Privacy Policy

LitMarker (litmarker.io) is an AI-powered essay-marking service for UK GCSE English Literature, English Language and History students. It is run by Samy Adel, a sole trader trading as “LitMarker”. LitMarker is not a registered company. If the business incorporates in future, we will re-issue this policy naming the company and notify you.

For the purposes of UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018), the sole trader named above is the data controller of your personal information.

• Email: privacy@litmarker.io
• Address: Suite RA01, 195-197 Wood Street, London, E17 3NU

Most of our users are secondary-school students, so this section summarises the policy in plain terms. The full sections below are the complete policy and take precedence over this summary.

• We collect your email, first name and study details (subjects, exam boards, exam date) to run your account.
• Your essays, feedback, marks, notes and LitBot chats are saved in your account so you can track your progress.
• To mark your work, your essay text is sent to AI providers. Your name, email and account ID are never attached to it.
• We show no ads and we never sell your data. The LitMarker app sets no cookies. Our analytics are cookieless, hosted in the EU, and identify you only by a random account ID.
• Your account data and essays are stored with Google Firebase on servers in the United States, protected by the international-transfer safeguards in Google’s data-processing terms (see section 9).
• Marketing emails are opt-in. You only receive them if you choose them, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
• A teacher can only see your work if you choose to join their class, and you can disconnect them at any time.
• You can delete individual essays yourself. To delete your whole account, email privacy@litmarker.io and we will do it for you.
• If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, email us at privacy@litmarker.io or complain to the ICO.

This policy covers:

• Students, including students under 18, who make up most of our users (see section 6);
• Teachers using the class-view dashboard; and
• Visitors to litmarker.io who do not have an account.

Account details

• Email address and, if you sign up with email, a password. Passwords are handled entirely by Google Firebase Authentication and stored hashed. We never see or store your password ourselves.
• If you sign in with Google, your Google display name and the link to your Google profile picture.
• Your first name (asked during onboarding; you can edit it in Settings).
• The date your account was created and whether your email is verified.

Records of your confirmations

When you sign up, we record that you confirmed you are 13 or over and that you accepted our Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy, with a timestamp and the version you accepted. If you join a teacher’s class, we record your consent in the same way. If you opt in to marketing emails, we record when and how you did.

Study profile

Your subjects (English Literature, English Language, History), the exam board for each, and your exam session (for example May/June 2027). We do not ask for your date of birth, year group, school name, home address or phone number.

Your work

Each essay you mark is saved to your account, including:

• the full essay text (including text extracted from a photo of handwritten work) and any source extract or question it responds to;
• the AI feedback, inline highlights and suggested rewrites, your estimated mark and assessment-objective (AO) breakdown, and any model answer generated for the question;
• your LitBot chat history for that essay;
• your private notes and any rating you give the marking quality.

Anything you write in an essay, note or LitBot chat is stored with it. We treat this content as potentially sensitive, but we cannot control what you put in it, so avoid including personal details about yourself or others where you can.

Photos of handwritten essays

If you photograph or upload a handwritten essay, the image is sent to Google Cloud Vision to extract the text and is then discarded. We never store the image. Only the extracted text is saved, as your essay.

Usage data

Timestamps of your essay markings and LitBot messages (used for the free-plan and fair-use limits), a count of Smart Improvements used, and flags for things like whether you have seen the tutorial.

Marketing and referral data

Your marketing email choice (opt-in only; the default is off), and first-touch attribution: on your first visit we record the campaign tags in the link you arrived from (UTM parameters), the referring website’s domain, and the page you landed on. This is stored in your browser, on your account when you sign up, and in our analytics.

Billing data (Pro subscribers)

Whether you have Pro, your Stripe customer and subscription references, whether a cancellation is scheduled, and the reason you give if you cancel. Card numbers and billing addresses are collected and held by Stripe, our payment provider, never by LitMarker.

Teacher accounts

For teachers we store your real name, email, school name, account type (classroom or tutor), your classes and assignments, and usage metering. Teacher accounts are set up by us directly, not self-serve.

What we do not collect

• No date of birth or year group (only the 13+ confirmation above);
• No school name, home address or phone number from students;
• No photos of your work (images are processed for text extraction and then discarded);
• No cookies set by the LitMarker app, and no session recordings;
• No precise location data.

UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use of your information. Ours are:

We do not use your information for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not make automated decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects. The marks LitMarker gives are AI-generated study estimates, not official results; see our Terms of Service.

LitMarker is built for GCSE students, most of whom are roughly 14 to 16 years old. Because most of our users are under 18, we design with the ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code (the Children’s Code) in mind. This section sets out what we do and the limits of it:

• You must be 13 or over to use LitMarker. Every new signup must actively confirm this, and we record the confirmation. This is a self-declaration: we do not collect your date of birth and we cannot verify the claim. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will close it and delete its data.
• Accounts created before 15 July 2026 predate these confirmations. We will be asking existing users to provide the same confirmations.
• We do not currently ask for a parent or guardian’s consent at signup, for purchases, or for joining a teacher’s class. If you are under 16, we recommend showing this policy to a parent or guardian. Parents and guardians can contact us at privacy@litmarker.io with any question or request about their child’s data.
• Choices we have made because our users are mostly minors: no ads and no selling of data; cookieless, EU-hosted analytics with no session recording; your name and email are never attached to essay content sent to AI providers; marketing is strictly opt-in and off by default; and sharing your work with a teacher only happens with your explicit, revocable consent.
• Essays and LitBot chats are free text. Anything a student writes in them is stored and processed as described in this policy, so we encourage students not to include personal or sensitive details about themselves or others.

LitMarker’s marking, feedback, model answers, Smart Improvements and LitBot are powered by external AI providers. What each receives:

• Essay marking and LitBot chat: Anthropic. Your essay text, the question, the source extract and our mark-scheme prompts are sent to Anthropic’s Claude models. For LitBot, your recent chat messages and the essay’s marks and feedback are included so it can help you.
• Model answers: OpenRouter. The question, source text and marks information are sent to OpenRouter, which routes the request to a downstream AI model (currently OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini). That downstream provider is a sub-sub-processor.
• Handwriting OCR: Google Cloud Vision. The photo of your essay is sent for text extraction and is not stored by LitMarker.

No name, email address or account ID is ever included in anything we send to Anthropic, OpenRouter or Google Cloud Vision. The AI sees your essay. It does not know who you are.

These providers process the content in order to provide the service, under their own commercial data-processing terms.

We never sell your information and we do not share it with advertisers. The complete list of service providers (processors) that receive user data is:

In addition, if you choose to join a teacher’s class, that teacher can see your work as described in section 14. We may also disclose information where the law requires it. If the business incorporates or is transferred, your data would move to the successor under the same protections, and we would tell you.

• Our main database and sign-in system is Google Firebase, hosted in the United States (Google’s “nam5” multi-region). This means your account data and essays, including children’s data, are stored and processed on Google’s US servers. This transfer is protected by the international-transfer safeguards in Google’s data-processing terms.
• Analytics (PostHog) is hosted in the EU (Frankfurt, Germany).
• Anthropic, OpenRouter (and its downstream model providers), Stripe, Vercel and Google are US companies, so using LitMarker involves transfers of personal data to the United States. Where any of our providers processes personal data outside the UK, we rely on the safeguards in that provider’s data-processing terms, such as the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement/Addendum.

Cookies

The LitMarker app sets no cookies, which is why you do not see a cookie banner. Two narrow exceptions to know about:

• Firebase Authentication keeps your sign-in session in your browser’s local storage. This is strictly necessary functional storage so you stay logged in.
• Stripe sets its own cookies on its own checkout and billing pages (checkout.stripe.com, billing.stripe.com) when you pay or manage billing.

Local storage we use

The app stores a few values in your browser’s local storage: lm_attribution (how you first found us: campaign tags, referring site and landing page), lm_last_seen, lm_session_started and lm_drafts_reported (analytics bookkeeping). During signup, your age and terms confirmations are also held briefly in session storage (lm_pending_signup_consent) until they are saved to your account, then removed.

Analytics

We use PostHog, hosted in the EU, configured to be as privacy-protective as we can make it because most of our users are young people:

• Cookieless: PostHog sets no cookies and writes nothing to your device;
• No session recording, no automatic click or keystroke capture, no automatic page tracking;
• Events are keyed to your random account ID, with a free/premium flag and structured event data (for example subject, exam board, word-count bucket);
• Essay text, chat messages, feedback, marks content, names, school names and email addresses are never sent to analytics.

We use no other tracking: no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no advertising tags of any kind.

• Your essays, feedback, marks, chats and notes are kept for as long as you have an account, so you can track your progress over time. We do not currently apply automatic time limits to them.
• You can permanently delete any individual essay yourself at any time.
• Account data (including usage records, attribution data and any cancellation reason you give) is kept until you ask us to delete your account (see section 12).
• We keep personal data only while your account is active and for as long as we need it to provide the service and meet our legal obligations. When you ask us to delete your account (see section 12), we delete your data, except records we are legally required to keep, such as billing and tax records, which we keep for as long as the law requires.

• Individual essays: delete them yourself in the app. This is a real, permanent deletion.
• Your whole account: there is no self-serve delete button yet. Email privacy@litmarker.io from your account email and we will delete your account and its data manually. We act on requests without undue delay and at most within one month.
• Data export: also by request to the same address.
• Some records held by our service providers are retained under their own policies and legal obligations. For example, Stripe keeps payment records it is legally required to keep.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you;
• Correct anything that is wrong;
• Delete your data (the “right to be forgotten”, which carries particular weight for young people);
• Restrict or object to certain processing, including anything based on legitimate interests;
• Take your data with you (portability);
• Withdraw consent at any time, for example for marketing emails or teacher sharing, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it;
• Complain to the ICO (see section 16).

To exercise any of these, email privacy@litmarker.io. There is no charge. We may need to verify you own the account first, and we respond within the statutory one month. You can also do some things directly in the app: edit your first name, delete essays, disconnect a teacher, and manage your payment details through the Stripe billing portal. To stop marketing emails, use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email or email us.

Parents and guardians can contact us on behalf of their child at the same address.

Teachers only ever see a student’s work through the class view, and only with that student’s explicit consent:

• Joining is your choice. You join a class with a code, and before anything is shared you see a consent screen (“Join class and share my work”) explaining exactly what the teacher will see. Your consent is recorded with a timestamp and version.
• What a linked teacher can see: your first name, your essays (including ones written before you joined, and personal essays not set as assignments), the questions and source extracts, the AI feedback and highlights, your marks and AO breakdowns, word counts, and your recent activity.
• What a teacher can never see: your LitBot chats, your private notes, your marking-quality ratings, your email address, or your payment details.
• You can disconnect at any time in Settings (“Connected teachers” then Disconnect). Access is cut immediately. The teacher keeps the gradebook records already created (your name and marks for submitted assignments), but not your essay content.
• While linked, you get LitMarker Pro free; that ends automatically when the link ends.
• Every teacher request for student data is checked against a live consent record on our servers. There is no standing copy of your essays on the teacher’s side, and no teacher can read student work before the student has consented.

There are currently no formal school (organisation) accounts. Teachers hold individual accounts that we provision manually, and they may be school teachers or private tutors. If your school needs a data-processing agreement or has questions about controller responsibilities for class data, contact us at privacy@litmarker.io.

• Database rules restrict every user’s documents to that user alone; teacher access runs only through server routes that re-verify the teacher’s identity and the student’s live consent on every request.
• Passwords are handled entirely by Google Firebase Authentication. We never see them.
• Payments run through Stripe with signature-verified webhooks; subscription status can only be set by our servers, never by a browser.
• Our servers check sign-in tokens on requests to the AI features.

No online service can promise perfect security, but we review our security posture and fix issues as we find them. If a breach ever put your rights at risk, we would notify the ICO and affected users as the law requires.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can:

• email us at privacy@litmarker.io; or
• complain to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

You can contact the ICO at any time. You do not need to complain to us first.

This policy replaces all previous versions. When we change it, we update the “Last updated” date at the top. If we make a significant change, for example collecting new kinds of data or adding a new provider, we will tell you in the app, for example by asking you to review the updated policy before you continue using LitMarker.

• Email: privacy@litmarker.io
• Post: Suite RA01, 195-197 Wood Street, London, E17 3NU