Privacy Policy of EduCollective
Last updated August 04, 2026
This Privacy Notice for EduCollective gUG ("we," "us," or "our"), describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share ("process") your personal information when you use our services ("Services"), including when you:
- Visit our website at https://www.educollective.org or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice
- Engage with us in other related ways, including any marketing or events
Questions or concerns? Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us at info@educollective.org.
SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS
This summary provides key points from our Privacy Notice, but you can find out more details about any of these topics by clicking the link following each key point or by using our table of contents below to find the section you are looking for.
What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. Learn more about personal information you disclose to us.
Do we process any sensitive personal information? Some of the information may be considered "special" or "sensitive" in certain jurisdictions, for example your racial or ethnic origins, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. We do not process sensitive personal information.
Do we collect any information from third parties? We use hCaptcha, a third-party bot protection service operated by Intuition Machines, Inc. (US), which processes certain technical data on our behalf when you interact with our login and signup forms. See Section 1 for details.
How do we process your information? We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent. We process your information only when we have a valid legal reason to do so. Learn more about how we process your information.
Do we store anything on your device? To make the app fast, we keep a copy of your recent chats in your browser's own storage on your device. It never leaves your device and is deleted when you log out. Learn more about on-device storage.
In what situations and with which parties do we share personal information? We may share information in specific situations and with specific third parties. Learn more about when and with whom we share your personal information.
What are your rights? Wherever you live, you can see what we hold about you, download a copy of it, correct it, and delete it. Learn more about your privacy rights.
How do you exercise your rights? The easiest way to exercise your rights is by submitting a data subject access request, or by contacting us. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
Want to learn more about what we do with any information we collect? Review the Privacy Notice in full.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?
Personal information you disclose to us
In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.
Personal Information Provided by You. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. The personal information we collect may include the following:
- names
- phone numbers
- email addresses
- passwords
- contact preferences
Data collected automatically through bot protection (hCaptcha)
To protect our login and signup forms against bots and automated abuse, we use hCaptcha, operated by Intuition Machines, Inc. ("IMI"), a Delaware US company. When you interact with a form that includes hCaptcha, IMI automatically collects and processes the following data:- IP address
- Browser type, version, and language
- Screen resolution and device type
- Behavioral signals (e.g., mouse movements, interaction timing)
This processing is based on our legitimate interest in protecting the platform from automated abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The data is processed by IMI as a data processor acting on our behalf, subject to their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. As IMI is a US-based company, data may be transferred to the United States under Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission.
Sensitive Information. We do not process sensitive information.
All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.
2. HOW DO WE PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION?
In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We process the personal information for the following purposes listed below. We may also process your information for other purposes only with your prior explicit consent.We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:
- To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. We may process your information so you can create and log in to your account, as well as keep your account in working order.
- To respond to user inquiries/offer support to users. We may process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
- To send administrative information to you. We may process your information to send you details about our products and services, changes to our terms and policies, and other similar information.
- To enable user-to-user communications. We may process your information if you choose to use any of our offerings that allow for communication with another user.
- To save or protect an individual's vital interest. We may process your information when necessary to save or protect an individual's vital interest, such as to prevent harm.
- To protect against bots and automated abuse. We use hCaptcha on our login and signup forms to prevent automated submissions and protect the security of our platform. This involves sharing certain technical data with Intuition Machines, Inc. as described in Section 1.
3. WHAT LEGAL BASES DO WE RELY ON TO PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION?
In Short: We only process your personal information when we believe it is necessary and we have a valid legal reason (i.e., legal basis) to do so under applicable law, like with your consent, to comply with laws, to provide you with services to enter into or fulfill our contractual obligations, to protect your rights, or to fulfill our legitimate business interests.If you are located in the EU or UK, this section applies to you.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on in order to process your personal information. As such, we may rely on the following legal bases to process your personal information:
- Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission (i.e., consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time. Learn more about withdrawing your consent.
- Performance of a Contract. We may process your personal information when we believe it is necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations to you, including providing our Services or at your request prior to entering into a contract with you.
- Legal Obligations. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as to cooperate with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercise or defend our legal rights, or disclose your information as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
- Vital Interests. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.
- Legitimate Interests. We may process your information when it is reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate business interests, provided those interests are not overridden by your rights and interests. Specifically, we rely on legitimate interest as the legal basis for processing data through hCaptcha (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) - our legitimate interest being the security and integrity of our platform and the prevention of automated abuse.
We may need to share your personal information in the following situations:
- Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
- hCaptcha (Intuition Machines, Inc.). When you use our login or signup forms, certain technical data (IP address, browser information, behavioral signals) is shared with hCaptcha for bot protection purposes. Intuition Machines, Inc. is located in the United States. Data transfers are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses. For more information, see hCaptcha's Privacy Policy.
- Supabase (Supabase, Inc.). Our accounts, profiles, groups, messages, calendar entries and all other application data are stored in a database operated by Supabase on infrastructure in the European Union. Supabase, Inc. is located in the United States and acts as our processor under a data processing agreement. Where personal data is transferred outside the European Economic Area, the transfer is governed by Standard Contractual Clauses. For more information, see Supabase's Privacy Policy.
- Vercel (Vercel Inc.). Our website and application are hosted by Vercel. In serving each request, Vercel processes technical connection data such as your IP address, browser type and the pages you request. Vercel Inc. is located in the United States and acts as our processor under a data processing agreement. Transfers outside the European Economic Area are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses. For more information, see Vercel's Privacy Policy.
- Resend (Plus Five Five, Inc.). We use Resend to deliver email, including your signup confirmation, password reset, notification and invitation emails. Your email address, your name where it appears in the message, and the content of that email are processed by Resend for the purpose of delivering it. Resend is operated by Plus Five Five, Inc., located in the United States, which acts as our processor under a data processing agreement. Transfers outside the European Economic Area are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses, and Plus Five Five, Inc. is additionally certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the UK Extension to it. You can switch off notification emails at any time using the unsubscribe link in any such email, or from your notification settings, without logging in. For more information, see Resend's Privacy Policy.
- OpenFreeMap (map backgrounds). The background imagery on our map comes from OpenFreeMap. Your browser never contacts them. We fetch the map style, fonts, icons and tiles from our own servers and pass them on to you, so your IP address is not disclosed to OpenFreeMap and they cannot see who is looking at the map or where. For more information, see OpenFreeMap. Map data is from OpenStreetMap contributors.
- Nominatim (OpenStreetMap Foundation). When you search for a place, or ask the map to name the spot you clicked or your current location, we look that up using Nominatim, a service of the OpenStreetMap Foundation (United Kingdom). Your browser never contacts them either. The request is made by our servers, so what Nominatim receives is the place name you typed or the coordinate to be named, and our server's address rather than yours. The coordinate is rounded before we cache it, and we do not keep a record linking a lookup to your account. For more information, see the OpenStreetMap Foundation Privacy Policy.
- Other Users. When you share personal information (for example, by posting comments, contributions, or other content to the Services) or otherwise interact with public areas of the Services, such personal information may be viewed by all users and may be publicly made available outside the Services in perpetuity. Similarly, other users will be able to view descriptions of your activity, communicate with you within our Services, and view your profile.
5. HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION?
In Short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this notice will require us keeping your personal information for longer than the period of time in which users have an account with us.
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
In practice, that means:
- Your profile, your activities, your messages, your calendar and your bookings are kept for as long as you have an account. They are deleted when you delete your account, which you can do yourself at any time from Account & security.
- Notifications are deleted automatically after 12 months.
- Reports of harmful content or behaviour are deleted automatically after 3 years. We keep them that long so we can explain and defend a decision if it is ever questioned, including by you.
- Our security log, which records actions taken on accounts, is deleted automatically after 12 months.
- Anti-abuse counters used for rate limiting are deleted after 3 days.
These deletions run automatically once a day. You do not have to ask for them.
6. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS?
In Short: You can see what we hold about you, download it, correct it, and delete it at any time, wherever you live.We apply the GDPR standard to everyone, wherever you are. You may ask for access to your personal data and a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how we use it, ask us to restrict how we use it, and ask for it in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent for something, you can withdraw it at any time. The two most common ones you can do yourself, immediately, from Account & security: Download your data, and Delete profile. For anything else, contact us and we will act within one month.
We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or UK data protection authority.
If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.
Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE? below.
However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
Account Information
If you would at any time like to review or change the information in your account or terminate your account, you can:- Log in to your account settings and update your user account.
Upon your request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements.
If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at info@educollective.org.
7. TRACKING AND DO-NOT-TRACK SIGNALS
We do not track you across other websites and we do not build a profile of you for advertising. There is no advertising on EduCollective and no advertising tracker on our pages. A “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control” signal from your browser therefore has nothing to switch off here, because we already behave the way it asks.
8. WHEREVER YOU LIVE, YOU GET THE SAME RIGHTS
In Short: We apply one standard to everybody, and it is the strictest one we know.
EduCollective is operated from Germany, so the GDPR governs what we do. Rather than give people different rights depending on where they happen to live, we apply the GDPR standard to everyone who uses EduCollective, anywhere in the world.
So wherever you are: you can see what we hold about you and download a copy of it, correct it, have it deleted, object to how we use it, and take it elsewhere. Nothing in this notice depends on your country.
Two things are worth saying plainly, because many services cannot. We have never sold personal data and we never will, and we do not share personal data for advertising. EduCollective is free, carries no advertising, and intends to stay that way, so there is nothing to sell your data for.
9. GERMANY, THE EEA, AND SCHOOLS
Germany and the European Economic Area
We are established in Hamburg, Germany, so the GDPR applies to everything described in this notice and we are the controller for it. You can exercise any of your rights under Articles 15 to 22 GDPR by contacting us. You can also download a copy of your data yourself at any time from Account & security → Download your data, and delete your account from the same screen.
If you believe we are handling your personal data unlawfully, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). You may complain to the authority in the EU country where you live or work. The authority responsible for us is:
Ludwig-Erhard-Straße 22, 20459 Hamburg, Germany
Schools and classroom accounts
A school can create classroom accounts for its classes. A classroom account holds only a class name, a year or grade, and a password. We do not collect any personal data about individual pupils: no names, no email addresses, no records of any kind. Pupils never create their own accounts.
Because of this, we are the controller for everything on this platform and we do not process personal data on behalf of a school. We act on our own purposes as the operator of the service, not on a school’s instructions, so no separate processing agreement (Auftragsverarbeitungsvertrag) is required between us. If your school’s data protection officer would like this in more detail, write to us and we will explain it in writing.
This holds only for as long as classroom accounts are used as intended. Please do not enter personal data about pupils anywhere on the platform, not in a class name, not in a profile, and not in a message. Name your classes in a way that does not identify a child, for example “Class 7b” rather than a pupil’s name.
10. ANALYTICS (COOKIE-FREE)
This website uses Umami Analytics, a privacy-focused, open-source analytics tool. Umami does not use cookies and does not collect any personally identifiable information. No data is stored on your device. We collect only anonymized usage data such as page views, referrer sources, browser type, device type, and approximate country of origin (derived from an anonymized IP address that is never stored). This data is used solely to understand how visitors interact with our website and cannot be used to identify individual users. No data is shared with third parties. The data is processed on servers located in the European Union in compliance with GDPR.11. ON-DEVICE STORAGE
In Short: To make the app fast, we keep a copy of your recent chats in your browser's own storage on your device. It never leaves your device and is deleted when you log out.To make your conversations open instantly, we store a copy of your recent chats in your browser's local storage (IndexedDB) on the device you use. This copy stays on your device: it is never transmitted to us or to any third party, and it is not a cookie. It is cleared automatically when you log out, which matters on shared devices such as school computers. This works the same way as the message drafts and display settings the app already saves locally, and it is strictly necessary to provide the messaging feature you have asked for.
12. DO WE MAKE UPDATES TO THIS NOTICE?
In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated "Revised" date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.
13. HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE?
If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may email us at info@educollective.org or contact us by post at:EduCollective gUG
20 Kugelfang
Hamburg, Hamburg 22297
Germany