Privacy policy

1. Who this policy covers

This policy explains what personal information is collected through teachersneha.com and in the course of teaching, why it is collected, how long it is kept and what rights you have over it. It applies to everyone who uses this website, sends an enquiry, books a lesson or studies with me.

I am a sole practitioner, not a company. There is no marketing department, no data team and no third party handling your details on my behalf beyond the ordinary service providers listed in section 8.

2. What information is collected

Only what is needed to answer you, teach you and keep proper records. Nothing is collected speculatively “in case it is useful later”.

3. What is deliberately not collected

This website is intentionally plain. It runs as static files with no database, no login system and no server-side processing of your data.

• No analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no heatmap tool and no visitor counter of any kind. I do not know how many people read this page.
• No advertising or tracking cookies. None are set, so there is no consent banner to dismiss.
• No third-party fonts, scripts or embeds. Every font, stylesheet, script and image is served from this site’s own files, so loading a page makes no request to any other company.
• No social media widgets. The share buttons are plain links that do nothing until you click them; they load nothing in the background.
• No profiling and no automated decision-making. Nothing about you is scored, ranked or decided by an algorithm.
• No sale or rental of data. Ever, to anyone, under any circumstances.

4. Cookies and browser storage

This site sets no cookies at all. It does use two small pieces of browser storage, both of which stay on your own device and are never transmitted anywhere.

Both are strictly functional. Neither identifies you to me, and neither is readable by any other website. You can delete them at any time through your browser’s “clear site data” setting; the site will continue to work exactly as before, simply without remembering your theme.

5. Why processing is lawful

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, these are the legal bases relied on. Where India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act applies, the equivalent grounds are your consent and the performance of our agreement.

6. How your information is used

Concretely, and exhaustively:

1. To read your enquiry and write back to you.
2. To propose lesson times that fit your time zone.
3. To send you the meeting link, worksheets, recordings and correction logs.
4. To maintain your progress document — goals, vocabulary sets, recurring errors, mock scores.
5. To write the monthly progress note for parents of young learners.
6. To issue invoices and keep the accounts.
7. To apply the cancellation policy consistently, which requires knowing when a lesson was booked and when it was cancelled.
8. To send the newsletter, if and only if you asked for it.

Your information is never used to build a marketing profile, is never combined with data bought from anyone else, and is never used to train a machine-learning model.

7. Testimonials, examples and quotations

Student quotations appear on this site only with explicit, specific permission given in writing, and I will always tell you exactly where the quotation will appear before it is published.

• You choose how you are identified: full name, first name and initial, or “an IELTS student, Tehran”.
• Permission can be withdrawn at any time and the quotation is removed within seven days, without argument.
• Children are never quoted by full name, and any quotation involving a child requires the written consent of a parent or guardian.
• If I use an anonymised teaching example in an article, identifying details are changed or removed so that the student cannot be recognised.

8. Who else can see your information

Your data is not shared with anyone for their own purposes. A small number of service providers process it on my behalf in order to make the service work at all.

Beyond these, information is disclosed only where the law compels it, or where there is a genuine and serious concern for someone’s safety — see section 12 on safeguarding.

9. International transfers

I teach students across roughly fourteen countries, so information necessarily crosses borders: your email travels from your country to mine, and the service providers above operate internationally.

Where personal data of individuals in the EEA or the United Kingdom is transferred outside those areas, the transfer relies on the providers’ standard contractual clauses or an equivalent safeguard. In practice the volume is tiny — a name, an email address and a set of lesson notes — and it is never routed anywhere other than the providers described in section 8.

10. How long information is kept

Data is deleted when it stops being useful, on the following schedule.

The 24-month figure exists because former students return more often than you would expect, and it is far better to still have your error log than to start again from nothing. If you would prefer everything deleted the day you stop, say so and it will be.

11. How your information is protected

• Access. I am the only person with access to student records. No assistants, no subcontracted teachers, no shared logins.
• Authentication. Every account involved — email, storage, payments, video platform — is protected by a unique long password and two-factor authentication.
• Devices. Working devices use full-disk encryption and lock automatically.
• Transport. Materials are shared over encrypted connections. This website is served over HTTPS and loads no third-party resources that could observe you.
• Minimisation. The most reliable protection is not holding data at all, which is why the lists in sections 2 and 3 are as short as they are.
• Breach response. If a breach occurs that is likely to affect your rights, you will be told directly, in plain language, within 72 hours of my becoming aware of it, along with what happened and what you should do.

No system is perfect, and I will not claim otherwise. What I can promise is that the amount of data at risk is deliberately kept small.

12. Children’s privacy and safeguarding

A significant part of my teaching is with children aged five to fifteen, which brings additional obligations.

• The parent or guardian is the client. All bookings, correspondence and payments are with the adult, not the child. Consent for any processing of a child’s data is given by that adult.
• Minimal data. For a child I hold a first name, an age group, the lesson schedule and teaching notes. No date of birth, no address, no school details unless the parent volunteers them for a specific reason.
• Progress notes are shared with the parent or guardian only.
• No direct messaging with a child. All communication outside the lesson goes through the parent’s email address.
• Recordings of lessons with children are made only at the parent’s request, are shared only with that parent, and are deleted on request immediately.
• Parents are welcome in the room. A parent or guardian may observe any lesson at any time without notice.
• Safeguarding. If something a child says or shows gives rise to a genuine and serious concern for their safety, I will raise it with the parent or guardian. In the rare circumstances where doing so would itself place the child at risk, I may contact the appropriate authority. This is the one situation in which information may be shared without consent.

13. Lesson recordings

Lessons are not recorded by default. A recording is made only when one of us asks and the other agrees, and both of us are told before recording starts.

• You may ask for a recording of your own lesson at any time; it is yours to keep.
• You may ask me not to record, at any time, without giving a reason.
• Recordings are stored for 90 days by default and are then deleted.
• A recording is never shared with anyone else, never published, and never used as a teaching example, even anonymised, without separate written permission.
• Please do not record a lesson without telling me — the same courtesy applies in both directions.

14. Your rights and how to use them

Depending on where you live, you have most or all of the following rights. I apply them to everyone, regardless of jurisdiction, because maintaining two standards would be more work than simply being decent about it.

How to make a request

Email [email protected] from the address you normally use with me, saying which right you wish to exercise. No particular form of words is required — “please delete everything you have about me” is perfectly sufficient.

• Requests are acknowledged within 3 working days and completed within 30 days, usually far sooner.
• There is no charge.
• If you write from an unfamiliar address I may ask one question to confirm it is really you — this protects you, not me.
• Deletion is confirmed in writing when it is done.

15. Newsletter and marketing

The only marketing communication that exists is a short monthly email containing a grammar tip, a vocabulary set and a link to the newest article. It is sent to people who typed their address into the subscription box and to nobody else.

• Subscribing is a deliberate act; being a student does not subscribe you.
• Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, and replying “stop” works just as well.
• Your address is removed within seven days and is not kept on a suppression list beyond what is needed to avoid re-adding you by mistake.
• The list is never shared, sold, rented or swapped.

16. Links to other websites

This site links to a small number of external destinations — the video-conferencing platform when you join a lesson, and the social networks behind the share buttons. Those links do nothing until you click them, and once you leave this site you are covered by that organisation’s privacy policy, not this one. I have no control over what they collect and cannot answer for it.

17. Changes to this policy

This policy is reviewed at least once a year and whenever the way I work changes. The version number and effective date at the top of this page always reflect the current text.

Material changes — anything that alters what is collected or who can see it — are emailed to current students at least fourteen days before they take effect. Minor corrections are made without notice.

18. Contact and complaints

For anything at all relating to your data:

If you are not satisfied with how I have handled a privacy matter, you are entitled to complain to the data protection authority in your country — for example the Information Commissioner’s Office in the United Kingdom, or your national supervisory authority in the EEA. You do not need my permission to do so, and doing so will never affect your lessons.