Privacy Policy

This explains what personal information Lighthouse Tutoring collects, why, who sees it, and what you can do about it. We handle personal information under the Privacy Act 2020.

The agency responsible for the information described here is Nicholas William Ian Poppelwell, trading as Lighthouse Tutoring, NZBN 9429053878878, of 14 Maungarei Road, Remuera, Auckland. That is who to contact about anything in this policy, and who the Privacy Commissioner would deal with.

Our privacy officer is Nicholas Poppelwell, reachable at lighthousetut@gmail.com. That is the person who answers requests to see or correct your information, handles privacy complaints, and deals with the Privacy Commissioner.

What we collect

If you request Lighthouse at another university: the university, course or subject, whether you are a student, prospective tutor or parent, and your email address. You can send this request without creating an account. We use it to review demand and to reply about your request, not to send marketing emails. Only administrators can read the requests. You can ask us to delete your enquiry by emailing the privacy officer.

When you sign up: your name, email address, and which role you are starting with. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and we never see it.

If you are a student: the papers you say you are enrolled in. We do not verify this with the university.

If you are a tutor:

• If you were approved through the earlier process, the university email address we verified then. New tutor applicants do not need a university email.
• Your academic transcript, which you upload to prove your grades
• Your full legal name, any previous names, date of birth, and signed, dated authority for

University of Canterbury (UC) to confirm your academic results with us

• Your IRD number, date of birth and home address. Inland Revenue requires platforms like ours

to report each tutor's earnings every year with these details, under the Tax Administration Act 1994. You must give them to us before you can be paid.

• Bank and identity details, which you give directly to Stripe. We never see or store them.

Your settings and profile: anything you choose to add, such as a short bio or that you would like a tutor who supports learning differences; your notification preferences, such as quiet hours; whether you have turned session recording off; and, if you tutor, when you are available.

When you use Lighthouse:

• Which papers you request help with, when, and for how long
• Who you were matched with
• For in-person sessions, your device's location, checked once when you send the request to

confirm you are on campus. We do not store the location itself, only whether the check passed. We also keep the meeting place you type in. Tutors who can take the request see the paper, the length and that meeting place before they accept.

• Anything you write into a request, such as a note about how you learn best, and any file you

attach to put on the whiteboard. The tutor who accepts the request can see them.

• Ratings, including any tags or comments, and any reports you make. A tutor can see the ratings

and comments given to them, and who gave them.

• If you turn on notifications, a technical address for each device you turn them on for, so we

can alert you. You can turn them off at any time in Settings.

• Your IP address, when you join an online session. It is passed to our video provider so the

session connects you to a server near you rather than one on the other side of the world. We do not keep it.

• Technical information about your sign-ins. Our authentication provider records the IP address

and browser details of your signed-in sessions, to keep your account secure. We count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and does not identify you.

• Recordings of online sessions (audio, video and whiteboard) and transcripts made from them,

unless the student has turned recording off. See below.

Payments: we record the amounts, a reference to the Stripe transaction, and the card type and last four digits, so you can see which card a refund will go back to. We never see or store your full card number.

If you do not give us information

Most of it is needed for the part of Lighthouse it is used for. Without a name and email address we cannot open an account. A tutor who does not upload a transcript cannot tutor, and one who does not give us an IRD number, date of birth and home address, and finish Stripe's setup, cannot be paid. You can leave your bio, learning preferences and notifications empty. Students can turn session recording off; tutors must allow it while they tutor.

Information we get about you from other people

Most of what we hold, you give us yourself. Some of it comes from somebody else, and the Privacy Act says you should know when that happens. It is:

• What the other person in a session says about it. A student's rating of a tutor, including any

tags or comment, and any report either person makes about a session, describes the other person.

• Recordings and transcripts, which capture what both people in a session say, not just you.
• From Stripe, if you are a tutor: whether your payout account is set up, whether payouts are

enabled, and what verification Stripe still needs from you. Not your bank or identity details, which Stripe keeps.

• From our video provider, Lessonspace: the transcript of a recorded session, sent to us once

the session ends.

• From UC, if you submit a new academic transcript: its response confirming or declining to

confirm the course grades you claim.

We use this information for the same purposes as everything else in this policy, the same people see it as set out here, it is held by the agency named at the top of this policy, and you have the same rights to see it and have it corrected, set out under "Your rights". Nothing requires us by law to collect it; we collect it to run sessions fairly and pay tutors.

Why we collect it

To match you with an eligible tutor, to run and time sessions, to tell tutors about new requests they have asked to hear about, to take payment and pay tutors, to verify that a tutor genuinely earned the grade they claim, to review reported sessions, to keep records of academic integrity agreements and reports, to write a lesson summary of each recorded session and show it to the student, the tutor and any linked parent, to show a linked parent the wallet and session history described below, and to meet our tax and accounting obligations, including reporting tutors' earnings to Inland Revenue.

Your academic transcript

This is the most sensitive thing we hold, so it gets its own section.

Your transcript is stored in private storage. It is not public and it is never shared with other Lighthouse users. It is read by an administrator to review your grades, and by an automated system that extracts the paper codes and grades into a list. Its contents are never written to our logs.

For a new transcript, we pay UC's current NZ$35 verification fee. We send UC your legal name, any previous names, date of birth, signed authority, and the course grades you claim for tutoring. We keep a copy of the request and UC's response in private storage and limit access to administrators. We do not make a new course eligible for tutoring until UC confirms its grade. Tutors already approved after a UC check do not need to repeat it.

Once approved, what remains visible in the product is only which papers you are eligible to tutor. Other users never see your grades, your other papers, or the document itself.

Session recordings and transcripts

Online sessions are recorded and transcribed by default, so that a session somebody reports can actually be reviewed rather than coming down to one person's word against another's.

What is recorded: the audio and video of the call, the shared whiteboard (including uploaded materials and annotations), and a written transcript of what was said. In-person sessions are never recorded.

Who can see the recording: only authorised administrators, and only for a requested review of a reported session. Your tutor cannot, your student cannot, and a linked parent cannot. Nobody routinely watches recordings. Lessonspace processes them to create the transcript.

Who can see the transcript: our administrators, and, only while a report made during the session is under review, the student and the tutor who were in it. A linked parent never can. We look at a transcript when a session is reported or when we are investigating a possible breach of the Academic Integrity Policy or our Terms of Service. An authorised administrator may watch the recording if a session is reported and a review is requested, or where the law requires it. We do not use them for marketing, we do not sell them, and we do not use them to train AI. We do send the transcript to Anthropic, our AI provider, to write the lesson summary described below. Anthropic does not use it to train its models. Their contents are never written to our logs.

Students can turn this off. In Settings, under Session recording, a student can stop future sessions being recorded or transcribed. A tutor must allow recording while tutoring under the Tutor Agreement, including when that account also has the student role. Change the student preference before a session starts: changing it during a session may not stop a recording already under way. We do not tell the other person which setting a student chose. Turning recording off also removes the transcript and AI summary, and can make a later dispute harder to resolve.

Where it is kept. Recordings are held by our video provider, Lessonspace, on Amazon Web Services servers, which may be outside New Zealand. Transcripts are copied into our own private storage.

How long. Recordings are deleted after 90 days and transcripts after 6 months. Recordings are removed by our video provider's automatic retention setting and transcripts by an automated sweep of our own, not by somebody remembering. If a recording or transcript is needed for an open report or investigation when it would be deleted, we may save a copy until that is resolved, and then delete it.

Why we can do this. We collect recordings for a lawful purpose connected with running Lighthouse: resolving disputes about sessions, which decide whether someone is paid or refunded, and upholding academic integrity. We also use the transcript for a related purpose, the lesson summary described below, which is a record of the session for the people in it. You are told about recording when you sign up, before every online session, and here, and you can switch it off.

Lesson summaries

After a recorded session, we write a short summary of it: what it covered, the main points, what the student learned, and what to focus on next. It is written automatically by an AI system (Anthropic's Claude) from the transcript, and it can get things wrong.

Who can see it: the student, the tutor, and any parent linked to the student's account, in their session history. Never the transcript itself, outside a review as described above.

What it leaves out. It is written to cover the study content only, and is told to leave out anything personal that is not about the paper. Because a parent may read it, anything you would not want a parent to know should not be said in a session.

No recording, no summary. In-person sessions, and sessions where the student has turned recording off, have no summary. We do not tell anyone why a summary is missing.

How long. Summaries are kept with your session history, and deleted if you delete your account.

Who else is involved

We use these providers, and your information passes through them:

Most of these store information outside New Zealand, mainly in the United States. The law there differs from New Zealand law. These providers handle your information to provide their service to us, and we stay responsible for how they handle it on our behalf. Anthropic does not use what we send it to train its models. Stripe is the exception: it also uses payment information for its own purposes, such as preventing fraud and meeting its legal obligations, under its own privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy.

Who else we may give information to

• The University of Canterbury, only about an academic integrity matter: our records of pledges,

reports and action taken, where the law allows us to.

• Inland Revenue, about tutors: each year we report your name, address, date of birth, IRD

number and what you earned through Lighthouse, as the law requires. We give you a copy of what we report.

• If you are a tutor, a parent linked to a student you tutored can see your name in that

student's session history.

• Anyone else only where the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not use it for advertising.

What parents can see

If you approve a link to a parent account, that parent can see your wallet balance, and your session history: the paper, the date, the tutor's name, whether it was online or in person, how long it ran, what it cost, and its status, for example whether it is under review.

They can also see the lesson summary of each recorded session.

They cannot see the session itself. Not the video, not the whiteboard, not any recording or transcript, not your ratings, and not the meeting link. You approve the link, and you can end it.

How long we keep things

Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can ask what we hold about you, and ask us to correct it if it is wrong. Email our privacy officer at lighthousetut@gmail.com and we will respond as soon as we reasonably can, and no later than 20 working days.

You can ask for your account to be deleted in Settings, and a person carries it out. Some information cannot be deleted immediately, in particular financial records we must keep and academic integrity records.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to us, and then to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Security

Access is controlled at the database level, so a user can only reach their own information and what this policy says they are shown about others, such as the other person's name in a session or what a linked parent can see. Session recordings are only reachable by our administrators, and transcripts are in private storage, reachable only as described above. Bank details and full card numbers are handled entirely by Stripe. Administrator access is limited to the people who need it, and needs a second sign-in step.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify you and the Privacy Commissioner as soon as practicable, as the Privacy Act requires, and tell you what happened, what we have done about it, and what you can do.

Changes

We will notify you of material changes in the app, and by email where we can, before they take effect.

Contact

lighthousetut@gmail.com

Lighthouse Tutoring is a trading name of Nicholas William Ian Poppelwell, a sole trader registered in New Zealand, NZBN 9429053878878, of 14 Maungarei Road, Remuera, Auckland. We do not operate a public counter, so please contact us by email, and we answer from the same address.

You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz if you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy issue. You do not have to come to us first, though we would rather you did so we can fix it.