Privacy

Lingua Desk is software that language schools run their teaching on. When a school uses it, that school decides what data it collects about its students, staff and parents, and why — it is the data controller. We hold and process that data on the school's instructions, as its processor, and we do not decide what to do with it.

For the handful of people who deal with us directly — the person who fills in our contact form, the owner who signs up a school — we are the controller, and this notice describes what we do with that.

For a school's people: the names, contact details, timetables, attendance, homework, grades, messages and invoices that make the software work. The lawful basis is contractual necessity — none of it is collected for any purpose but delivering the service the school is paying for.

For an enquiry to us: your name, email, the school you mentioned and what you wrote, kept so that we can answer you and remember that we did.

Marketing email is separate and consent-based. Nothing you send us about running a school subscribes you to anything.

Students may be minors. Data on a minor's account is limited to what teaching requires, and a parent is linked to a child only through a verified flow the school administers — which is the mechanism by which a guardian knows about, and has control over, that account.

Data is held in the region chosen for the school. We run regions in several jurisdictions and a school picks one when it is set up; its records stay there, and we do not relocate them. It is encrypted in transit and at rest, secrets are held in a managed key store, and passwords are stored as one-way hashes that cannot be reversed.

Each school's data is separated at the database level: every record carries the school it belongs to, and the database refuses to return one school's rows to another. That is a guarantee of the storage layer, not of the application remembering to ask.

Our staff do not browse a school's data. Where we need access to help, it is granted explicitly, time-boxed, logged, and visible to the school in its own audit log.

We use sub-processors to run the service: cloud hosting and storage, payment processing, transactional email, an AI provider where a school has switched those features on, and a video provider for online lessons. Each is bound by a data processing agreement, and the current list is available to any school on request.

Where a school enables AI features, only what the feature needs is sent — a homework submission for pre-review, a topic for a word list — and it is never used to train anybody's model.

You can ask for a copy of your data, in a structured file you can take elsewhere. You can ask for it to be corrected, or erased — where erasure would break a record we are legally required to keep, such as an invoice, we strip the personal details and keep the rest.

If your data is held by a school on Lingua Desk, ask the school first: it is the controller, and it has the tools to answer you. We will help it do so, and will act directly if it cannot.

We have a documented incident process. Where a breach affects personal data, we notify the relevant regulator within 72 hours of confirming it, and we tell the schools and people affected.

Security problems can be reported to security@linguadesk.org; we would rather hear it from you than read it later.