Privacy policy

The short version

• You can use almost all of Econ Academy without an account. The lessons, interactive graphs, practice quizzes, calculators and glossary are open to everyone.
• If you create an account, we store your email address, a display name and your learning progress so the site can schedule your reviews and show you what you have mastered.
• We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages and tools get used. Analytics events never contain your name or email.
• Written answers you choose to submit for grading are sent to an AI model (Google Gemini on Google Cloud) and come back with feedback. Nothing else on the site involves AI, and no AI is used to make decisions about you or to profile you.
• We do not sell data, do not run advertising networks or ad trackers, and do not share your data with anyone except the service providers that host the site, listed below.
• Email us and we will delete your account and everything attached to it.

Using the site without an account

Most of econ.academy is public. When you read a lesson, drag a curve, take a practice quiz or use a calculator, the following happens:

• Hosting logs. The site is served by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel records standard request logs (your IP address, the page requested, browser type, time) for security and debugging. We keep no separate copy of these logs.
• Analytics.We use Google Analytics 4, loaded through Firebase Analytics, to count visits and record usage events such as “practice question answered”, “calculator used” or “lesson page viewed”. Events carry the lesson or question identifier and whether an answer was correct, never your name, email or free-text answers. Google Analytics sets cookies (see Cookies).
• Browser storage.The site keeps a few small items in your browser’s local storage so it can show a “continue where you left off” strip, remember a class code you were about to use, or remember which course you picked before signing up. These items never leave your device.

What an account adds

An account is needed for the adaptive course (spaced-repetition reviews, the diagnostic, progress tracking) and for teacher classes. When you sign up we store:

• Identity. Your email address and a display name. If you sign up with email and password, the password is handled by Firebase Authentication (a Google service) and stored only as a hash; we never see it. If you sign in with Google, Google sends us your name, email address and profile picture, and we keep the name and email.
• Learning data. Which lessons you have read, every practice answer you give (question, your choice, correct or not, time taken), per-concept scheduling data for spaced repetition, daily activity, streaks and points, your self-rating of how hard a lesson felt, and any misconceptions the site has detected from your answers. This is the data that makes the course adapt to you.
• Role. Whether you use the site as a student or as a teacher, and which classes you belong to.

Your learning data is readable only by you. Firebase security rules enforce this at the database level, not just in the interface.

Teacher classes

A teacher can create a class and share a six-character join code. When a student joins with that code, the teacher can see the student’s display name, join date and a progress summary: completed lessons, mastered topics, current streak, points, last active date, weak areas and common misconceptions. The teacher does not see the student’s email address, password or individual free-text answers.

Teachers can remove a student from a class at any time, and a student can ask their teacher or us to be removed. Removal deletes the student’s entry from that class roster.

Teachers can optionally publish an anonymous class benchmark so other teachers can compare their class against a pool. Benchmarks contain only aggregates per unit (for example, the share of a class that has mastered a topic). They never contain names, user identifiers or rosters, and a class with fewer than four students cannot publish one at all.

How AI is used, and how it is not

Econ Academy’s lessons, graphs, quizzes and explanations are written and checked by a person. AI is involved in exactly one feature:

• Grading written answers.Some practice sets contain short written questions. When you submit one, your answer text and the question are sent from our server to Google’s Gemini model through Google Cloud Vertex AI, which returns a score and feedback against a rubric written by the author. Only signed-in users can submit, each user is limited to a fixed number of grades per day, and the request is tied to your account only by an internal user ID, never by name or email.
• What we keep. The returned feedback is cached under a one-way hash of the question and answer so that an identical resubmission does not need a second AI call. The cache entry holds the feedback, the question identifier and token counts, not your name. If a grading call fails, we log the error with your internal user ID and the length of your answer, not its text.
• What Google does with it.Under Google Cloud’s Vertex AI terms, prompts and outputs sent through the service are not used to train Google’s models and are not retained beyond what is needed to return the response and meet Google’s abuse-monitoring obligations.

No AI system profiles you, ranks you, makes decisions about you, or generates the content you study. The spaced-repetition scheduler is a published, deterministic algorithm (FSRS), not a learned model.

Feedback and error reports

The feedback widget and the “report an error” button on lesson blocks send us your message, the page you were on and your browser type. If you are signed in, your user ID and email are attached so we can reply, and you can optionally attach a screenshot, which is stored in Firebase Storage. Signed-out submissions are anonymous.

Where your data lives

We do not run our own servers. These providers process data on our behalf under their own data-processing terms:

• Google Firebase (Google LLC): authentication, the Firestore database that holds accounts and learning data, Storage for feedback screenshots, and Analytics. Data is stored primarily in the United States. Firebase privacy.
• Google Cloud Vertex AI (Google LLC): the AI grading described above. Vertex AI data governance.
• Vercel (Vercel Inc.): hosting and request logs. Vercel privacy.

Transfers of personal data from the EU to these US providers rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the standard contractual clauses in the providers’ terms.

The site links to ExamTeX, a practice-exam tool by the same author. ExamTeX is a separate service with its own privacy policy, and nothing is shared between the two sites unless you create an account on both.

Cookies

Econ Academy itself does not set tracking cookies. Google Analytics sets its standard cookies (_ga and _ga_<id>, up to two years) to tell returning visitors from new ones. You can block them in your browser settings or with Google’s opt-out add-on; the site works the same without them. Your sign-in session is kept in browser storage managed by Firebase Authentication, not in a cookie, and ends when you sign out.

How long we keep data

• Account and learning data: for as long as your account exists. Delete the account and it goes with it.
• Class roster entries: until the student leaves, the teacher removes them, or the class is deleted.
• AI grading cache and error logs: indefinitely, but they contain no name or email, and the cache contains no answer text.
• Google Analytics user-level data: at most 14 months, per Google Analytics 4 retention settings. Aggregated reports are kept.
• Feedback messages: until we have acted on them.

Your rights and how to use them

Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation you can ask to see the data we hold about you, correct it, receive a copy in a portable format, object to a particular use, or have it deleted. To do any of these, email arazir@ism.lt from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days. Deleting your account removes your profile, your learning data and your entries in any class roster.

You can change your display name yourself in Settings. If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate (vdai.lrv.lt) or to the data-protection authority in your own country.

Children and schools

Econ Academy is built for secondary-school and university students and for their teachers. It is intended for users aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13; if you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email us and we will delete it. Students under the age of digital consent in their country (16 in some EU countries, 13 in others) should sign up with a parent’s or school’s permission.

Teachers who use the class features do so under their school’s policies. We only ever see the display names and progress summaries described above. If your school needs a data-processing agreement or a list of sub-processors, email us.

Security

All traffic uses HTTPS. Learning data is protected by Firebase security rules that let only the owner read it (and only the class teacher read roster summaries). Passwords are hashed by Firebase Authentication. Server-side logs for AI grading are accessible only to the site administrator through Google Cloud credentials, never from the browser.

Changes to this policy

When something here changes we update the date at the top. If a change affects how your data is used in a way you would care about, we will say so prominently on this page before it takes effect. See also the terms of use.