Privacy Policy

1. Purpose and scope

This Privacy Policy explains how Academic English Hub ("Academic English Hub," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, discloses, stores, and deletes information when you use our website, practice activities, complete tests, accounts, score reports, and AI-assisted evaluation features (together, the "Service"). It also explains the choices and rights available to you. This Policy is separate from our Terms of Service; privacy information is not hidden in the Terms.

Academic English Hub is the party responsible for deciding how information is used within the Service. Privacy questions and requests may be sent to privacy@academicenglishhub.com.

2. Information we collect

Account and identity information

Creating an account is optional. If you sign in with Google, we receive and store the name, email address, profile image, provider identifier, and account identifiers made available through Google sign-in. We also keep session records needed to keep you signed in, which may include an IP address, browser or user-agent information, session token, and session timestamps. If you take a complete test, we collect the test-taker name that you enter for the score report, even if you continue as a guest.

Test submissions and learning records

We collect information created when you practice or submit a test, including selected answers, typed answers, completed words and sentences, email and essay responses, speaking-response metadata, test and question identifiers, start and completion times, time spent, unanswered items, selected adaptive routes, scores, estimated bands, evaluation status, feedback, and saved progress. For speaking activities, the Service may record your voice. Recordings are stored on your device and sent securely to Cloudflare Workers AI for automatic transcription. Listen and Repeat practice scores use that transcript. Scoring requires an internet connection; offline recordings wait until you reconnect for server transcription. Temporary transcription audio is deleted after completion, or by the cleanup job after 24 hours if unfinished. Transcripts and final scores are saved with your practice records. During a Take an Interview practice, each answer is also uploaded to our storage as you finish it, so that an AI evaluation you request can complete even if you close the page. Uploaded recordings are deleted within two hours if you do not request an evaluation, and when an evaluation finishes or is deleted.

If learning progress is enabled, we also store your study-plan questionnaire answers, including age group, learner role, study reason, TOEFL plans and purpose, target score, exam date, and recommended and selected study pace. We also store stars, daily-goal snapshots, streak history, league level, virtual reward inventory, and the events used to calculate them. Weekly leaderboards are optional. If you join using your account name, other participants can see that name, your league, weekly stars, rank, and current streak. Earlier participants keep the leaderboard name and avatar they previously chose until they agree to join using their account name. Other participants do not receive your email, exam date, target score, study plan, detailed scores, results or answers, subscription state, AI usage, or timezone. Leaving hides you from participant-facing results without removing your personal learning progress.

Optional AI feedback information

Separately from automatic speech transcription, if you choose AI feedback, we process the relevant written response or voice recording together with the task prompt, scoring rubric, test identifiers, generated transcript, evaluation output, score evidence, model name, usage information, errors, and timestamps. AI evaluation has an additional notice before a response or recording is sent. You can complete objective practice without choosing AI evaluation; your overall estimate then covers only the sections that have been scored, and the report states which sections it excludes.

Device, diagnostic, and usage information

We receive basic technical information needed to deliver and secure the Service, such as browser type, operating system, device category, network status, requested pages, timestamps, and error or performance information. Our hosting and security providers may process IP addresses and request logs. We deliberately do not put essay text, answer text, transcripts, names, email addresses, or audio into product-analytics events.

Analytics choices

By default, we use cookieless, short-lived anonymous usage counts with no persistent analytics identifier on your device. If you accept analytics cookies, we use a persistent identifier and fully masked session replay to understand navigation and interface problems. Replay masks page text and inputs and blocks audio and video. You can change this choice under Account → Privacy choices. Necessary local storage, authentication cookies, and security mechanisms are not controlled by the optional analytics choice.

Advertising choices

Advertising is a separate choice from analytics, and accepting analytics never enables advertising cookies. Advertising vendors may set or read cookies and similar identifiers on the completed result pages that carry an advert. Section 6 explains what is collected, who collects it, and how to change or withdraw the choice.

Order and payment information

When paid packages are offered, we process the order identifier, package snapshot, amount, currency, payment and refund status, purchase language, billing or contact information actually collected, and the versions and acceptance times of the purchase documents. Card payments are processed by iyzico. We may retain a payment identifier, card brand, and masked card detail if iyzico returns them and retention is necessary for support, accounting, fraud prevention, or legal compliance. Academic English Hub does not store a full card number, card expiry date, or CVV.

3. Why we use information

We use information only as reasonably necessary to:

• deliver tests, save progress, restore attempts, and show reviews and score reports;
• authenticate accounts, sync records across devices, and prevent unauthorized access;
• calculate objective scores and provide requested AI-assisted feedback;
• operate adaptive test routes and preserve the exact test version you received;
• maintain security, enforce usage limits, prevent abuse, and investigate incidents;
• debug failures, provide support, perform quality assurance, and improve accessibility and reliability;
• measure aggregate Service usage and improve the learner experience according to your analytics choice;
• fund the Service by showing and measuring advertising on completed result pages, as described in section 6;
• comply with law, respond to valid legal requests, and establish or defend legal claims; and
• improve scoring rules, rubrics, evaluation consistency, and evaluation accuracy as described below.

4. Developer and quality review of submissions

Authorized developers or administrators may review a submitted test, including answers, essays, transcripts, scores, evaluation outputs, and related technical metadata, when reasonably necessary for debugging, support, abuse prevention, quality assurance, investigating a disputed result, or improving evaluation accuracy. Review is limited to people who need access for those purposes. Reviewers may see a raw voice recording only while it remains available during an active, failed, or abandoned evaluation workflow.

Please do not include sensitive personal information, confidential information, or information about another person in an answer. Practice responses should be written for the assigned educational task only.

5. Model development and automated evaluation

Academic English Hub does not currently use your submissions to train or fine-tune an Academic English Hub machine-learning model. We may use aggregated or de-identified score patterns and error categories to test and improve prompts, rubrics, scoring logic, and evaluation accuracy. A human may compare an evaluation with its submission as part of the limited quality review described above.

Requested writing and interview evaluations are sent to Google's Gemini API. Google's current terms distinguish paid from unpaid API services. Under paid-service terms, Google states that prompts and responses are not used to improve its products; under unpaid-service terms outside certain regions, Google may use submitted content and generated responses to improve and develop products and machine-learning technologies, and human reviewers may process them. The applicable treatment can depend on service tier and region. Review the Gemini API terms and Google Privacy Policy. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or unnecessary personal information for AI evaluation.

AI output can be inaccurate or inconsistent. It is used only for unofficial practice feedback, and consequential decisions should not be based solely on an AI-generated score.

6. Advertising and advertising cookies

We use Google Ads conversion measurement to understand whether our advertising leads to purchases. After a payment is confirmed, we send Google the order reference, purchase amount, and currency. The Google tag starts with advertising storage and data-use consent denied; it can send cookieless measurement signals in that state. Advertising consent is managed separately through the advertising consent service. Accepting analytics cookies does not grant advertising consent. We do not enable personalized advertising signals for this conversion tag or send it your name, email address, payment-card details, or practice responses.

Academic English Hub is funded in part by advertising. We work with Google AdSense, and adverts appear only on completed practice result pages, never during a test, never on a sign-in, account, settings, or consent screen, and never between a question and its answer or explanation. Adverts are always labelled "Advertisement". Advertising has no influence on our practice content, our scoring, our explanations, or the research published in our guides.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve adverts based on your prior visits to this website or to other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve adverts to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet. Alongside cookies, advertising vendors may use web beacons and pixels, your IP address, approximate location derived from it, device and browser information, and similar identifiers to deliver, measure, and limit the repetition of adverts, and to detect fraud and invalid traffic.

Adverts may be personalized, meaning they are selected using information about your interests and prior browsing, or non-personalized, meaning they are selected using general context such as the page's subject and your approximate location, with limited data used for frequency capping, reporting, and fraud prevention. Where the law requires consent for personalized advertising, including in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, that consent is collected through a Google-certified consent management platform before any personalized advert is served, and declining leaves the rest of the Service fully usable.

You can change or withdraw your advertising choice at any time under Account → Privacy choices, which reopens the advertising consent dialogue where one applies to you. You can also opt out of personalized advertising from Google at Google Ads Settings, and from many other vendors at optout.aboutads.info and youronlinechoices.eu. Details of how Google handles information from sites that use its services are in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

We do not give advertising vendors your essays, emails, spoken responses, transcripts, answers, scores, evaluation feedback, account details, or email address, and we do not use them to target adverts. Our advertising choice is separate from the analytics choice described in section 2 and from the AI-evaluation notice: accepting one never accepts another.

7. When information is shared

We do not sell your test submissions or personal information. We may disclose information to:

• Cloudflare, which provides website, API, database, object-storage, security, network services, and automatic speech transcription through Workers AI;
• Google, for optional Google sign-in and for Gemini AI evaluation that you request;
• Google AdSense and the advertising vendors it works with, for the adverts on completed result pages described in section 6;
• PostHog EU Cloud, for anonymous product analytics and, only after acceptance, masked session replay;
• iyzico, to initialize, verify, reconcile, cancel, or refund a card payment and to prevent payment fraud;
• Trustpilot, blind-copied on the one-time welcome email you receive after your first completed practice, so it can invite you to leave a review of the Service;
• professional advisers or authorities when reasonably required by law, security, or legal claims; and
• a successor organization in a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale, subject to appropriate safeguards.

Service providers may process information only for the service they provide to us and under their applicable contracts and policies. Third-party sites you open from the Service have their own privacy practices.

8. Where information is stored

Guest and account practice records may first be stored in your browser, including local storage and IndexedDB. Completed practice and complete-test metadata are also copied to our server for guests, under a guest identifier rather than an account, so that tests operate securely and results can be supported and reviewed. When you sign in and choose to sync, completed learning records are copied to your account in our cloud systems. Information may be processed in countries other than the country where you live. Where required, we rely on provider safeguards and lawful transfer mechanisms.

9. Retention

• Browser records: remain on the device until you delete them, clear site data, delete an attempt where that option is provided, or a sign-out cleanup removes the signed-in user's local cache.
• Guest server records: guest identities and associated attempts, saved practice records, evaluation records, messages, usage, and stored audio are deleted after more than 5 days without guest activity.
• Account records: account details, synced practice submissions, scores, and completed AI evaluation history are generally retained until you delete the account or request deletion.
• Automatic transcription audio: temporary server copies are deleted when transcription completes. Unfinished copies expire after 24 hours and are removed by the periodic cleanup job. Local recordings remain available on the recording device. Transcripts, recording fingerprints, and final scores are retained with practice records; temporary practice sessions also expire their server transcripts within this retention window.
• Voice recordings uploaded for optional AI evaluation: are normally deleted from our object storage when the evaluation finishes or is deleted. Audio left by an abandoned or failed workflow is deleted within 2 hours. Audio an evaluation is still working on is held only until that evaluation ends, and in no case beyond 4 hours. The written results of the evaluation, scores, transcripts, and feedback, are kept under the rules above; the recordings themselves are not. A provider may retain data separately under its terms.
• Allowance and security records: daily AI-usage bookkeeping is pruned after approximately 40 days. Security and operational logs are retained only as long as reasonably needed for security, reliability, and legal obligations under provider settings.
• Analytics: cookieless counts, consented analytics events, and masked replays follow the retention configured in our EU analytics project. We periodically minimize or delete analytics data and do not intentionally place test-submission content in it.
• Advertising: cookies and identifiers set by Google and other advertising vendors are held by those vendors under their own policies and retention periods, not by us. We keep no advertising profile, no record of which adverts you saw, and no click data of our own. Clearing this site's cookies removes the identifiers stored on your device.
• Deleted accounts: when an account is deleted we keep, for 7 days, a one-way hash of the account's email address together with its remaining paid AI-evaluation balance and that day's usage counters. We keep no other detail, and the hash cannot be turned back into an address. Its only use is to compare against an address signing up again, so that deleting and re-registering does not reset a daily allowance or restore a refunded balance. It is deleted automatically after 7 days.
• Orders and contracts: order, payment-reference, consent, contractual-document, activation, and refund records are retained for the period required by tax, accounting, payment, distance-contract, and dispute laws. Relevant distance-contract records are retained for at least three years where Turkish law requires it.

We may retain a limited record longer if required by law, necessary to protect users or the Service, or needed to establish or defend a legal claim. Where possible, retained information will be restricted or de-identified.

10. Deleting information and making a request

Signed-in users can select Delete account on the Account page to delete the cloud account and cloud-saved records. Local browser records may remain on that device, so you should also clear this site's data in the browser if you want to remove local copies. Deleting analytics cookies through Privacy choices stops persistent analytics but does not itself delete test records.

Two things deliberately outlive a deleted account. Order and payment records are kept for the periods tax, accounting, and distance-contract law require. And for 7 days we keep a one-way hash of the account's email address with its allowance counters, purely so that deleting and signing up again does not reset a free daily allowance or restore a refunded balance; that record is deleted automatically once the 7 days pass.

You may request access, correction, export, restriction, objection, or deletion by emailing privacy@academicenglishhub.com. Include the email address on your account or, for a guest request, the attempt ID and any guest label shown to you. We may ask for verification and may be unable to locate or delete a guest record if we cannot reliably connect it to you. Rights vary by location and may be subject to lawful exceptions. You may also complain to your local data-protection authority.

11. Security

We use measures designed to protect information, including encrypted network transport, restricted admin access, expiring sessions, and deletion workflows. No online service is completely secure. Protect your device, sign out on shared devices, and contact us if you believe your account or submission has been accessed improperly.

12. Children

The Service is not directed to children under 13. If local law requires a higher age to consent to online data processing, a parent or legal guardian must review this Policy and authorize use. If we learn that we collected personal information from a child without required permission, we will take reasonable steps to delete it.

13. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy as the Service, providers, or law changes. We will change the effective date and, for a material change affecting submitted-test data, require a new acknowledgment before revealing complete-test results. The version displayed when you accept is stored with that attempt.

14. Contact

Privacy questions, deletion requests, and complaints: privacy@academicenglishhub.com. Please do not email test answers, passwords, government identifiers, medical information, or other sensitive data.