not affected.

For anything else, write to [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days. If you are in the EEA or the UK and are unhappy with our response, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

12. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your data we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes will be announced in the app.

13. Contact

SERGEI SUSLOV PR, Serbia — [email protected].

IELTS trademark

IELTS is a registered trademark of the British Council, IDP IELTS Australia and Cambridge University Press & Assessment. PrepForIELTS is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the owners of the IELTS trademark.