Privacy.
This policy explains what personal information Lecturly collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to the website at lecturly.ai, the app at app.lecturly.ai, and our emails. Questions go to legal@lecturly.ai.
The short version
- We collect your account details, the files you upload, what Lecturly makes from them, how you use the app, and billing status.
- To build your lessons, the text of your files is sent to AI providers. We don’t use your content to train AI models.
- We don’t sell your personal information, we don’t share it for targeted advertising, and we don’t use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
- Card details go straight to Stripe. We never see your full card number.
- You can download your data and delete lectures or your whole account from Settings at any time.
1. Who we are
Lecturly is operated by Arjun Karthik, doing business as Lecturly, in California, United States (“Lecturly,” “we,” “us”). We are the “business” under California law and the “controller” of your personal data under the EU and UK GDPR. Contact: legal@lecturly.ai.
2. What we collect
Information you give us
- Account details: your first and last name, email address, and password (stored only as a secure hash by our authentication provider). If you sign up with Google, Google shares your name and email with us.
- Onboarding answers: optional answers about your education level and year, school, main subject, how many classes you take, what you find hard about studying, and how you heard about us.
- Your uploads: the lecture files you upload (PDF, PowerPoint, Word) and the text we extract from them. Your files may contain personal information, such as your name or a professor’s, so please don’t upload sensitive information you don’t need to.
- What you create: lessons, narration audio, notes, flashcards, quizzes, your quiz answers and scores, edits you make, and lessons you choose to share.
- Tutor questions: the questions you ask the AI tutor. These are sent to an AI provider to get an answer. We don’t save the conversation to your account.
- Messages to us: feedback you submit in the app, support emails, and creator program applications (name, email, school, social handle, audience size, and what you tell us about your content).
- Referrals: your referral code, who you referred or were referred by, and rewards earned.
Information collected automatically
- Study activity: summaries of how you use Lecturly, such as video watch time and completion, quiz and flashcard activity, notes reading and exports, and how many times you used the tutor. We don’t record your screen, and these summaries don’t copy your lecture text, written answers or tutor messages.
- Service records: when you generate something, which AI model was used, how long it took, token and character counts, whether it worked, and error codes. These don’t contain your lecture content.
- Device and network data: your IP address, browser and device type, and request logs, which our hosting providers record to deliver and secure the service. We use IP addresses briefly for rate limiting and abuse prevention.
Information from others
- Stripe tells us your customer ID, plan, subscription status and payment results. Stripe keeps your card details.
- Google shares your name and email if you sign in with Google.
- A friend who refers you shares their referral code with you, which links your accounts for rewards.
3. How we use it
For EU and UK users, the legal basis for each use is in brackets.
- To create your account, turn your uploads into lessons, notes, flashcards and quizzes, answer tutor questions, and run the features you ask for. [Contract]
- To process payments, enforce plan limits, and give referral rewards. [Contract; legal obligation for tax and accounting records]
- To send you emails you need, such as account confirmation, links you request, receipts and important changes, plus a one-time welcome email. [Contract; legitimate interests]
- To keep Lecturly secure, prevent fraud and abuse, enforce our Terms and Acceptable Use Policy, and fix bugs. [Legitimate interests; legal obligation]
- To understand how students use Lecturly and improve it, using the study activity and onboarding answers above. Authorized staff can view these summaries to improve the product and help with account issues. [Legitimate interests]
- To comply with the law and respond to lawful requests. [Legal obligation]
We don’t use your uploads, generated content, or tutor questions to train AI models, and we don’t make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Quiz grading by AI is a study aid only.
4. AI processing
Lecturly uses third-party AI models to do its job. When you generate something, the relevant text (your extracted lecture text, the lesson script, or your tutor question and the lesson context) is sent to the AI model and text-to-speech providers described in section 5. We send what’s needed for the task and nothing else from your account, such as your email or billing details. These providers process the content to return a result to us under their API terms, which don’t permit them to use it to train their models. Lessons, notes, flashcards, quizzes, quiz feedback, narration and tutor replies are generated by AI, and the tutor is an AI, not a person. AI output can be wrong, so check anything important against your course materials.
5. Who we share it with
We share personal information only with service providers that help us run Lecturly, under contracts that limit how they can use it, and in the specific cases listed below. The categories of service providers we use are:
- Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers: running the website, the app and the services that build your lessons.
- Database, file storage and authentication providers: storing your account, uploads and generated content, and signing you in.
- AI model providers: generating lessons, notes, flashcards, quizzes, grading and tutor replies from the text we send them.
- Text-to-speech providers: turning lesson scripts and tutor replies into narration audio.
- Payment processor (Stripe): payments and billing.
- Email and productivity providers: sending account emails, handling our business email, and storing creator program applications.
- Google: if you choose to sign in with Google.
You can ask us for the current list of providers that process your personal information by emailing legal@lecturly.ai.
We also share personal information:
- When you share a lesson. Anyone with the link can access the lesson, including its title, narration, transcript, view count, and your name (or the part of your email before the @, if you haven’t set a name). Turn sharing off at any time.
- For legal reasons, when we believe in good faith it’s required by law, a court order or a valid legal request, or needed to protect someone’s safety, our rights, or the security of the service. This includes reporting child sexual abuse material to NCMEC.
- In a business transfer, such as a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, where your information would stay protected by this policy or one at least as protective, and we’d tell you first.
We do not sell your personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California law, and we haven’t done so in the last 12 months. We have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16.
Categories under California law
In the last 12 months we collected these categories of personal information, from the sources in section 2, for the purposes in section 3, and disclosed each only to the service providers in this section for business purposes:
- Identifiers: name, email, account ID, IP address. Disclosed to hosting, database, email, payments and sign-in providers.
- Commercial information: plan, purchases and subscription history. Disclosed to Stripe and our database provider.
- Internet or other electronic network activity: study activity summaries, service records, request logs. Disclosed to hosting and database providers.
- Education-related information you choose to give us: school, education level and year, and the course material you upload. Uploaded text is disclosed to AI providers to make your study materials.
- Audio and electronic information: the narration audio we generate and content you create. Disclosed to our TTS, AI, storage and hosting providers.
- Inferences: limited to understanding which features help students, drawn from study activity and onboarding answers. Not disclosed outside our database provider.
- Sensitive personal information: account login credentials only, used only to sign you in.
6. Cookies and similar technologies
We use only what’s needed to run Lecturly: cookies that keep you signed in across lecturly.ai and app.lecturly.ai, and your browser’s local storage for preferences like theme, captions and playback speed. We don’t use advertising cookies, third-party analytics, or cross-site tracking. Because we don’t track you across other sites, we treat “Do Not Track” and Global Privacy Control signals as satisfied by default; we honor Global Privacy Control as an opt-out of sale and sharing in any case.
7. How long we keep it
- Your account, uploads and everything you created stay until you delete them. Deleting a lecture removes its file, text, lessons, audio, study materials and its study activity. Deleting your account removes your profile, uploads, generated content, study activity, feedback and sign-in, and cancels any subscription.
- Billing, purchase, usage and audit records are kept after account deletion, no longer linked to your account, for accounting, tax, fraud prevention and dispute purposes. Stripe keeps its own transaction records as the law requires.
- Creator applications and support emails are kept only as long as we need them to review your application or help you, then deleted.
- Rate-limit records that use your IP address are short-lived. Hosting logs are kept by our providers on their standard short schedules.
- Backups held by our database provider are overwritten on a rolling basis, usually within a few weeks.
8. Your choices and rights
Everyone can, from Settings:
- see and edit your profile details;
- download a copy of your data (Settings, Privacy & data);
- stop sharing any lesson;
- delete any lecture, or your whole account.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to: know what personal information we collect and how we use and share it; access it; get a portable copy; correct it; delete it; object to or restrict certain uses; withdraw consent; and opt out of sale, sharing for targeted advertising, or profiling (which we don’t do). California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Oregon and other US state residents, and EU, UK and Swiss residents, have these rights by law; we extend them to every user.
To make a request, email legal@lecturly.ai from the email on your account. We’ll verify it’s you by matching the account email, and we may ask for more if needed. You can use an authorized agent, who must show written permission from you. We respond within 45 days (one month in the EU and UK), and we’ll tell you if we need more time as the law allows. If we deny your request, you can appeal by replying to our answer; we’ll respond to an appeal within 60 days, and if you’re still unhappy you can contact your state attorney general. We won’t treat you differently, charge you more, or give you a worse service for using your rights.
If you’re in the EU, UK or Switzerland, you can also complain to your local data protection authority, though we’d appreciate the chance to fix things first.
Sensitive information. We don’t ask for sensitive personal information, and we don’t use any you include in an upload for anything beyond making your study materials. Your password is the only sensitive data we process to run your account, and only to sign you in.
9. International transfers
Lecturly is based in the United States, and we collect your information directly in the US. Our providers process it in the US and other countries. They receive it under data processing terms that rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK and Swiss extensions) where they are certified, or on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK addendum. Ask us for details.
10. Security
We use encryption in transit and at rest, access controls that keep each user’s data separate, private storage for your files, and limited staff access. No system is perfectly secure, so we can’t promise absolute security, but if a breach affects your personal information we’ll notify you and the authorities as the law requires.
11. Children
Lecturly is not for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. In the EU and UK you must be at least 16, or the age of digital consent where you live, whichever is lower. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, email legal@lecturly.ai and we’ll delete it. Users under 18 should use Lecturly with a parent or guardian’s permission. We don’t sell or share anyone’s data for advertising, including teens’.
12. Changes to this policy
We’ll update this page when our practices change and change the date at the top. If a change is material, we’ll email you before it takes effect.
13. Contact
Privacy questions, requests and complaints: legal@lecturly.ai.