Privacy notice

The short version: your uploads and the pages made from them are yours, are visible only to your account, are never used by us to train anything, and are never part of any measurement or advertising. The AI model that reads them is run by a third party, DeepSeek, whose servers are in China and whose own terms differ from ours — read “Model providers, specifically” below before uploading anything sensitive. We do record how the app is used by signed-in accounts — for example that a goal was set, a lesson finished or a plan chosen — without any tracking cookie, and you can say no to that below. Anything involving a measurement cookie or an advertising platform happens only if you opt in.

Who is responsible

Antony Levell, trading as Thred is the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: [email protected]. If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first so we can put it right; you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to the data protection authority where you live.

What we hold

• Your account — email address, and a password we never see in readable form.
• Your goals — what you said you want to learn, how far and how much you already knew, any deadline you set, and the path built for it. Used to decide what to teach you, in what order and how deeply. If you answered the questions of an earlier version of our onboarding, those answers are kept with your account and used the same way.
• What you upload — your files, kept as you sent them, plus the text extracted from them.
• What the app makes from it — pages, links, categories, conversations, quizzes and the record of what you got right and wrong.
• Usage and billing— how much model usage your account has consumed, how many tutor questions it has asked today (to apply the free plan's daily limit), your trial dates and your subscription status. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.
• Product events — for signed-in accounts, a record that particular steps happened: the first-goal screen was shown, a goal was set (and whether from scratch, from documents or from a sample), a path was built, a lesson started or finished, you said you would come back, a plan was offered or checkout started. Each is a name, a time and your account id — never the wording of your goal, your sources, pages or conversations.
• Measurement, if you opted in — a random id in a cookie, which pages you saw before signing in, when you came back, and where you arrived from: the campaign parameters and advertising click identifier on the link you followed, and the site that linked to us.
• Your consent record — what you were asked, what you answered and when. Kept whatever you answered, because we are required to be able to show it.

What we deliberately do not do

No measurement, analytics or advertising ever reads the contents of your vault. Not the text of your sources, not their filenames, not your page titles, not your conversations, not the topics you study. The funnel records that a source was read; it never records what it was. This matters more than it might sound: for a medicine, law or theology student those files can reveal health, criminal or belief data, and the safe way to handle that is to keep it out of the measurement system entirely rather than to promise to be careful with it.

Why, and on what basis

• Running the service — performance of our contract with you. This covers your account, your uploads, everything made from them, and your billing.
• Keeping it working, secure and within its costs — our legitimate interests. This covers server logs, rate limiting and the record of background jobs.
• Product events— our legitimate interests in understanding which parts of the service work, so we can improve it. They use no cookie, contain nothing you wrote, and are only ever looked at in aggregate. You can object at any time: choose “no” to measurement below and no more are recorded, or email us.
• The measurement cookie and advertising — your consent, asked separately for each on this page and freely refusable. Nothing is stored on your device for them unless you opt in, and declining costs you nothing: the whole app works either way.
• Tax and accounting records — a legal obligation.

Cookies and similar storage

Five things, and the measurement id is the only one that needs your consent.

• Sign-in — keeps you logged in. Strictly necessary; no consent needed, and the app cannot work without it.
• Your cookie choice— remembers what you answered here, so we do not ask again. Strictly necessary in the same sense: the only alternative to remembering “no” is asking again forever.
• Theme — remembers dark or light.
• Notices already shown— in your browser's own storage, a note that you have seen the end-of-first-lesson card and the trial notices, so they are not shown twice. It never leaves your device.
• Measurement id — a random value with nothing derived from it but which half of an A/B test you see. Set only if you accept, deleted if you later decline, and it expires after a year.

There are no third-party advertising cookies on this site and no tracking pixels in the pages. Where an advertising platform is told about a conversion, it is told by our server after the event — described below — rather than by anything running in your browser.

Advertising, if you allowed it

If — and only if — you ticked the advertising box, then when you subscribe we tell the platform that sold us the click that a subscription happened. What is sent is: a one-way cryptographic hash of your email address, the click identifier from the ad you followed, the amount, and a reference number that stops the same payment being counted twice. Your email address itself is not sent, and neither is your name, your address, or anything at all about what you study.

The recipients are Meta, Google and TikTok, and only whichever of them actually referred you. They act as independent controllers for this, not as our processors, which means their own privacy policies govern what they do with it after that. This is the part of this notice we would most encourage you to decline if you are unsure — nothing in the product depends on it.

Who else sees your data

Supabase, Stripe and our hosting provider act on our instructions as processors. The model provider, DeepSeek, is described separately below, because it is different.

• Supabase — the database, file storage and sign-in. Your data is stored in the EU (Ireland).
• DeepSeek — the model that reads your sources and answers your questions. Text you upload and ask about is sent to it to be processed, on servers in China. See below.
• Stripe — payments, and the billing emails that go with them: receipts, the reminder before a trial turns into a paid subscription, renewal reminders and failed-payment notices. They tell us whether you have paid; we never receive your card number.
• Fly.io — the server the app runs on, in London.

Some of these process data outside the UK and EEA. Supabase and Stripe cover transfers with the EU standard contractual clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum (Stripe also relies on the Data Privacy Framework). Transfers to DeepSeek in China are described below and are not covered by a contract of that kind.

Model providers, specifically

This is the bit worth being precise about, because it is the thing people actually want to know. Reading a source means sending its text to a model provider's API. We do not send them your email address or anything else identifying you — only the text being worked on.

DeepSeekstores the data it receives on servers in the People's Republic of China, which the UK does not treat as providing the same protection as UK law, and which has laws allowing authorities to require access to data. We have no data processing agreement with DeepSeek that restricts what it does with the text. Its published privacy policy says it may use data to train and improve its models, with a right to opt out of that, and its API terms allow inputs and outputs to be used for training. We therefore cannot promise that text sent to it is not retained or used for training. Because this transfer is necessary for the tutor to work at all, you agree to it by uploading material or asking the tutor questions; if you do not want it, do not use those features. Do not upload personal data about other people, confidential documents, or anything you would not want held in China.

How long we keep it

• Your vault — until you delete it. Start over in Settings removes every page, source, conversation and file immediately, and there is an export button beside it.
• Product events, measurement events and attribution — 25 months, then deleted. Sooner if you withdraw consent, which deletes what was collected under it.
• Records of background jobs — 7 days.
• Consent records — 6 years, because they are the evidence that we asked properly.
• Tax records — what was paid and when, 6 years, as the law requires.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit, and each account's data is separated from every other account's at the database level so that one account cannot read another's. Passwords are stored hashed. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affecting your data occurs we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, object to how we use it, ask us to restrict that use, or ask for it in a portable form. The export button gives you most of this instantly; for the rest, email us and we will answer within a month, free of charge.

Withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it — the button above does it, immediately, and takes with it the measurement data collected under it. It has no effect on anything done lawfully before you withdrew, and no effect on your account or your vault.

Automated decisions

Nothing here makes a decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you. The app builds a path and suggests a starting level from what you tell it about your goal, and you can change both. The 7-day trial, the free plan and its limits are the same for everybody.

Children

This service is not intended for under-16s and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account here, email us and we will remove it.

Changes to this notice

If we change this notice in a way that matters, we will email you before it takes effect and update the date at the top. We will never use your data for a new purpose without telling you first, and asking for consent where the law requires it.

Contact

Questions, requests or complaints about your data: [email protected].