Privacy
Privacy Policy
What we collect, why we collect it, who else sees it, and what you can do about it.
Effective date: July 30, 2026|Last updated: July 30, 2026
The short version
A plain-language summary for convenience. The full sections below are what actually governs.
- We collect what we need to run a learning service: your name, your phone number, your email address, the schoolwork you bring us, and what you do in the app.
- We do not run advertising, and we do not sell personal information. There is no advertising network, no ad profiling and no data broker in this product.
- What you type into a lesson is sent to the AI services that generate the response. That is how the product works, and section 7 explains it.
- Some of the providers who help us run the service operate outside Canada, so your information may be processed and stored outside Canada. Section 8 explains what that means.
- You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Email privacy@cantutor.ca.
1. Who we are
CANtutor AI is an AI-assisted learning service operated by CANtutor, a corporation based in Ontario, Canada and operating as CANtutor AI (“we”, “us”, “our”). This policy explains how we handle personal information, and it applies to the CANtutor AI website and app.
We are responsible for the personal information under our control, including information we transfer to service providers for processing. If you have a question or a complaint about privacy, write to privacy@cantutor.ca, which reaches the person accountable for our compliance with this policy.
We handle personal information in accordance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable Ontario law.
2. Information we collect
We collect only what we need to provide and improve the service. In practice that falls into four groups.
2.1 Account information
Verified-email status protects access to your account (staff accounts also use an authenticator). We also record completed learning-action timestamps, feature names and accounting totals to operate free usage windows and measure learning activity. These records do not include the text of your work. Optional visitor analytics remains subject to the privacy choices described below.
When you create an account we collect your name, your phone number, your email address, and a password. If you sign in through a third-party sign-in provider such as Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture from that provider instead of a password.
We ask for a phone number so that we can tell when one person is opening several accounts to repeat free allowances. It is a risk signal, not proof of identity. We use it for that, and to reach you about your account if we need to. We store the number as you gave it; we do not verify it, and we do not ask for one if you tell us you are under 13 (see 2.6). We do not send marketing text messages.
2.2 What you bring to a lesson
The questions you ask, the subject and grade level you choose, the text you type, and any files or images you upload for help with. If you use a voice feature, the audio you speak during that session and a text transcript of it.
Camera and screen sharing. If you turn on your camera during a voice session, or share your screen, the video is carried live to the AI service that runs the session and still images from it are read by the AI so that it can see what you are working on. It is processed as the session happens and we do not record or keep it. Share only the window you need help with. Anything else visible on the screen you share is sent as well.
Lecture recordings. The lectures feature has been removed from the app. If you previously recorded or uploaded a lecture, its audio file and text transcript remain stored on your account, although they can no longer be opened in the app, until you close your account. That audio was sent to an AI service for transcription and may contain other people’s voices. To have a saved lecture and its audio deleted sooner, email privacy@cantutor.ca.
2.3 How you use the service
Records of your activity in the app — lessons started and completed, progress and scores, items earned, settings you choose, and support messages you send us.
2.4 Technical information
Standard information your browser or device sends when it connects, and basic records of errors and service availability. We use this to keep the service running, secure and working correctly.
2.5 Payment information
If you buy a subscription, our payment provider collects and processes your card details directly. We do not receive or store your full card number. We receive a record that a payment succeeded or failed, and the plan you are on.
2.6 Your profile, and your age
After you create an account, we ask a short set of questions to set up your profile. Some are required and some can be skipped; the setup screens say which. We collect:
- Your birth year, which we ask first, before anything else in setup. We ask for the year only, not your full date of birth, and from it we work out an age bracket: under 13, 13 to 17, or 18 and over. We use it to decide whether you can hold an account on your own and, if you tell us you are under 13, to ask a parent or guardian first (see below and section 5.2). We do not verify the year you give us.
- Your city, your province or state, and your country. City level only. We do not ask for a street address, and we do not read your device’s location. We use it to understand where our students are, so that we can plan the service and know which region’s rules apply to your account.
- Your phone number, if you are 13 or older, for the purpose described in 2.1. It is stored, not verified. We do not ask under-13 accounts for a phone number.
- Your grade level, and the subjects you want to focus on, so that the tutor and the lessons we suggest can be matched to your level and your subjects.
- Your strengths and weaknesses, in your own words, if you choose to tell us. This is optional. We use it for the same purpose as your grade level and subjects.
- Your average grade, as a percentage, a GPA, or both, if you choose to tell us. This is optional. We use it, with your grade level, to pitch explanations at the right level. We do not share it with your school.
- How you found us and, if the answer is social media, which platforms. We use this to understand which of our efforts bring students to the service. We do not use it to advertise to you.
- A parent’s or guardian’s email address, and their decision, if you tell us you are under 13. How that works is described next.
If you tell us you are under 13, we stop the setup there and ask for a parent’s or guardian’s email address. We send that address one email containing a link to a page where they can approve or decline the account. The link works once and expires after 30 days. Until they approve, the account cannot be used and we collect nothing further through it; if they decline, or do not respond within 30 days, it stays that way. We keep the address they gave and the record of their decision for as long as the account exists, as our record that consent was asked for and what the answer was. Apart from re-sending that one email if the student asks us to, we do not send the parent or guardian anything else.
3. What we do not collect
- We do not sell personal information and we do not disclose it for a third party’s own marketing.
- We do not run advertising in the product, and there is no advertising or behavioural profiling network in it.
- We do not ask for your government ID, your street address, or your financial account details.
- We do not track your activity across other companies’ websites or apps.
4. Why we collect it
We identify our purposes before or at the time we collect information, and we use it only for those purposes. They are:
- To create and administer your account and let you sign in.
- To tell whether you are old enough to hold an account on your own, and to ask a parent or guardian when you are not.
- To set up the tutor for your grade level and subjects, and to understand how students hear about us.
- To provide the service itself — generating explanations, feedback, lessons, practice and voice conversations in response to what you ask.
- To save your progress, so that your work is still there the next time you sign in.
- To process payments and manage subscriptions.
- To respond to your support requests and to contact you about the service.
- To keep the service secure and reliable, to investigate misuse, and to enforce our Terms of Use.
- To understand which features are used, so we can improve the product.
- To comply with our legal obligations.
If we ever want to use your information for a new purpose that is not listed here, we will identify that purpose and obtain your consent before doing so, unless the law permits or requires otherwise.
5. Consent, age, and young users
5.1 How consent works
You give consent by creating an account and using the service after being presented with this policy. For anything beyond what is reasonably necessary to provide the service, we ask separately.
You may withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. Withdrawing consent for information we need in order to operate your account means we can no longer provide the service to you, and your account will be closed. To withdraw consent, email privacy@cantutor.ca.
5.2 Age, and information collected under an earlier version
CANtutor AI is a general-audience learning tool and is not directed to children. When you set up your profile we ask for your birth year — the year only, never your full date of birth — so that we know whether you are old enough to hold an account on your own (see 2.6). We do not verify the answer. The eligibility rules for holding an account are set out in our Terms of Use.
If you tell us you are under 13, the account can only be used once a parent or guardian has approved it through the email described in 2.6. Until then it is not usable, and we collect nothing further through it.
If you are a parent or guardian and you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact privacy@cantutor.ca and we will review the account and delete the information.
An earlier version of this service did collect age-related information. Before this policy took effect, signup asked for a birth year and an account type, and in some cases a guardian’s email address and a consent record. That collection stopped, and the records from that period have since been deleted. The birth year and guardian details described in 2.6 are collected under this policy, not that earlier one. If you or your child had an account during that period and you have a question about it, email privacy@cantutor.ca and we will answer it.
6. School and Google Classroom accounts
If you connect a Google account, we request only the permissions needed for the features you use, and we ask for them at the point you turn the feature on. You can disconnect at any time from your account settings, or by revoking our access in your Google account’s security settings.
Where a school or district enables CANtutor AI for its students, the school determines what information is provided to us and we handle it on the school’s instructions under our agreement with them. Information received through a school integration is used to provide the service to that school and its students, and for nothing else.
Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. We do not use Google user data for advertising, and we do not sell it.
7. How AI features process your content
CANtutor AI is an AI-assisted tool. To answer a question, generate a lesson or hold a voice conversation, the content of your request is sent to third-party AI services that produce the response and return it to you. This includes the text you type, files and images you send for help, plus lecture recordings uploaded before new recording was retired, and — in a voice session — your speech, its transcript, and your camera or shared screen if you turn either on. The providers are named in section 8.
We use these services under commercial terms that restrict them to processing your content in order to return a result to us. Our agreements with them do not permit them to use your content to train their general-purpose models.
Do not put sensitive personal information into a lesson. Health information, financial account details, government identifiers and similar information are not needed for tutoring and should not be entered.
AI output can be wrong. The accuracy limits of the service, and what you are responsible for when you rely on its output, are set out in our Terms of Use.
9. What other users can see
Parts of the service are social by design. Where you take part in a leaderboard, a shared room or a multiplayer activity, your display name, avatar and score are visible to the other participants. Choose a display name you are comfortable showing to other people, and do not use your full name.
Your lessons, your uploaded work and your account details are not visible to other users.
If another user behaves inappropriately, you can report and block them from within a shared room, and you can also email privacy@cantutor.ca.
11. Retention and deletion
We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes in section 4, or as long as the law requires us to keep it.
- Account and learning content is kept while your account is open, so your progress is there when you return.
- Lecture recordings, transcripts and uploaded files are kept until you delete them, until your account is deleted, or (for lecture recordings, which can no longer be opened in the app) until you ask us to delete them. We do not delete them on a schedule of our own, so that your material is still there when you come back to it. Voice-session audio and video are not recorded at all; only the text transcript of a session is kept.
- Profile answers, your birth year, and any guardian email address and consent decision are kept while your account is open and are deleted when your account is deleted. We keep the guardian record for the life of the account because it is our evidence that consent was asked for and what the answer was.
- Billing records are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, which is longer than the life of the account.
- Free allowance security records include a hash of your verified, normalized email address and a stable account identifier. These claims survive account deletion to prevent repeated allowance claims through account recreation; they currently have no automatic expiry. Contact us to request review of a retained claim. Other security and error records follow their applicable retention controls.
You can ask us to delete your account from inside the app, under Settings → Account → Delete account. If you have already uninstalled the app, or would rather not sign in, email privacy@cantutor.ca. Either way we will delete or anonymise your personal information, except where we are required to retain it by law.
Deletion is scheduled rather than immediate: there is a 30-day grace window, and signing back in during that window cancels it. Your subscription is set to end at the end of the period you have already paid for, so it may continue to show as active until then; you are not charged again. Full instructions and what happens to your data.
12. Safeguards
We protect personal information with security safeguards appropriate to its sensitivity. These include technical, organisational and physical measures covering access control, encryption of information in transit and at rest, and restricting internal access to those who need it to do their job.
We deliberately do not publish the details of our security controls, because describing them precisely would make them easier to defeat.
No method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Protect your own account by using a strong, unique password and not sharing it. If you believe your account has been accessed by someone else, or if you become aware of a security issue in the service, contact privacy@cantutor.ca immediately. If a breach of our safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as the law requires.
13. Your privacy rights
Under Canadian privacy law you have the right to:
- Access — ask us whether we hold personal information about you, what it is, how it has been used, and to whom it has been disclosed.
- Correction — ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
- Withdraw consent — as described in section 5.1.
- Deletion — ask us to close your account and delete your information, as described in section 11.
- Complain — as described in section 14.
To exercise any of these, email privacy@cantutor.ca from the address on your account. We respond to access requests within 30 days. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act, so that we do not disclose your information to someone else. In limited circumstances the law permits us to refuse a request — for example where responding would reveal another person’s personal information — and if we refuse, we will tell you why and how to challenge that decision.
14. Complaints
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal information or your request, write to privacy@cantutor.ca. We will investigate and respond in writing.
If you remain dissatisfied, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Complaining to us first is not a precondition, and nothing in this policy limits your right to go directly to the Commissioner.
15. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the service changes or the law does. When we do, we update the “last updated” date at the top of this page. If a change is significant — for example, if we begin using your information for a materially different purpose — we will give you notice in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires it, we will ask for your consent.
16. Browser extension
If you use the CANtutor AI browser extension, it reads only what you explicitly act on — the text you highlight, the current page’s title and URL, and (only when you ask for it) the text of a Google Doc, the whole page, or a screen capture. It sends what you send to CANtutor’s own backend, authenticated with your existing cantutor.ai session, exactly as this policy describes for everything else. It runs no background reads, no tracking and no analytics of its own.
The extension’s own data practices, including the Google API Limited Use disclosure for its Google Docs feature, are documented separately on the browser extension privacy policy.
17. How to contact us
For any privacy question, request or complaint, including access, correction and deletion:
For anything that is not a privacy matter, see our support page.