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Your Data: Retention & Deletion

Effective September 3, 2026 · previously July 26, 2026

This page explains, in plain language, what information Discernly keeps, how long we keep it, and exactly what happens when you delete your account. Our aim is simple: keep only what earns its place, be honest about what we keep and why, and give you a real way to have your information removed.

The short version

  • We keep your account and materials for as long as your account is open.
  • When you delete your account, we remove the things that identify you (your name, email, login, and the link between you and any student work), and we detach your saved payment method.
  • By default, we keep the teaching materials and student responses in a de-identified form (with names and identifiers stripped out) so we can study how students learn and improve the product. De-identified information is no longer tied to any person.
  • If you'd rather we erase everything, including those materials, you can ask us to, and we will.
  • We keep a bare financial record (what was charged and credited) because we're required to, and so that any remaining credit can still be refunded.
  • Lessons are processed by commercial AI providers, and neither we nor they use student work to train AI models.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those points.

1. What we hold

While your account is open, Discernly stores:

  • Your account details: your name, email, and login credentials.
  • Your teaching materials: the challenges, prompts, and lessons you create.
  • Student work from your lessons: the answers, peer reviews, group responses, reflections, and AI feedback generated during a lesson. Students join lessons with a name they type in; that name is attached to their work.
  • A financial record: if you've added credit, the charges and credit adjustments on your account, plus a token that represents your saved card (never the card number itself).

Discernly is intended for students aged 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has submitted work through Discernly, email us and we'll delete it.

2. Where it goes: AI providers and other services

Discernly produces its feedback by sending lesson content, including student answers, to commercial AI providers. That is how the product works. It's also the thing educators and institutions most want a straight answer about, so here it is.

We do not use student work to train AI models.

Our providers are under business terms that bar them from using the content we send to train their models, and we configure our accounts to keep that true. Student writing is used to generate feedback for that lesson and for the de-identified research described in Section 4.

One thing we'd rather you hear from us: providers keep what we send them for a limited period so they can check for abuse of their own systems. With our main provider that window is 30 days. They don't train on it and they don't use it for anything else, but it isn't erased the moment a lesson ends. If we move to zero-retention processing, we'll say so here.

If any of this changes, we will say so on this page before it takes effect.

We work with more than one AI provider so that a single provider's outage can't stop a class mid-lesson; Discernly routes between them and falls back automatically. These are the companies that may process information on our behalf:

  • OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google: generate the AI feedback in a lesson. They receive lesson content and student answers. They do not receive your name, your students' names, or any billing detail.
  • Render: hosts the application and database, in the United States.
  • Stripe: processes payments. Card details are entered directly into Stripe's own secure fields and never reach our servers; we hold only a token that stands for the card.
  • Our email delivery provider: sends account, billing, and lesson notification email.

We keep this list current. If we add a provider that processes personal information, it appears here.

3. How long we keep it

We keep this information for as long as your account is open. We don't put an expiry clock on active accounts. Your lessons and materials stay available to you until you decide otherwise.

When you close your account, what happens next depends on which of the two options below you choose.

4. Deleting your account: the default

When you delete your account, we de-identify and detach it. Concretely, we:

  • Remove your personal details: your name, email, and login are cleared, and your login is permanently disabled.
  • Sever the links to you: your saved payment method is detached, and student names in your lessons are replaced with labels that can't be traced back to a person.
  • Keep the teaching materials and student responses in de-identified form. With the identifying details stripped out, we retain this content to understand how students respond to different questions and to improve Discernly. Because it is no longer tied to any individual, this information is no longer personal data.

We do this because that content is genuinely valuable, for you and for every educator who uses Discernly, and because de-identified information can be kept and studied without putting anyone's privacy at risk.

An honest note about free-text answers. Student answers are written in the student's own words. We remove the name field attached to each student, but we can't guarantee that a student never typed a name inside the text of an answer. If having every such mention removed matters to you, choose full erasure below.

5. Deleting your account: full erasure

If de-identification isn't enough for you, you can ask us to erase your materials entirely. In that case we also delete your lessons and everything in them (student answers, peer reviews, group responses, reflections, and AI feedback), leaving nothing but the anonymized, non-identifying financial record described below.

Just tell us you want full erasure when you request deletion, and that's what we'll do.

6. The financial record we always keep

Whichever option you choose, we retain a minimal financial record: the history of what was charged to and credited on your account. We keep this for two reasons:

  1. We're required to. Accurate financial records are a basic accounting and tax-compliance obligation.
  2. So we can still refund you. If you have unused purchased credit, keeping the record is what lets us return it after your account is closed.

This record is anonymized: once your personal details are removed, it is no longer connected to your name or email. It contains amounts, dates, and payment tokens, not your identity.

7. Backups

For safety, we keep encrypted backups of our systems and roll them forward on a short cycle (currently seven days). When you delete your account, your information is removed from our live systems right away and ages out of these backups within that window. We don't restore deleted information from backups except to recover from a system failure.

8. If you use Discernly through your school

When Discernly is used under an agreement with a school or institution, student records belong to the institution, and we handle them under that agreement and under applicable education-privacy law. In that setting, requests about student data are generally directed through the institution rather than made to us directly. If you're an instructor covered by an institutional agreement, that agreement governs. Reach out and we'll point you to the right process.

If you signed up on your own and pay for your own credit, there's no institution in the middle, and you are the one directing us. Your lessons are yours to delete or erase, using the options in Sections 4 and 5, and you don't need anyone's approval to do it.

In neither case do we treat student work as ours. Students hold the rights in what they write; we process it on instruction, to run the lesson. Our terms of service sets this out in full.

9. How to delete your account

Default de-identification is self-serve. You can delete your account at any time from your account settings, using the "Delete my account" option. We'll ask you to confirm, and then de-identify and detach your account as described in Section 4.

Full erasure is by request. If you want your teaching materials and student responses erased entirely (Section 5), email us at privacy@discernly.co from the address on your account and ask for full erasure. Because this is permanent, we'll confirm with you before carrying it out.

A few situations need a quick extra step (for example, if you have unused credit you'd like refunded, or if you created an institution or team on Discernly), and we'll walk you through those when you reach out.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change how we retain or delete data, we'll update this page and note the new effective date. Material changes will be communicated to account holders.

Questions about your data? Contact us at privacy@discernly.co.