Privacy notice

The Arabic Ladder is run by Ahmet Can, the school’s owner and the data controller, reachable at hello@arabicladder.com. He is responsible for your data.

Why we may keep it

To teach you and take your payments, which is the agreement you make when you join; and so the school’s owner can look after the teaching, which the law calls a legitimate interest.

You

Your name, email and the evenings that suit you, to sign you in, place you in a group and write to you.

When you enquire

How you heard about us, the link you came from if it carried a campaign tag, and that you said you’re 18 or over. The level check times you picked, moved or cancelled, and whether you came. Your teacher and the school’s owner see these.

Your free level check

Your teacher’s short note: your level and the group that suits you. Level checks aren’t recorded.

Your learning

Your place in the course, attendance, homework, marking and practice answers. We also note when you open a lesson, and what you tick (“I’ve got this” on a lesson, “I’ve read this” on a recap), so your teacher can see before class what each of you has done. If you press “Explain again?” in class, we keep which point you asked about and when.

Notes about you

Your teacher, and the school’s owner, may keep short notes about how you’re getting on. You don’t see them in the app.

Messages

Your private messages with your teacher, and your group chat. Your teacher may pin a message, yours too, at the top of the group chat, or of the class chat while class runs.

The whiteboard

What your teacher draws on it in class stays on the class page for your group, pages cleared during class too. Your teacher can hide a page.

Class recordings

Sound only, never anyone’s camera, with a transcript and a recap that a computer writes from it.

Payments

Who paid, when and how much. Stripe handles your card; we never see your card details.

Your teacher

Your homework, marking, messages and recordings, which lessons you’ve opened and what you’ve ticked, when you pressed “Explain again?”, and the notes about you, to teach you.

The school’s owner

Can also read your homework, marking and private messages with your teacher, and the notes about you, to look after the teaching.

Your group

Your first name and initial, the group chat, who can’t make a class and who is already in the room. Your group can listen to its class recordings. Classmates never see that you pressed “Explain again?”: it isn’t in the chat, the recording or the transcript.

Nobody else

Nothing is published or sold. It goes only to the companies below that run the app for us, and only for that.

Only your group’s weekly class is recorded, as sound only, so anyone who misses one can catch up. The reading circle is never recorded, and a one-on-one only if you said yes. You can say no in your Account: you still join every class. In the weekly class your microphone is off and you type in the chat; in the reading circle and your one-on-ones you speak as usual.

A group class has other people in it

The recording of your group carries your classmates’ voices as well as your own, and theirs carries yours.

Our database and sign-in run on Supabase, hosted in London, UK. The app itself runs on Netlify (United States). Class audio and homework files are stored with Cloudflare, which chooses where they are kept for us — we cannot promise they stay in one country. Payments are processed by Stripe. Emails are sent via Resend (United States) from arabicladder.com.

Live classes run through 8x8’s video service, which carries the sound and video of the class room. When a recording is written down as a transcript, the audio goes to AssemblyAI (United States). The recap is then written from the transcript by a computer, Google’s Gemini (United States).

Outside the UK

Each company outside the UK is bound by standard contract terms that UK law approves, so your data keeps the same protection there.

While you are a student with us. If you pause, stop paying or leave a group, everything from the classes you attended stays until your account closes.

Recordings

Kept while your group runs and your account is open. Backup copies of anything deleted are removed after 30 days.

When your account closes

When you close your account we delete your sign-in and take your email address off it; your lessons, your marked homework and your payment records stay with the school, because a lesson recording has other people on it and a payment has to survive an audit. Notes about you stay with that record, for the school’s owner only.

Deleting

Your homework files are deleted whenever you ask. Group recordings stay for the group, because they carry everyone’s voices; to keep your voice out of them, say no to being recorded in your Account. A note about you that is deleted is kept for one day, so Undo can bring it back, then removed. Payment records are kept as long as tax law requires.

See what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted: email hello@arabicladder.com and a person handles it.

A copy of your data

Press Ask for a copy in your Account, and we email you everything the school holds about you, including notes about you and each time you pressed “Explain again?”, within a month.

Not happy?

You can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).