Privacy
Student practice without student accounts.
Effective October 3, 2026. Etale Topology Labs designed The Spelling List to collect as little student information as the classroom workflow allows.
Information we collect
Teacher accounts provide an email address and authentication identifiers. Teachers provide practice names, grade bands, and spelling targets. Stripe handles payment details; we receive subscription and customer identifiers, not full card numbers.
Student sessions
Students use a shared assignment link without names, email addresses, or accounts. The browser compares each attempt with the assigned target. For a close, word-like misspelling it sends correctness, attempt count, recovery, duration, the error location and type, the correct target letters, and only the changed letter span, limited to eight characters. The full entry, distant gibberish, and instruction-like text are not sent. Anonymous changed spans expire with session records. Teachers never see a student entry; an aggregate result may use a safety-screened neutral description of a plainly harmless changed fragment, and omits the fragment when it is unsafe or unclear.
How information is used
We use teacher data to operate accounts, prepare practices, provide support, prevent abuse, and process subscriptions. Anonymous session summaries produce assignment-level results. We do not sell personal information, serve advertising, or build student profiles.
Service providers
AWS hosts the application, authentication, storage, email, audio, and logs. OpenAI receives teacher-submitted spelling targets and grade-band context for teaching. For an optional aggregate interpretation, it receives no full student answers—only bounded anonymous close-miss signals, which may include a changed span of up to eight characters. Stripe processes subscriptions. These providers process data only to supply their services to us.
Retention and deletion
Anonymous session summaries expire after 90 days. Validated teaching caches expire after 180 days. Teacher account and practice data remain while the account is active or as needed to provide the service. Billing and security records may be retained as required by law or legitimate accounting and fraud-prevention needs. Teachers can delete an eligible account from Account; support can also assist.
School and child privacy
The service is intended to be selected and managed by an adult teacher or authorized school user. Do not ask students to enter names, contact details, or other personal information. Schools and teachers must follow their own approval, notice, and consent obligations. A school should confirm that classroom tools comply with its policies before use.
Security and choices
We use access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, short-lived sign-in tokens, private storage, bounded retention, and narrowly scoped server roles. No online system can promise absolute security. Contact etaletopologylabs@gmail.com to ask about access, correction, deletion, or privacy.
Changes
We may update this notice as the service changes. A material change will be dated here and, when appropriate, presented to account holders.