1. Who we are
Ariel Goshe and Nir Berkovich, trading as AIelts, of Tel Aviv, Israel ("we", "us"), operates this service. We are the data controller for the personal data described in this notice. For any privacy question, or to exercise any of the rights in section 7, contact us at aieltscoaching@gmail.com or at the postal address above.
2. What we collect
Account data
- Your email address, and a hashed form of your password. We never store your password itself.
- Whether you signed up with a password or with Google, and your Google account identifier if you used Google sign-in. Where you sign in with Google, we receive that identifier and your email address from Google.
- Whether your email is verified, your account status, and the time of your last sign-in.
Study profile
- Your display name, native language, and target exam date.
- Any previous IELTS band and number of previous attempts you tell us about.
- Your self-reported strong and weak skills, if you choose to assess your own level instead of taking the diagnostic.
- Whether you have seen the in-app introductory tour.
Practice data
- Your answers to Reading and Listening questions, and the scores derived from them.
- The full text of Writing responses you submit.
- Audio recordings of Speaking responses you submit, and the transcripts produced from them.
- The band scores, criterion-level feedback, detected weaknesses, and study plan generated from the above.
Feedback you send us
If you use the in-app feedback prompt, we store your rating and any message you write, linked to your account, so we can act on it and reply.
Reviews you choose to publish
If you write a review in the app, we store your rating, any text you write, the name you give (cut down to your first name and last initial before it is saved) and your highest AI-estimated Writing or Speaking band. It appears on our website only if you tick the box asking us to show it, and only after we have checked it. A published review shows only your first name and last initial, the rating, the text and that band. To have a published review removed, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com and we will take it down.
Calendar sync
If you turn on calendar sync, we generate a feed token for your study plan. Anyone holding the resulting feed address can read your study-task titles and dates, and the calendar provider you subscribe with receives them. Turn it off at any time to stop this.
Payment data
Purchases are processed by Dodo Payments, which acts as the Merchant of Record. We never receive or store your card details. We store a record of which plan you bought, when it starts and expires, and the transaction identifier Dodo Payments gives us.
Technical data
We remember your chosen interface language in the aielts-language functional cookie for one year. Without a saved choice, the interface uses Hindi for India device timezones (Asia/Kolkata or Asia/Calcutta) and English otherwise. This check happens in your browser; it does not collect your location or use IP geolocation. The blog and IELTS assessment content remain in English.
Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) generated by our hosting provider, used to operate and secure the service. We also log security-relevant events - sign-in attempts, password resets and similar - and those entries include the email address involved, so that we can investigate fraud and abuse. Your IP address is used to rate-limit requests, and to derive a short pseudonymous visitor code - a keyed hash whose key changes every day - that our request logs record together with the page or action requested and, if you are signed in, your account identifier. The IP address itself is not stored by the application.
We do not use third-party analytics cookies. We count visits to our public pages (the home page, pricing, the guides, free practice, sign-up and sign-in) with Umami, a cookieless analytics service operated by Umami Software, Inc. It records the page, the referring site and a salted daily hash of the visit; it sets no cookies, stores no IP address, and is not loaded on any page inside the app.
We run a small amount of Google advertising, and to know whether an advertisement led to a free test, a sign-up or a purchase we use Google’s advertising tag (Google Ads). Its code is included on every page of the site, but it reports a page visit to Google only on the same public pages and on the page shown after a purchase. It is not used for personalised advertising or remarketing. Outside the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, when you complete a sign-up or a purchase it also sends Google a hashed (one-way scrambled) form of your email address, which Google uses to match it to an advertisement click, and if you arrive from a Google advertisement it may set Google’s conversion cookies (names beginning _gcl) for up to 90 days. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland it runs in consent-denied mode: it sets no cookies, sends no hashed email address, and sends Google only cookieless, aggregate signals.
We use browser storage only to keep you signed in, to remember your interface preferences, and to hold a small amount of state for checkout and in-app prompts. We do not show a cookie banner, because we set no non-essential cookie anywhere that the law requires your consent first - the storage we do use is strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for, and the only advertising cookie we allow is set outside those regions.
3. Why we process it, and our legal basis
| Purpose | Legal basis (UK/EU GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Creating and securing your account | Performance of a contract |
| Signing you in with Google, if you choose that method | Performance of a contract |
| Grading your Writing and Speaking, and building your study plan | Performance of a contract |
| Taking payment and honouring our refund terms | Performance of a contract; legal obligation for tax records |
| Sending account emails (verification, password reset, grading complete) | Performance of a contract |
| Acting on feedback you send us | Legitimate interests - improving the service |
| Publishing your review on our website, if you ask us to | Consent - withdraw it at any time by emailing us to remove the review |
| Keeping the service secure and diagnosing faults | Legitimate interests - keeping the service available, secure, and free of abuse |
4. Who we send your data to
We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We use the following processors to deliver the service:
| Processor | What it does | What it receives | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI grading providers | Grading Writing and Speaking responses against IELTS criteria | Your Writing text, Speaking transcripts, and your native language | United States |
| Speech processing provider | Converting Speaking recordings to text, and generating Listening audio | Your Speaking audio recordings | United States |
| Cloud provider (hosting, storage, email) | Running the service, storing recordings, sending account emails | All account and practice data, including audio files | United States |
| Dodo Payments | Payment processing as the Merchant of Record | Your email and billing details, handled directly by Dodo Payments | United States |
| Sign in with Google. Google’s sign-in script loads on our sign-in and sign-up pages whether or not you use it | Your IP address and browser when you visit those pages; your Google account email and identifier only if you sign in with Google | United States | |
| Google Ads | Measuring whether a Google advertisement led to a free test, a completed sign-up or a purchase. Not used for personalised advertising or remarketing | Your IP address, browser and the page visited, on our public pages and the page shown after a purchase; a successful sign-up signal, including after email verification, and with it a hashed (one-way scrambled) form of your email address; a Google click identifier if you arrived from a Google ad. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland it sets no cookies, sends no hashed email address and sends only cookieless signals | United States |
We use more than one AI grading provider, each an established commercial AI company based in the United States. Which one grades a given submission depends on availability; each receives the same data, and the record of your evaluation names the model that produced it. We use these providers under API terms which state that inputs are not used to train their models.
If you want to know exactly which companies our AI and speech providers are, ask us at aieltscoaching@gmail.com and we will tell you. We will also tell you here, in this notice, before adding a provider that is not one of those already in use.
To be explicit about the AI processing: when you submit a Writing response, its text is sent to an external AI provider to be graded. When you submit a Speaking response, the audio recording is sent to an external speech processing provider to be transcribed, and the resulting transcript is sent to an external AI provider to be graded. If you would prefer not to have your work processed this way, you can choose not to submit Writing or Speaking responses. The rest of the service still works.
Our practice questions and passages are generated offline, in advance, by a separate content pipeline. That pipeline never receives your data - it runs on our own prompts before you ever see the material.
5. International transfers
We are established in Israel, and our infrastructure and several of our AI processors are located in the United States. Israel is recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection, so personal data reaching us from the EEA does so on the basis of that adequacy decision.
Where we transfer personal data onward, outside the UK or the EEA, we rely on one of the following, depending on the recipient: an adequacy decision, including the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension where the recipient is certified under it; or the Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, as incorporated into our agreement with that provider.
To ask which applies to a particular processor, or for a copy of the safeguards in place, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com.
6. How long we keep it, and how to delete it
- Account and study data: kept while your account exists, and deleted when it is deleted.
- Writing responses, Speaking recordings and transcripts: kept so that you can review past sessions.
- Payment records: kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, typically 6 years from the end of the relevant tax year, even after account deletion. These are transaction records only - never card details.
To delete your whole account, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com and we will do it within 30 days. There is no self-service account deletion in the app yet, so this is currently the only route; we will confirm by email once it is done. Deletion covers your account data, study profile, practice responses and audio recordings, and leaves only the payment records described above.
Your access window ending does not delete anything. Your account, results and submissions remain until you ask us to delete them.
7. Your rights
If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland you have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, and receive a portable copy. Where we rely on legitimate interests - feedback and security, in the table above - you have the right to object to that processing, and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds to continue.
You can also complain to your data protection authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EEA, the supervisory authority in the country where you live, where you work, or where the issue arose.
To exercise any of these, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com. We respond within 1 month, and will tell you if we need up to 2 further months because the request is complex.
8. Automated scoring
Your Writing and Speaking submissions are scored automatically, by AI models, with no human examiner involved. The system compares your response against the four published IELTS assessment criteria for that task type and produces an estimated band score per criterion, together with written feedback.
These scores are practice estimates only. They are not official IELTS results, they do not determine your access to any test, course, visa or institution, and no decision with a legal or similarly significant effect for you is made on the basis of them. For that reason the restriction on solely automated decision-making in Article 22 UK/EU GDPR does not apply to this processing.
Even so: if you think a score is wrong, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com. We will review it, tell you what we find, and correct or remove the score where appropriate.
9. Security
Passwords are stored only as salted hashes, using argon2id. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Secrets and API keys are held in a managed key vault rather than in our source code. Access to production data is limited to those who need it to run the service. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
Your Speaking recordings are not stored behind a permanent link. Each time a recording is played back or sent for transcription, we generate a fresh access link that stops working within the hour, so a link that leaks into a browser history or a log cannot be used later.
10. Children
This service is not directed at children under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.
11. If you are in the United States
This section supplements the rest of this notice for residents of California and other US states with comprehensive privacy laws.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We never have. We do not use advertising trackers, and we do not disclose your data to any third party for their own marketing purposes. Because we do not sell or share, there is no opt-out for you to exercise - but if you have a question about this, email aieltscoaching@gmail.com.
The categories we collect are set out in section 2, the purposes and recipients in sections 3 and 4, and our retention in section 6. We collect audio recordings of your Speaking responses in order to transcribe and grade them. We do not use voice data to identify you, so we do not process it as sensitive personal information for the purpose of unique identification.
12. Changes
If we change this notice - for example by adding a new AI processor - we will post the updated version on this page. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version.
13. YouTube
We publish short educational videos on our YouTube channel, @aieltscoaching. To upload them we use YouTube API Services. That connection works only on our own channel: it uploads our own videos, and it does not access, collect, store or share any information about you, your Google or YouTube account, or the people who watch our videos. It is not linked to your AIelts account.
When you watch or interact with our videos on YouTube, YouTube and Google process your data under their own terms, not ours: the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.
Because we store no YouTube data about you, there is nothing from YouTube for us to delete. You can review and revoke the access any application has to your Google Account at any time in Google’s security settings. To delete the data held in your AIelts account, see section 6.
14. Contact
Questions about this notice, or about your data: aieltscoaching@gmail.com.
See also our Terms of Service and our Refund Policy.