Privacy Policy — EE Coach

About EE Coach

EE Coach (ee.alltheway.ing) is developed and maintained by a one-person team as part of the alltheway.education family of educational tools for IB Diploma Programme students. The service supports students in developing an Extended Essay research question, drafting an outline, and reviewing a written draft — all through structured, AI-guided coaching.

Our commitments to students

Student data on EE Coach is processed for educational purposes only. Specifically:

• We do not show advertising to students.
• We do not perform behavioural profiling for commercial or marketing purposes.
• We do not sell or share student data with third parties for marketing.
• We do not use student content to train artificial intelligence or machine-learning models. Our AI provider (Anthropic) confirms that API content is not used for model training.
• We collect only the personal data needed to operate the coaching tool and (where applicable) to support your school's EE coordinator dashboard.

Data we collect

When you use EE Coach, we collect and store:

• Identity — your email address (used to sign in via magic-link email or Google), and your first and last name plus profile photo if you sign in with Google.
• Coaching conversations — the messages you send and the AI responses you receive in the RQ Coach, Outline Coach, and Draft Review tools.
• Progress data — structured information captured at each step of the coaching process (e.g. your working research question, chosen subject, outline structure).
• Generated documents — PDF summaries from the RQ Coach, and metadata about Google Docs you choose to export from the Outline Coach.
• Coordinator-uploaded data — if your school uses the EE Coordinator dashboard, your EE coordinator may upload student/supervisor lists and historical EE results for analytics. These contain names and email addresses of students and supervisors in the coordinator's cohort.
• Token usage and cost data — how many AI tokens your conversations have consumed, for billing and abuse-prevention purposes.
• Approximate location — a coarse, city-level location (country, region and city) derived from your IP address when you start a coaching session, used only for aggregate usage analytics. We do not store your IP address for this purpose, and the location is approximate.
• Technical metadata — basic sign-in timestamps and request logs needed to operate the service.

We do not knowingly collect special-category personal data (e.g. health, religion, ethnicity). You control the content of your coaching conversations and drafts; please avoid entering sensitive personal information.

Age of users and minors

EE Coach is designed for IB Diploma Programme students, who are typically aged 16–19. Access is usually provided through a school's EE coordinator, and students sign in with their own school-issued email address (commonly a Google Workspace account).

Where schools enrol students under 16: in the school context, the school is the data controller and is responsible for obtaining any parental or guardian consent required under local law before inviting minors to the service. EE Coach acts as a processor on behalf of the school. EE Coach itself does not collect parental consent directly — schools should treat this notice as part of the information they share with parents when seeking that consent.

Where a student signs up independently (i.e. not through a school), the student is the data controller of their own data and is responsible for confirming they are of an age at which they can lawfully consent to use the service under their local jurisdiction.

We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, please contact us and we will promptly delete the account and associated data.

Coordinator dashboard

Schools that use the EE Coordinator dashboard appoint one or more coordinators who can:

• View progress summaries and exported PDFs for students in their cohort.
• Upload student, supervisor, and historical results lists for analytics.
• Send templated emails to students and supervisors in their cohort (e.g. deadline reminders).

Coordinators cannot read the raw turn-by-turn coaching conversation; they see summaries and the structured progress captured at each step. Coordinators from one school cannot see students from another school.

How we use your data

• To run the coaching tools. Your conversations and progress are stored so you can resume sessions and export summaries.
• To support your EE coordinator (if your school uses the coordinator dashboard).
• To improve the service. We may use aggregated, non-identifying statistics (e.g. how many students reached each coaching step) to evaluate and improve EE Coach. We do not use individual student content to train AI models.
• To respond to support requests you submit via the bug-report or contact forms.

Subprocessors

We rely on a small number of carefully chosen subprocessors to operate the service. Each is bound by a data processing agreement with appropriate technical and organisational safeguards.

Where your data is hosted

Personal data is stored exclusively in the European Union.

• Production database — your account, coaching conversations, progress, and any coordinator-uploaded data are stored in Supabase's managed Postgres in the European Union (AWS eu-north-1, Stockholm, Sweden).
• Backups — automated backups are managed by Supabase and remain in the same EU region. Retained for 7 days.

The web application runs on Vercel and is delivered via Vercel's global edge network. The edge nodes cache static assets (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images) but do not store any personal data. Compute that handles personal data (database queries, authentication, AI coaching) runs in Vercel's primary region, not at the edge.

International data transfers

Our primary data store is in the European Union. However, some subprocessors are based in the United States — namely Anthropic, Google, Vercel, and Resend. Where personal data is transferred outside the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we rely on:

• EU–US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK extension / Swiss adequacy decision) where the receiving organisation is certified. Google, Vercel, and Anthropic are DPF-certified at the time of writing; we periodically verify this against the official DPF list.
• Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) — the European Commission's 2021 modules, together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and Swiss-equivalent clauses — in each subprocessor's data processing agreement where adequacy or DPF certification does not cover the transfer.
• Supplementary technical and organisational measures — encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access control, and the data-minimisation principle: we send each subprocessor only the data it needs to do its job. For example, Anthropic receives the conversation text needed to generate a coaching response but not your name, email, or any school-uploaded student lists.

Subprocessors based in the European Union (Supabase) do not require transfer mechanisms because the data does not leave the EEA.

Security measures

We use the following technical and organisational measures to protect your data:

• Encryption in transit — all traffic to ee.alltheway.ing is served over HTTPS/TLS.
• Encryption at rest — Supabase encrypts the underlying Postgres database and storage volumes at rest.
• Access control — database-level row-level security (Supabase RLS) restricts each user to their own data; coordinator access to student data is scoped to their school's cohort; one named administrator has elevated access (see Administrator access below).
• Authentication — sign-in is delegated to Google OAuth or to passwordless magic-link emails; we never see or store passwords.
• Backups — managed automated backups via Supabase, in the same EU region as the production database, retained for 7 days.
• Environment segregation — development, preview, and production environments are isolated. Production uses a dedicated Supabase project and a dedicated set of secrets stored in Vercel's encrypted environment-variable store. Preview deployments cannot read or write production data.
• Strong administrator authentication — the administrator account signs in via Google OAuth and has two-step verification enabled on the underlying Google account.
• Vulnerability management — dependencies are tracked by GitHub Dependabot, which raises alerts and pull requests for known vulnerabilities. Critical and high-severity advisories are reviewed promptly. The platform is patched on a continuous basis through Vercel deployments.
• Minimum-scope third-party access — when you export an outline to Google Docs, the application uses Google's narrow drive.file scope, which only grants access to files the app itself creates in your Drive. The app cannot read other files in your Drive.

AI usage and automated decision-making

EE Coach uses Anthropic's Claude API to generate the coaching responses in the RQ Coach, Outline Coach, and Draft Review tools. Anthropic confirms that content sent through the API is not used to train Claude models.

The AI generates suggestions, questions, and feedback to help you develop your Extended Essay. It does not make automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects. Specifically:

• The AI does not grade your Extended Essay or assign marks.
• The AI does not determine whether your essay is approved or rejected by the IB.
• Coordinators and supervisors retain full discretion over educational decisions.

The AI is a coaching aid. The final responsibility for the content and quality of your Extended Essay rests with you and your EE supervisor.

Cookies and tracking

EE Coach uses only strictly-necessary cookies. We do not use advertising, marketing, or third-party analytics cookies, and we do not embed any third-party tracking scripts.

Specifically:

• Authentication cookies set by our authentication provider (Supabase) to keep you signed in and to refresh your session. These are first-party, HTTP-only, secure, and same-site. Without them, you cannot sign in.
• No analytics cookies. We do not run Google Analytics, Vercel Analytics, Plausible, PostHog, or any equivalent.
• No advertising or social-media tracker cookies.

We also use first-party browser storage that is not a cookie:

• Local storage — UI preferences such as the dark/light theme. Never sent to our servers.

Because no non-essential cookies or tracking technologies are used, no consent banner is shown. If we ever introduce non-essential cookies or analytics, we will update this section and provide an appropriate consent mechanism before doing so.

Administrator access

One named administrator (the site owner) has elevated access to operate and maintain the service. They may access individual records when investigating a specific support request or a suspected abuse / security incident, but do not routinely browse student conversation content.

Your rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction — request correction of inaccurate data.
• Deletion — request deletion of your account and all associated data.
• Restriction — request that we restrict processing of your data in certain circumstances.
• Objection — object to how we process your data, where processing is based on legitimate interests.
• Data portability — request your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent — where processing relies on consent, withdraw that consent at any time.

To exercise any of these rights, write to richard@geographyalltheway.com or use the contact form on the FAQ page. We aim to respond to all requests within 30 days. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — for users in the EU/EEA, your national data protection authority; for users in Switzerland, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC); for users in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Data retention

We retain personal data only for as long as it is needed for educational purposes:

• Active accounts — data is retained for as long as you maintain an account, so you can resume coaching and re-export your summaries.
• Inactive accounts — accounts with no sign-in for 24 months (the duration of an IB Diploma Programme course) are flagged for deletion. The user is notified by email and given 30 days to sign in and keep the account active; if there is no response, the account and associated data are deleted.
• End of school engagement — if a school stops using EE Coach, the school can request bulk deletion of all student accounts associated with that school's coordinator cohort.
• Backups — Supabase-managed backups retain copies for 7 days beyond the live data, after which they are overwritten.
• On request — you can ask us to delete your account and all associated data at any time (see Your rights).

Data portability and account deletion

You can request an export of your personal data — including your coaching conversations, progress, and any generated PDFs — by writing to richard@geographyalltheway.com. We will provide it in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format (typically JSON). You can also request deletion of your account through the same channel; deletion is permanent and cannot be undone.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our service, subprocessors, or applicable law. The “last updated” date below indicates when the policy was last revised. Material changes will be communicated to users via the service.

Contact

For any privacy-related questions, requests, or complaints, please write to richard@geographyalltheway.com or use the contact form on the FAQ page. EE Coach does not have a formal Data Protection Officer at this stage, given the size of the service; the site administrator handles privacy queries directly.