Legal
Privacy Policy
Effective 23 August 2026 · Last updated 23 August 2026
This policy explains how GlowTech (“Glow”, “we”, “us”) handles information across both parts of our service: GlowScribe, the writing app students use to complete assignments, and Glow Insight, the browser extension teachers use in Google Classroom. They are two halves of one product, so one policy covers both.
1. Summary
Schools use Glow to understand how written work was produced. To do that, GlowScribe records how a document is written — not just the finished text — and Glow Insight shows the resulting report to the teacher grading it.
If you are a student: while you are writing an assignment in GlowScribe, the app records what you type, delete and paste, and when. Your teacher can see a report built from that record. Section 3 describes exactly what is captured.
We do not sell personal information, use it for advertising, or use it to build profiles for anything other than providing this service to your school.
2. Our role and your school’s role
Glow is provided to schools. The school decides to use it, decides which assignments are tracked and with what settings, and decides who may see the results. In data-protection terms, the school is the controller of student data and we act as its processor and service provider, handling that data on the school’s instructions and consistent with its obligations under FERPA and applicable student-privacy law.
This matters for your questions: if you are a student or parent asking what was collected, why, or for it to be deleted, your school is the right first contact. We will support them in answering.
3. What GlowScribe collects from students
- Account information
- When you sign in with Google, we receive your Google account ID, name, email address, and profile picture, along with the Google Classroom courses and assignments available to you.
- The writing record
- While you work on an assignment, the app records the document as it is being built. That includes the text you type, the text you delete, the text you paste (and whether it came from inside or outside the document), formatting changes such as bold, colour, font size and alignment, and the time each of these happened. This is the core of the service: it is what makes it possible to show how a piece of writing came together rather than only what was handed in.
- Session activity
- We record when a writing session starts, ends, and is submitted, how long it lasted, and when you switch away from the writing tab and return to it. We do not see which other tab, window, or application you moved to — only that the writing tab lost and regained focus.
- Your document
- The document you write is stored on our servers so it can be saved, resumed, submitted, and reviewed by your teacher.
- Measurements derived from the above
- From the writing record we calculate summary figures — total and active writing time, keystroke and paste counts, typing speed over time, editing density, and indicators relating to pasted, potentially plagiarised, or potentially AI-generated content. These are signals for a teacher’s judgement, not determinations of misconduct, and no academic decision is made automatically from them.
4. What Glow Insight collects from teachers
- Account information
- When you sign in, we receive your Google account ID, email address, name, and profile picture. Your signed-in identity is stored in your browser profile so you stay signed in between sessions.
- Google Classroom identifiers
- To show the right information, the extension reads identifiers for the course, assignment, or student submission currently on screen — taken from the Classroom page address and from the page itself — and sends them to our servers to retrieve the matching record.
- Assignment content you provide
- When you create an assignment through the extension, we receive what you enter: title, instructions, point value, due date, and the integrity settings you choose. When you register an existing Classroom assignment, we also receive its title and description as shown on that Classroom page.
- Settings stored on your device
- Your integrity preferences for an assignment and your signed-in state are stored in your browser’s extension storage. If you have Chrome sync enabled, Google syncs these between your signed-in Chrome profiles; we do not control that sync.
The extension itself does not capture keystrokes, mouse movement, or browsing activity. It reads the address of your current tab only to decide which of its own controls to show and to display an icon badge while you are on Google Classroom; that address is not transmitted to us beyond the Classroom identifiers above. It runs on no website other than classroom.google.com, contains no advertising or analytics software, never sees your Google password, and downloads no code from the internet — everything it runs ships inside the installed package.
5. Technical information
Like any web service, our servers receive standard request data, including IP address and browser user agent, whenever either product communicates with us. We keep these request logs for 30 days. Our interfaces also load a font from Google’s font service, which means Google receives a request from your browser, including your IP address, when a page or panel is displayed.
6. How we use information
- To authenticate you and keep you signed in.
- To deliver assignments to students and save their work.
- To produce the writing reports teachers use to review submissions, which is the purpose the school adopted the service for.
- To operate, secure, debug, and improve the service.
We do not use this information for advertising, and we do not sell it or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not use student work to train machine-learning models for other customers or products.
7. Who can see what
- Teachers can see the reports and submitted work for students in courses they teach. Reports identify students, normally by school email address.
- School administrators may have access according to the school’s own configuration and policies.
- Other students cannot see your work or your writing record.
- Our staff can access data only where needed to operate or support the service, under access controls.
- Service providers — we use Google Cloud Platform (hosting and databases) and Google Identity (sign-in) to run the service. They process data on our instructions only.
We may also disclose information where required by law. We do not sell personal information to anyone.
8. Google API Services
Glow’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Authentication is handled by Google and is governed by Google’s own privacy policy.
9. Storage, location, and retention
Data is stored on servers located in the European Union. If you are located elsewhere, your information may be transferred to and processed there; where required, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses for those transfers.
Documents, writing records, and reports are kept for as long as the school’s account is active, unless the school asks us to delete them sooner. Account information is kept while the account is active. Server logs are kept for 30 days. When an account is deleted, we delete or anonymise the associated data within 30 days, except where we must keep it to meet a legal obligation.
Teachers can remove the data the extension stores on their device at any time by uninstalling it or signing out.
10. Security
We use industry-standard measures to protect information, including encryption in transit (HTTPS) and access controls limiting who on our team can view customer data. No system is perfectly secure, but we take this seriously and will notify affected schools and users of a breach as required by law.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, to object to or restrict processing, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.
Students and parents should contact their school first, as the school controls student records in the service. Teachers and other users can contact us directly at privacy@glowtech.example. School customers may request our Data Processing Addendum at the same address.
12. Children
Glow is provided through schools and is not offered directly to children. Where the service processes data about students under 13, it does so solely on behalf of and under the direction of their school, which is responsible for providing any consent required under COPPA or equivalent law. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children outside a school relationship.
13. Changes
We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will update the “Last updated” date and, where appropriate, notify schools and users directly. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated policy.