Privacy
Fathomtrail and your privacy
This page is for you if you learn with Fathomtrail. It explains what the app keeps about you and who can see it. Your parent or carer set up your account, and there is a longer notice for them.
What the app keeps about you
- Your nickname, a colour, your school year, your exam year and your courses. The app does not need your full name, your birthday or your email address.
- Your work: your answers, how sure you were, what you said you already know, your chats with the tutor, and the marks and comments adults give you.
- Which topics you know, which you don’t know yet and which haven’t been checked yet. The app uses this only to choose what to teach you next.
- Each day, roughly how many minutes you studied and how many of your topics you know, still need to learn or have not checked yet. Never your answers.
- If you record a spoken answer, or yourself reading aloud in German sound practice, for an adult to mark or review, the recording. Its sound is deleted 30 days after it is marked or reviewed, or 90 days after you sent it if nobody marks it. You can delete it sooner yourself.
- The devices you sign in on, such as “Chrome on Android”, and when you last used them.
Who can see your work
The adults in your family who use Fathomtrail can see all of your work and progress, including your chats with the tutor. That means your parents or carers, and any tutor or teacher they invite. Your parents can also see which devices you are signed in on, and they can sign them out. If your parents or carers choose, Fathomtrail can email them a short weekly summary (the days you studied, about how long, and how many topics you now know or still need to work on) and a link to your report at the end of each term. These emails use your nickname and never include your answers. Nobody in any other family can see your work. You can see only your own work, not your brothers’ or sisters’.
The people who run Fathomtrail can reach the records to keep the app working. When you chat with the tutor or ask for feedback, your words go to OpenAI, a company whose AI writes the replies, but your name does not go with them. In some German activities, the recording of your voice goes to Microsoft so it can be turned into text or checked; you tick a box to agree each time first, and the app does not keep that recording. Your parent can switch this on or off for you. When it is off, nothing you record goes to Microsoft. It starts off for a child added in Year 8 or below. So please don’t type or say personal things in your answers, like your full name, your address or your school.
Your PIN is secret
You sign in with your family’s code and your own PIN. Don’t tell anyone your PIN, not even a friend or a brother or sister. The app keeps your PIN scrambled, so nobody can read it, not even us. If someone gets your PIN wrong 20 times in 24 hours, your sign-in is locked, and your parents can see that in Family settings. A parent can unlock it and give you a new PIN. If you think someone knows your PIN, tell a parent.
Anyone with your family’s code may see the nicknames and colours of the children in your family on the sign-in screen, so keep the code in the family too.
No adverts, nothing sold
We never sell anything about you, never show you adverts and never use your information to advertise to you. The app doesn’t know or ask where you are. There are no leaderboards, no streaks and no grade predictions.
Deleting your record
If you want your record deleted, ask a parent. Your family’s account owner can delete it from Settings. That removes your profile, your courses and all of your work. A parent can also download a copy of your family’s records.
If you’re worried about anything here, talk to a parent or carer, or a teacher you trust. The notice for parents says how to contact us, and how to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which looks after people’s privacy in the UK.