Privacy

BandAI is operated by A4 Commerce FZE, UAE, which is responsible for the personal data described here. If you are in the UK or the EU, A4 Commerce FZE, UAE is the controller of that data.

Contact: support@bandai.courses. Email is the only channel — there is no phone line, and we say so rather than publish a number nobody answers.

Built from the database itself, fullest first.

Your work. Essays, letters, reports, your reading and listening answers, and the transcript of everything you said in speaking practice. The marking we store includes a rewritten version of your own essay. A weekly essay draft you save is also stored.

Your results. Every band we have measured for you, per attempt and over time; your strengths and weaknesses per question type; your mock sittings; and a machine estimate of the band you may reach and when. These are statements about a named person's measured ability, and we treat them that way.

Your account and profile. Email address, name, native language, exam type and date, target bands, self-assessed starting bands, and the destination you told us about. If you typed a free-text answer about why you are taking IELTS during signup, we hold that too. If the link you arrived on was tagged with a source, the channel it named is saved to your account once, at signup.If you arrive through a partner referral link, we also count the click itself — as an anonymised code that cannot identify you and changes with the day, never your address — and the link carries a signed tag that only that link can produce, so a partner code typed by hand credits nobody.

Your habits and your day. Which lessons and blocks you finished and when, your streak and study days, the words you bookmarked and the translations shown for them, and short notes the coach keeps about recurring habits — including verbatim phrases from your own speaking, kept as the evidence behind them.

What you type into the helper. Inside your account there is a helper that holds a conversation: it answers from notes we wrote and from what it knows about IELTS and English, and it is automated — it says so if you ask. To answer, it sends the message you typed, the earlier messages in the same conversation, and the name of the page you were on to an AI service (Anthropic) — nothing else about you: not your name, your bands, your plan or your exam date, which it cannot see. Before anything is sent we refuse the obvious shapes of personal detail — a card number, a passport number, a phone number, an email address — and we ask you not to type others, but a detail written in prose will reach the service. We keep the reply we wrote you, and not your message, unless you choose to send a question to the team; then we store the question you typed, the page you were on, and the reply we send you. The service does not use what you type to train its models.

Before you sign in. Our public pages carry a helper too, for questions about BandAI and the exam. It is automated and says so. The conversation and the name of the page go to the same service; nothing else about you. So that we can read what people ask before choosing, and limit how fast the helper can be used, we keep both halves of a public conversation for 30 days and then delete them, and we hold a random token in your browser and a code made from your network address that changes every day — they name nobody, and the limit is best-effort. If you leave an email so the team can come back to you, we store the address, your question, the page, the channel your arrival link named, and our reply; if you also ticked the line about the occasional note, we record that you did, the wording you saw and when, and every such note carries a link to stop them.

Your question's page. When you send a question to the team, our email carries a link to a page showing your question, its status and our reply. Anyone holding the link can open it, so do not forward it. We note when it was first opened.

Payments and the guarantee. What you bought and when, your Stripe customer and payment identifiers, and — if you claim — your official overall band, your four skill bands, your test date, your Test Report Form number, the conditions as they stood when you claimed, and the decision we took.

To teach you: choosing what you practise next, marking it, and showing your progress. That is the contract you entered when you signed up.

To run the guarantee: checking whether you met the conditions and deciding a refund. Payment and claim records are kept because we have a legal obligation to keep financial records and a legitimate interest in being able to evidence a decision about money.

To keep the product working: error reports and basic reliability data. Analytics — how the site is used — runs only if you say yes, and you can change your mind at any time, here.

Separately, and without asking, our own server counts how many times each page is loaded each day. That count is a number per page per day and the country the request came from; it sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device and keeps no record of who you were. To tell one visitor from another within a day it keeps a code made from your network address and browser type under a key that changes every day and cannot be turned back into either, and that code is deleted the next day by a job that runs every morning.

To measure our advertising: with that same yes, three advertising pixels — Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok and LinkedIn — load on our public pages only, and are told one thing: that a page was viewed. They never load inside your account, on any page that shows your bands or your work, or on any billing page; they are never sent your name, your email, your bands or anything you write or say. If you say no, or have not answered, none of them loads at all. If you withdraw after saying yes, we stop them and delete the cookies they set on our domain; a script already loaded stays until the page is next opened — we can stop it sending, not unload it.

To answer you: when you email us, or when you send the helper a question for the team, we use your address to reply; when the helper holds a conversation with you inside your account, that is part of the service you signed up for; when you ask the public helper something before choosing, or leave an email for the team on a public page, we rely on our legitimate interest in answering a visitor and on the steps you take towards a contract. The occasional note is sent only if you ticked the line, and stops when you say so.

We do not sell your data.

Hosting and delivery, our database and file storage, payments, email, product analytics, error reporting, AI marking, the helper's conversations on our public pages and inside your account (the messages you type and the earlier messages in the same conversation reach the AI service, which does not use them to train its models), and speech transcription. Each is contracted to process data only on our instructions. With your consent, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn receive a page-view signal from our public pages, as section 3 describes.

Your name, email and account identifier are shared with our payment provider when a customer record is created — that is what lets a payment and a refund attach to you rather than to a stranger.

When you speak, the audio is sent to a transcription provider and comes back as text. The recording is not stored — the words are what we keep, and what the marking is based on.

Some of those words are kept verbatim as short quotations, where they are the evidence behind a habit the coach has noticed. They are your own words, quoted back to you.

Your bands are produced by an automated system. It decides what you practise next and what your progress page shows.

A refund is not decided automatically. A person reads the claim and the evidence and makes the decision. If you disagree with a band or a decision, email support@bandai.courses and the team will look at it.

Signing in stores a session so you stay signed in, and a last-active timestamp so an idle session can be closed. Neither is optional — without them you could not sign in at all.

While you work, your answers and a same-day essay draft are kept on your device so a refresh does not lose them. Your chosen microphone is remembered the same way.

If you arrived from a tagged link, the channel it named is kept on your device for 7 days so it can be saved to your account at signup (section 2). A partner referral link adds its signed tag to that note for the same 7 days — a proof that you came through the link, sent back once at signup and never to analytics.

Analytics cookies are set only after you agree. Your answer to that question is itself remembered on your device, so we do not ask again. The server-side page count in section 3 sets no cookie and stores nothing here.

The helper's conversation inside your account is held in your browser under your account's own key and cleared when you sign out; on a public page, the conversation lives in that tab only, beside a random visitor token that lasts 7 days and names nobody. A note that you have seen the current version of this policy is kept so the helper does not keep telling you.

If you claim, we ask for your official result: your overall band, your four skill bands, your test date and your Test Report Form number. We record the conditions exactly as they stood when you claimed, so the decision can be explained later.

We use it to check the claim and to pay a refund. It is not used for anything else, and it is not shared beyond the people who decide and the payment provider who moves the money. The full terms are on the guarantee page.

Honestly: most data is kept until your account is closed, and there is no automatic expiry before that. We have not invented a retention schedule this product does not enforce. The one exception is a public helper conversation, which is kept for 30 days and then deleted by a job that runs every day — the only period on this page, because it is the only one code enforces.

Closing your account means anonymisation, not deletion. Payment and claim records are built to survive closure — the database refuses to delete a paying account outright, by design — so what we do is sever the rest: your name, email and sign-in are removed, and what must remain no longer points at a person we can identify.

There is no self-service close button. Email support@bandai.courses and the team will do it. Saying that plainly is more honest than implying a button exists.

If you are in the UK or the EU you have the rights the UK GDPR and GDPR give you: to ask what we hold, to have it corrected, to object, to ask for restriction, to receive a copy of what you provided, and to ask for erasure — which we honour as anonymisation, as described above, with financial and claim records retained where the law allows or requires it.

There is no self-service export. Ask by email and the team will compile it. We answer within a month. You can also complain to your data-protection authority; we would rather you emailed us first, but that is your right, not a condition.

BandAI is for people aged 16 and over. If you are younger, please do not create an account; if we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we will close it as section 9 describes.

Withdrawing consent is one tap — the control in section 3, above.

Our database runs in Sydney, Australia. Analytics, hosting, payments, AI marking and transcription providers operate from the United States. Mail forwarding transits our domain registrar.

If you are in the UK or the EU, this means your data leaves the UK and the EU. We say so rather than imply otherwise.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the product before the change takes effect, and this page will always carry the date it was last changed.