Privacy Policy

Who we are

GradeLamp (gradelamp.com) is an essay feedback service run by [Company legal name], [Registered address] (“GradeLamp”, “we” or “us”). We decide how and why your personal information is used, which makes us its controller.

For any privacy question or request, email privacy@gradelamp.com. This policy covers the website, the grader, accounts, payments and the emails we send.

What we collect

What you give us

• Your essay, plus any prompt or documents you paste with it, so we can grade it. We never connect to your documents or accounts elsewhere: GradeLamp only sees what you paste.
• Your email address, if you create an account. We also store a normalised copy (lowercase, with tags like +school removed) so free grades work fairly.
• Your birth month and year, asked once at sign-up and checkout. We use them only to work out whether you are 13 or older (and 18 or older), keep just those yes-or-no answers, and discard the date itself.
• Optional details: your role (student, parent, teacher, counselor or other), and whether you want occasional emails from us. Both are off until you choose them.
• Feedback you send, such as a “Question this score” report (the reason and an optional note, with no essay text) and emails to support.
• A waitlist email, if you ask us to tell you when something opens. We use it for that one email.

What we create while you use GradeLamp

• Your results: row scores, quotes from your essay, comments and fixes. Saved to your history only if you are signed in.
• Purchase records: which pass you bought, the price, when, and the exact terms shown at checkout. Dodo Payments handles the payment itself; we never see your card number.
• Hashed network details: we turn IP addresses into one-way hashes to enforce free-grade limits and stop abuse. We don't store raw IP addresses.
• Product analytics: events like “grade started” or “result viewed”, linked to a random device id kept in your browser and, once you sign in, your account. Events never contain essay text, quotes, names, emails, birth dates, IP addresses, or scores tied to you.
• How you first found us: the page you landed on, the referring website's domain and any campaign tags in the link, stored in your browser and, after sign-up, on your account. We use this to learn which channels help students.
• Score statistics: counts of how many essays earned each score on each rubric row, with no link to any person or essay. We may publish these as aggregates, such as “the most-missed row”.

How we use it

• To grade your essay and show you the result.
• To run your account: sign-in, your 30-day history, deleting and exporting your data.
• To sell and honour passes, process refunds and answer billing questions.
• To keep the service fair and safe: free-grade limits, rate limits and abuse prevention.
• To send the emails the service needs, such as sign-in codes, receipts and reminders before a pass ends.
• To send occasional product emails, only if you opted in. Every one has a one-click unsubscribe.
• To improve GradeLamp using aggregate figures, never by reading your essays.

What we never do: we never use your essays to train AI models, never sell or rent your personal information, never show ads, never use ad pixels or third-party trackers, and never build profiles of you for advertising.

How the AI grading works with your data

GradeLamp sends your essay, prompt and documents to Anthropic's Claude API, directly, to score each rubric row. Our own code then checks the quotes and adds up the points. How GradeLamp grades explains each step.

• No training. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, Anthropic may not train its models on what we send.
• Anthropic's retention. Anthropic deletes what we send within 30 days. If its safety systems flag content under its usage policy, it can keep that content for up to 2 years.
• Zero data retention. We don't have a zero-data-retention agreement with Anthropic yet. If that changes, we'll update this page.
• Instructions inside essays are ignored. The grader is told to treat your essay as writing to assess, not as instructions, and our code checks every result.
• Results are AI-generated estimates. Every result says so. A person at GradeLamp doesn't review results before you see them.

If an essay mentions something hard. Personal essays sometimes describe a crisis. If the grader notices signs of a current risk to the writer, the result shows a short note with free helpline details. Nothing is sent anywhere else: we don't contact anyone, and our staff don't see it. The note never appears on share links, printouts, exports or emails.

What we store, and for how long

Grading without an account. We don't store your essay. While it's being graded, it exists only in memory on our server and at Anthropic. The finished result (never the essay) is held for up to 15 minutes, encrypted with a key that only your browser has, so you can still collect it if your connection drops. Your browser keeps your draft and recent results for 2 hours so you don't lose them.

Grading while signed in. We save your essay, prompt, documents and result to your history for 30 days, then a daily job deletes them automatically.

Deleting and exporting your data

• Delete now. Delete any essay, or all of them, from your history at any time. It's gone from our database immediately. Our encrypted backups roll off within 7 days, and Anthropic's copy is deleted within 30 days (or up to 2 years if its safety systems flagged it).
• Delete your account. In Settings, deleting your account removes every essay, share link and analytics event linked to you. We keep purchase records for tax and disputes with your account id removed. A one-way hash of your email stays until your free-grade window ends, so deleting and re-creating an account doesn't reset free grades; it can't be turned back into your email.
• Get a copy. Email privacy@gradelamp.com and we'll send you a file of your profile, essays, results and events within 7 days. A self-serve “Download my data” button is on its way to Settings.

Who we share data with

We share personal information only with the companies that run parts of GradeLamp for us (below), under contracts that limit them to providing their service. We also share it if the law requires it, to protect people's safety, or as part of a sale or merger of GradeLamp (in which case this policy's promises go with it, and we'll tell you first).

Shared results. When share links arrive, you decide who sees a result and whether your essay is included. A link is random, isn't listed in search engines, expires, and you can revoke it at any time.

“Question this score” with your essay. When this option arrives, signed-in users will be able to tick an unticked box to share an essay with us so we can check a score. Only the GradeLamp operator and rubric reviewers we contract under confidentiality terms can read it, on an internal page that logs every view. It's deleted after 30 days and never added to the essays we use to test the grader.

Sub-processors

These companies process data on our behalf. We'll update this list before adding a new one that handles your essays.

The routing service marked “pending” is something we may use only to test the grader on essays we commission from paid writers. Your essays always go to Anthropic directly. If that ever changed, we would name the operator and host here first.

Cookies and browser storage

We use only cookies the service needs to work, so there's no cookie banner. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

• Session cookie: keeps you signed in (30 days, renewed as you use GradeLamp).
• Anonymous id cookie: a random, signed id that makes the free grade work without an account.
• Age-check cookies: one remembers that you answered the age question (30 minutes); another stops an under-13 sign-up from being retried (30 days).

Your browser's local storage also holds your draft and recent results (2 hours), a random device id and how you first found us (for the product analytics above). You can clear these any time in your browser settings. Page counts and speed measurements come from Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, which don't use cookies.

Children and teens

GradeLamp is for people aged 13 and older. It isn't directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them. This is how we handle the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA):

• Sign-up and checkout ask for a birth month and year with no default answer.
• If someone is under 13, we don't create an account and store nothing except a cookie that blocks a retry and a count of blocks.
• If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we delete it and its data within 72 hours. Parents and guardians can tell us at privacy@gradelamp.com.
• The free grade without an account stores no essay and no personal details.

Teens. Students aged 13 to 17 can use GradeLamp. Anyone under 18 needs a parent's or guardian's permission to buy a pass, and can send a parent a pay link instead. GradeLamp has no public profiles, messaging or comments.

India. If you are in India, you must be 18 or older to create an account.

Teachers and schools

Teacher accounts open later (see GradeLamp for teachers). When they do, class sets are read in the teacher's browser, student names are removed before anything is sent, and no class-set essay is stored on our servers. A dedicated privacy page for schools will explain this in detail. An individual teacher account is not a district agreement, so teachers should check their district's approved-tool list.

Where your data is processed

Our database and server functions run in the United States, in one region. Anthropic processes grading requests on its own infrastructure, and that processing isn't limited to any one country or region. We don't offer EU-only or UK-only processing.

If you use GradeLamp from outside the United States, your information is transferred to the United States and to wherever our sub-processors operate. We rely on each provider's data processing terms to protect it.

How we protect it

• Encryption in transit (HTTPS) and at rest in our database.
• We keep essay text out of our logs, error reports and analytics.
• IP addresses stored only as one-way hashes; share links and pay links are long random tokens.
• Two-factor sign-in on the accounts we use to run GradeLamp, and secret keys kept only in our hosting provider's secret store.
• Separate databases for testing, with no real essays in them.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you the personal information we hold about you, give you a copy, correct it, delete it, or stop using it for something you object to. Email privacy@gradelamp.com. We reply within 7 days and may ask you to confirm the request from your account email. Using these rights never costs anything or changes how GradeLamp treats you.

We don't sell personal information or share it for cross-site advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. If you're unhappy with our answer, you can complain to your local data protection or consumer authority.

If you are in the UK or the EU

We don't market GradeLamp in the UK or EU today, but if you use it from there, the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR gives you the rights above, plus the right to data portability and to complain to your supervisory authority. Our legal bases are:

• Contract: grading, accounts, history and passes.
• Legitimate interests: security, fraud and abuse prevention, and aggregate product analytics.
• Consent: optional product emails, which you can withdraw at any time.
• Legal obligation: tax and accounting records.

Grading is practice feedback. It doesn't make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you.

Changes to this policy

If we make a change that affects how we use your data, we'll email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect and update the date at the top of this page. We'll never apply a change to essays you gave us under an earlier promise without asking you.