Privacy Policy

You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age required by the laws of your country) to create a student account. If you are under 18, you confirm that a parent, guardian, or responsible adult is aware of your use of Zadway and consents to it.

If a teacher or school invites you to a class, that teacher can see the practice results described in section 6 — but never your password, payment details, or private messages to our support team.

Information you give us

• Account details — your name, email address, role (teacher or student), password, and email-verification status. Authentication is handled through AWS Cognito.
• Your work — the essays, answers, and practice responses you submit, plus any prompts, comments, or teaching materials a teacher uploads. Essay text is stored in Amazon S3, not inline in our database.
• Class information — for teachers: the classes you create, the students you invite, assignments you set, and notes you add to a report.
• Payment information — if you subscribe to a paid plan, our payment processor Stripe collects and processes your card details. We do not store full card numbers; we receive a customer reference, subscription status, and the last four digits and card type for your records.
• Messages you send us — anything you include when you contact us through our contact page or reply to our support correspondence.

Information created when you use Zadway

• Scoring and feedback — band scores, criterion breakdowns, sentence-level corrections, Band 7/8 rewrites, and vocabulary and grammar suggestions generated for your submissions.
• Practice activity — your Reading, Listening, and Vocabulary session results, answers, timings, streaks, estimated band, spaced-repetition schedule, and progress analytics.
• Usage and device data — log records such as your IP address, browser type, pages viewed, actions taken, timestamps, and sign-in events. We use these for security, abuse prevention, rate limiting, and diagnosing problems.

Cookies and analytics

Our website uses a small number of cookies. Strictly necessary cookies (for example, to remember your cookie choice) are always active. Analytics cookies — we use Google Analytics 4 — load only if you select “Accept” on our cookie banner. You can change your choice at any time through the Cookie Preferences link in the site footer. The signed-in app uses cookies that are essential to keep you logged in; authentication tokens are stored in HTTP-only cookies, never in your browser’s local storage.

Our contact form is protected by Google reCAPTCHA to prevent spam and abuse. Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply to that feature.

• To provide the Service — score essays, generate feedback and rewrites, run Reading, Listening, and Vocabulary practice, and track progress.
• To create and manage your account, verify your email, and keep you signed in.
• To let teachers manage classes and assignments, and to show teachers the student results described in section 6.
• To process subscriptions, payments, renewals, discount codes, and (where relevant) sales-partner commissions.
• To operate the AI scoring pipeline, including a de-duplicated results cache so identical submissions are not re-processed unnecessarily.
• To keep the Service secure — enforcing usage limits, detecting fraud and abuse, and investigating incidents.
• To respond to your support requests and send you service-related messages (for example, verification, password reset, billing, and important changes).
• To understand and improve how the Service is used, and to fix bugs.
• To comply with legal obligations and enforce our terms.

We do not use AI to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you without human involvement. Band scores and feedback are advisory: a student’s real result is decided by IELTS, and a teacher remains responsible for their own academic judgement.

To score essays and generate feedback, rewrites, and vocabulary content, we send the relevant text (such as your essay and the prompt) to OpenAI for processing. To produce audio for Listening practice, we send scripted passage text to ElevenLabs. These providers process the content to return a result to us.

We use these providers under their business/API terms, which do not permit your content to be used to train their models. We send only what is needed for the task, and we do not send payment details to them.

If a student is enrolled in a teacher’s class, that teacher can see:

• IELTS band scores and criterion breakdowns for submissions made in that class context;
• assignment submissions and essay reviews;
• identified strengths and weaknesses, progress reports, and class analytics.

A teacher cannot see:

• student passwords or login credentials;
• payment or billing information;
• private account settings;
• a student’s private correspondence with Zadway support;
• any information the platform does not explicitly expose to teachers.

Students can review and, where offered, decline class participation. A student’s practice done outside a class is their own and is not surfaced to a teacher.

Service providers (sub-processors)

We share information with vendors who help us run the Service, only as needed to do so:

Legal and safety

We may disclose information if required by law, to respond to lawful requests, to enforce our terms, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users, the public, or Zadway.

Business transfers

If Zadway is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any change in ownership or use of your personal information.

We do not sell your data

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We do not use your essays or practice work to advertise to you.

The Service is hosted on AWS infrastructure. Your information — including essay text in S3 and records in MongoDB Atlas — may be stored and processed in AWS regions outside your country, and our AI sub-processors (OpenAI, ElevenLabs) process text on their own infrastructure, which may be located in the United States. Where personal information is transferred internationally, we rely on the safeguards offered by those providers, including contractual data-protection terms.

• Account and practice data is kept while your account is active so you and (where applicable) your teacher can see your history and progress.
• Billing records are kept for as long as needed to meet tax, accounting, and legal requirements.
• Logs and analytics are kept for a limited period for security and troubleshooting, then deleted or aggregated.
• Support messages are kept for as long as needed to handle your request and for a reasonable period afterwards.

When an account is deleted, we remove or de-identify the associated personal data — including essay files, evaluations, and Reading, Listening, and Vocabulary session records — except where we are required to retain certain records (such as billing history) or where data has been aggregated or de-identified so it no longer identifies you. Our internal, content-hash-based scoring cache does not identify you and is not personal data about you.

We use technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit, HTTP-only authentication cookies, access controls and role-based permissions, managed cloud infrastructure, and separation of essay text (S3) from database records. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect your information and to respond promptly to any incident.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal information, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent. To exercise any of these:

• In the app — you can view and edit your profile, manage your subscription, and request account deletion from your settings.
• By contacting us — send your request through our contact page. We may need to verify your identity before we act on a request.
• Cookies — use the Cookie Preferences link in the footer to accept or decline analytics cookies at any time.
• Email — service and transactional emails are a necessary part of the Service; any optional updates will include an unsubscribe option.

If you are a student in a school or class, some requests (for example, correcting your name or removing you from a class) may be handled by your teacher or school. You can always contact us directly if you need help. If you believe we have not resolved a concern, you may have the right to complain to your local data-protection authority — in Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Zadway is intended for IELTS candidates and educators. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children below the minimum age stated in section 1. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information without appropriate consent, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date above and, where appropriate, notify you by email or through the Service. Your continued use of Zadway after an update means you accept the revised Policy.

For any question about this Policy or how your information is handled, reach us through our contact page.