Privacy Policy

This policy describes how TRISTAN AI, LLC (“TRISTAN,” “we,” “us”) handles information in the TRISTAN application — the software teachers use to photograph, assess, and report on student mathematical work. Our marketing website is covered separately by the website privacy policy.

Our role, and who controls the data

TRISTAN is provided to schools and districts, not to individual teachers or families. The school or district is the customer of record and remains the owner of all student information in the service. We handle that information as a school official under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), acting under the direct control of the school with respect to education records.

Practically, that means we use student information only to deliver the service to the school, and only as the school directs. We do not decide independently what to do with it. Parents and guardians seeking access to, correction of, or deletion of their child's records should contact their school or district, which can direct us.

What we collect

Teacher and administrator accounts

• Name and email address
• Authentication credentials — either a securely hashed password or a Google sign-in identifier. We never store your Google password.
• School or district affiliation and role
• Sign-in timestamps and in-app preferences

Student information

Student records are created by teachers, not by students. Students do not register for accounts, and the service does not ask students for personal information.

• First name, last name, and a display name the teacher may customize
• A class-code identifier the teacher generates in order to attach work to a student
• Class enrollment — which classes a student belongs to

We do not collect student dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, government identifiers, demographic categories, biometric data, disciplinary records, or location data.

Student work

• Photographs or scans of student mathematical work submitted by a teacher
• Text transcriptions generated from those images
• Assessment output derived from the work — practice-standard ratings, identified strengths, misconceptions, and narrative feedback
• Teacher corrections and overrides of that output

Because submissions are photographs of physical work, they may incidentally capture whatever a student wrote on the page — a name in a corner, a doodle, an aside. We treat every submission image as an education record.

Automated processing, and the AI provider

Assessment is performed by a large language model. To produce a transcription and an assessment, we transmit the submission image and the associated task description to our AI provider.

Our current AI provider is Anthropic, PBC, which processes submissions as our subprocessor under its commercial terms of service. Submissions are sent without student names attached, though as noted above an image may itself contain a name a student wrote.

Assessment output is advisory. It is presented to a teacher for review and can be corrected or overridden, and it is not used to make any automated decision about a student — no placement, no grade of record, no disciplinary consequence.

Service providers

• Anthropic, PBC — AI transcription and assessment
• Google Cloud Platform — application hosting, database, and storage of submission images, in United States regions

This is our complete list of subprocessors that receive student information. If we add or change one, we will update this policy and notify participating schools before student data reaches the new provider.

What we never do

• We do not sell student, teacher, or administrator information. Ever.
• We do not serve advertising, and we do not use any information for targeted advertising.
• We do not build advertising or commercial profiles of students.
• We do not disclose student information to third parties except the service providers listed above, or where the school directs us to, or where the law requires it.
• We run no third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking technology inside the application.

Cookies

The application sets a session cookie holding your sign-in token. It is required to keep you logged in and does nothing else. There are no analytics or advertising cookies in the application.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to production systems is limited to personnel who need it. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes and are never recoverable in plain text. Teachers can see only the students and classes assigned to them; administrators can see only their own school or district.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects student information, we will notify the affected school or district promptly, and cooperate with the notifications they are required to make.

How long we keep information

We retain student records and submitted work for the duration of the school's agreement with us, so that teachers can see growth across a school year. We do not currently apply an automatic deletion schedule; records persist until deleted on request or until the agreement ends.

At the end of an agreement, we will delete or return student information at the school's direction.

Deletion on request

A school, district, teacher, or administrator may request deletion of any student, teacher, or administrator record by writing to privacy@tristanai.com.

We will verify the request, delete the record together with its linked content — submissions, images, transcripts, and assessments — within 10 business days, and confirm to the requester when deletion is complete.

Children's privacy

TRISTAN is used with students who may be under 13. We collect student information only from teachers acting on behalf of a school, never directly from students, and we use it only to provide the educational service the school has contracted for. Where the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) applies, we rely on the school to provide consent on behalf of parents, as COPPA permits for school-directed educational services. A parent may ask their school to review or delete their child's information at any time, and we will act on the school's instruction under the timeline above.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the effective date above. Where a change materially affects how student information is handled, we will notify participating schools directly rather than relying on this page alone.

Contact

TRISTAN AI, LLC
34 Sand Hill Road
Underhill, VT 05489
privacy@tristanai.com