Privacy policy

1. Who we are

PrepShorts (“we”) is run by Aditya Kedia, an individual, from Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. For students who join through a school code, we handle study data on the school’s instructions; for students who join on their own, we are directly responsible for it. Either way, this policy describes everything we collect and why, and our data-protection page sets out the formal legal framework under India’s DPDP Act, 2023 and, where it applies, the EU GDPR.

2. What we collect

Account details. The name and email address on the Google account used to sign in, a class and section, a school code if you have one, and — only if a student chooses it — the language their lessons open in, where a lesson is recorded in both (English unless they pick Hindi). We do not collect a password — Google signs you in — and we do not collect a parent’s email or telephone number. Teachers additionally give the classes they take; schools give their institutional details and an office contact.

A teacher without a school code. A teacher whose school is not on PrepShorts yet can leave their name, email address, school, city and the classes they teach on our teacher form. That is not an account and opens nothing: we use it only to reply to that teacher about bringing their school on board, and we delete it twelve months after it arrives.

Study activity. Which videos were watched and to what point, which checks and tests were taken and, for a test, the whole marked paper — every question as it was put, the options offered, and the option chosen — the topics marked covered or weak, page ratings and the private line you may write beside a rating, and doubts sent to teachers. There is no notebook and nothing to bookmark, so there is nothing of that kind to collect. This is the heart of the product: it is what builds your progress map and your revision list.

Technical basics. Device type, browser, approximate region, and error logs — the minimum needed to keep the service working on the phones and shared computers our students actually use.

3. What we never collect

No precise location. No contact lists. No photographs of students. No microphone or camera access. No browsing history outside PrepShorts. No advertising inside PrepShorts. The website and app do run Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel to measure visits and our own advertising; §4 and §11 say exactly what they receive and set. We do not ask for Aadhaar or any government identifier, and we hold no password of yours. We deliberately design forms so that the least possible information does the job: a school code, for instance, tells us everything the roster needs without collecting an address.

4. How we use data

We use study activity to run the features you see: resuming a video where it paused, marking topics covered, building the weak-topic map, assembling tests weighted toward what needs work, and giving teachers and the school office their dashboards. We use account details to sign you in and to connect you to your school. We use technical basics to fix what breaks. We do not use any of it to profile students for anything other than study, to rank students against each other publicly, or to market anything to anyone.

5. Who sees what

The student sees everything of their own: progress, scores, ratings and the private line beside them, and every doubt they sent.

Their teachers see study progress, check and test results, doubts addressed to them, and page ratings — for the classes they teach. Teachers do not see the private line a student writes beside a rating — that is enforced by what the database hands them, not by the application remembering to leave a field out.

The school office sees rosters, per-student progress summaries, class rollups and the weak-topic map — the same picture a good staff-room register would hold, kept current automatically.

Parents see progress through the student’s own account or the school’s term reports. Other students see nothing of yours. There are no public profiles, no leaderboards, and no way for a stranger to reach a student through PrepShorts.

6. Sharing

We do not sell data — not to advertisers, not to “partners”, not in anonymised bulk, not ever. We share data only with: the school named by your school code (that is the product working as described); service providers who host our infrastructure under contract and process data solely on our instructions, listed on the data-protection page; and authorities where the law genuinely requires it, in which case we insist on due process and tell the school unless legally barred. One feature sends a student’s own words outside our systems and it is worth naming here rather than leaving to the list: the “Ask about this video” box on a topic page sends the typed question, and that video’s transcript, to OpenAI, with nothing attached that identifies the student and no copy kept of either the question or the answer. Every page of the website and of the signed-in app also loads Google Tag Manager, which runs Google Analytics 4 and the Meta Pixel for our marketing. They receive the address and title of the page being viewed, the browser and device, a rough location worked out from the connection, and identifiers from their own cookies (named in §11). Inside the app a page address can contain an internal account number or a school code; no page title carries a name. Google and Meta process this under their own business terms. Videos are served by PrepShorts from its own storage rather than embedded from a video platform, so no third-party video host learns which child watched what; the terms page explains this boundary.

Our YouTube channel. We also publish our videos on our own YouTube channel, PrepShorts (@prepshortsofficial). A small internal tool uses YouTube API Services to fill in our own videos’ titles, descriptions, captions, thumbnails and playlists. It reads and changes only our own channel; it does not access any information about you, about people who watch the channel, or about any other YouTube account. If you watch our videos on YouTube, YouTube’s Terms of Service apply, and Google’s Privacy Policy describes how Google handles your data. Access granted to any app through a Google account can be reviewed or removed in Google’s security settings.

7. Retention

Study records are kept while the account is active, because a progress map is only useful with its history. That includes the marked paper of every test taken: it is what lets a result from three months ago be reopened, printed and revised from, rather than remembered as a bare score. If an account is idle for two full academic years we write to the account’s contact and then delete it. When a school ends its agreement, its roster links are severed: students keep their own study history under their own accounts, and the school keeps the reports it exported. A deletion request (Section 10) removes your account and everything under it within 30 days — every check, test, rating and question, and the name on any answer you wrote as a teacher. Two things are deliberately kept and are worth naming rather than covering with the word “aggregate”. If a support session ever opened your dashboard, the record that it happened stays: it names the operator, the school and the date, and it is what makes that access accountable at all — deleting it on request would defeat the safeguard. And if you registered a school, the school’s own registration record stays, because it is the school’s record rather than an individual’s and the school is still using it. Everything else that remains is counts and averages that name nobody.

8. Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access inside PrepShorts is role-based: an engineer debugging the video player does not see doubts. Whenever someone here acts as a student, teacher or school office — the only way we can see what you see — that is recorded with their name and the moment. Ordinary reads inside our own operator console are not individually logged, and this page claimed a recorded reason for them until 9 September 2026. We back up the database every night and check each backup is readable, and we rehearse a full restore from one of those backups — last done on 9 September 2026. If a breach ever affects your data, we will notify the school and affected users promptly with what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing — the process is detailed on the data-protection page.

9. Children

Most PrepShorts users are children, and the whole product is designed for that fact rather than patched for it. Where a student joins with a school code, the school’s own enrolment carries the parent’s authority. Where a student joins without one, we rely on the account holder’s own consent and deliberately collect no parent contact and nothing about a household — the data-protection page sets out both bases in full. There is no advertising, no public community, no direct messaging between students, and no feature that trades a child’s data for anything. Our full commitments — including how doubts are moderated and how adults are vetted — are on the child-safety page.

10. Your rights

You — or your parent or guardian acting for you — can ask us at any time to: see the personal data we hold about you; correct anything wrong; export your study history in a portable format; delete your account and personal data; or complain about how we’ve handled any of this. Write to privacy@prepshorts.com or use the contact page. We acknowledge within 48 hours, answer within 7 days and resolve within 30. (These are the same commitments as §10 of the Data protection page, which is the one a school’s DPO reads — the two said different things until 9 September 2026.) Our Grievance Officer’s details, and the escalation route to the Data Protection Board of India, are on the data-protection page.

11. Cookies

Our own cookies are all functional. Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel, loaded through Google Tag Manager on every page, set cookies of their own, listed after ours. Our five cookies:

• ps_session — keeps you signed in, 30 days. It is an opaque identifier and nothing else: everything about you sits on our side, which is what lets us end a session the moment it is revoked.
• ps_hint — the single character “1”, carrying no name, no identifier and no claim, so a page can tell whether to draw a sign-in button before it has asked us who you are.
• ps_oauth — 10 minutes, set only while you are signing in with Google and discarded as soon as you come back.
• ps_video_<video> — 5 minutes. A signed badge naming one video, which is what lets it stream. It is set for anybody who presses play, signed in or not, and without an account it identifies nobody: it says which video and until when, and nothing else. It is renewed while you watch; for an account, that renewal is the point at which a closed account stops playing.
• ps_video_ids — 1 hour, the list of which of those badges you currently hold.

Set by Google and Meta, through Google Tag Manager: _ga and _ga_<id> — Google Analytics 4, up to 2 years, a random identifier that lets it count returning visits; _fbp — Meta Pixel, 90 days, a browser identifier Meta uses to measure our advertising; _fbc — Meta Pixel, 90 days, set only when you arrive by clicking one of our adverts on Facebook or Instagram. The Meta Pixel also keeps two entries in your browser’s local storage: lastExternalReferrer and lastExternalReferrerTime — the last other website that linked you here, and when. What runs inside Tag Manager is configured by our marketing team; if this list changes, this section changes with it.

And two things kept in your browser rather than sent to us: ps.hold:<page>, one number recording how tall a section measured last time so the page does not jump while it loads — no identity in it, and it is per-page; and, for teachers only, ps.draft.doubt.<question>, an answer you have typed but not yet sent, held in session storage so it survives a mistaken click and is gone when you close the tab. Neither ever reaches our servers. Clearing your browser storage signs you out and loses nothing else. (Until 9 September 2026 this section said it stored the point where a video paused. It never did — nothing here records where you are in a video — and the claim was found by writing this list.)

12. Changes & contact

If this policy changes in any way that matters — new data collected, new sharing, new retention — we will say so plainly on this page, date it, and notify schools before it takes effect. Silent edits are not how we work.

2 September 2026. A line-by-line pass of this document against the database that actually stores the data. Four things it said were not true of the product and have been corrected rather than softened: sign-in has no password and collects no parent’s email or telephone number (it is a Google account, and nothing else); there is no notebook and no bookmarking, so neither is collected — what was called “notes” is the one private line a student may write beside a page rating; and there is no language setting to remember, because the product is in English today. Nothing new is collected and nothing new is shared; this entry records that the document over-described what was held, which is the same kind of error as under-describing it and is logged the same way.

30 August 2026. Section 2 and Section 7 now say that a test’s whole marked paper is kept — each question as it was put, the options offered, and the option chosen — for as long as the account is active. That is new data and a new retention period, so it is recorded here rather than folded in quietly. It is what lets a result from three months ago be reopened, printed and revised from, instead of remembered as a bare score. Nothing new is shared with anybody: the paper is visible to the student, and to their teachers and school on the same terms as the score already was.

Questions, requests and complaints: privacy@prepshorts.com · PrepShorts · Aditya Kedia · Jaipur, Rajasthan, India · or the contact page.