Privacy policy

What we collect

• Account details. Your email address, your name if you give one, and a hashed password. We never store a password in a readable form.
• Assessment data. Your answers, section timings, scores and which questions you flagged. This is what a practice platform is for; without it we cannot score a test or show you progress. In an IELTS or TOEFL practice test it includes the recordings of your spoken answers, and in an AP practice test the photographs of free responses you write on paper, both kept with the test so it can be scored.
• Purchase records. What you bought, when, and the payment reference. Card details are handled entirely by our payment processor and never reach our servers.
• Technical data. Basic request logs needed to run and secure the service.
• Account security. To keep each account to one session at a time and to prevent account sharing and bulk copying of our content, when you sign in we record one-way hashed digests of your browser's user agent and of your network block (the first three parts of your IP address), your session identifier, the site you signed in on, and when a session was closed because of a sign-in on another of our sites or another device. A new sign-in to your account closes all your other sessions. We do not store your IP address or browser string themselves for this purpose and we do not use device fingerprinting. These records are deleted 90 days after last use. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you and our legitimate interest in keeping accounts secure.

Your account works across our sites

Studeous shares an account system with the other test-preparation sites operated by the same company, so one email and password signs you in to all of them. Your purchases and results on Studeous are not shared with those sites, and theirs are not shared with Studeous.

Answers scored by AI

Written and spoken answers that are marked by AI, photographed AP free responses, and the AI Tutor’s conversations are processed by AI providers for that purpose only: OpenAI, Google (through Vercel’s AI Gateway) and MiniMax. These providers process the data on our behalf and for these purposes only. A spoken answer in a question bank is scored as it is sent and is not kept.

While you take an AP practice test, your answers are kept in your browser until the test ends, so that they are not lost if the page reloads; they are deleted when you hand the test in.

Payment processing

Payments are processed by Stripe. When you buy something, Stripe receives the details it needs to take the payment, and we receive a record that the payment succeeded. We never see or store your full card number.

Results belong to the student

If your school or tutor arranged the sitting, they can see your results for that sitting — that is the point of a group test. Your individual assessment results are otherwise private; the dashboard leaderboard shows points and place as described below. We do not sell assessment data, we do not share it with exam owners, and we do not use one institution’s results to build comparisons shown to another. How school access works.

The leaderboard in your dashboard shows your points and place. Your name (first name and surname initial) appears only if you turn this on yourself; otherwise other students see only a number in place of your name.

How long we keep it

• Account and assessment data: while your account is open.
• Inactive accounts: deleted after a prolonged period of inactivity, with notice to the account's confirmed email address first.
• For an account deleted this way, we keep a record of the deletion (the email address; the dates the account was opened, last used and deleted; the number of practice tests deleted with it) for 2 years, then erase it. We also use this record to stop a new account opened with the same email address from getting the free trial again. Anything you buy is not affected. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in offering the free trial once per person.
• Purchase records: kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, even after an account closes.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it. Contact us on WhatsApp and we will verify your account and action the request within 30 days. If you are in the EU or UK you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

Cookies and analytics

We set the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to keep the site secure. Those are necessary for the service and are not optional. We also use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are used, which sets its own cookies.

estate_dv: a strictly necessary security cookie, set only when you are signed in. It holds a one-way hashed marker that your session is open and the only one; it lasts up to 7 days. For the same purpose we use estate_dv_chk, estate_dv_ended and estate_dv_notice, which last up to 15 minutes, to tell you once when your session was closed because of a sign-in on another of our sites or another device.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland we ask first. Analytics is switched off for you until you accept, and declining is remembered so we do not ask again. Nothing about the site changes either way — there is no content behind accepting.

We have turned off Google’s advertising features entirely, everywhere: no ad storage, no ad personalisation, and no sharing of your data for advertising. We run no advertising on this site and we do not sell or share your data with advertisers.

To change your mind, clear this site’s data in your browser settings; we will ask again on your next visit.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects you, we will say so on this page and date the change. The date at the bottom of this page is when it was last reviewed.