Privacy Policy

Last updated: [OUTSTANDING: fill in the date this policy is actually published]

This is a draft, not a finished legal document. Before this site goes live, have a UK solicitor (or a qualified data protection advisor) review this policy for compliance with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, including whether Trusted Tutors needs to register with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and appoint a data protection contact. Do not rely on this page as-is.

Who operates Trusted Tutors

Trusted Tutors is an independent tutor directory operated by Peter Hinett as a sole trader. [OUTSTANDING: a geographical business correspondence address is legally required here for a UK trader processing personal data and dealing with consumers, and must be added once confirmed — not a home address, and not an invented one.] This policy has not yet had a professional data-protection review — see the notice above.

For any question about this policy or your personal information, contact us via our Contact page or at support@trustedtutors.co.uk.

Information we collect

We collect the following categories of personal information:

  • From parents and students browsing the site: nothing is collected just by browsing or searching — no account or sign-up is required. If you send an enquiry to a tutor or contact us, we collect the name, email address and message you provide.
  • From tutors applying to be listed: the information submitted through our "Become a Tutor" application form (currently a Google Form), including name, email, subjects, levels, price, qualifications, experience, biography and a profile photo link. Identity, DBS and qualification information is reviewed on a live video call (see our Verification Policy) and is not stored beyond what's needed to record that the check took place.
  • From tutors once listed: the public profile information you provide (biography, qualifications, price, subjects, levels, optional intro video and social/website links) is stored in a private Google Sheet and displayed publicly on your profile.

How we use the third-party services behind this site

Trusted Tutors is a static website with no server or database of its own. It relies on the following third-party services, each of which processes personal information on our behalf:

  • Google Forms — collects applications from tutors who want to be listed. Responses are stored in a private Google Sheet that only we can access.
  • Google Sheets — holds the "tutors", "reviews" and "resources" data behind the site. The sheets that power the public-facing site contain only information we intend to publish (a tutor's public profile, published reviews, free published resources) and are published in read-only, unlisted form so the website can read them; they are not intended to be indexed or browsed directly, and applicant/administrative data is kept in a separate, private sheet that is never published. All resources on the site are free — Trusted Tutors does not currently sell resources or take payment for them.
  • Web3Forms — a third-party form-processing service that receives enquiry, contact and resource-request submissions and emails them to us. Web3Forms processes the name, email address and message you submit; see Web3Forms' own privacy policy for how it handles that data in transit.
  • Cloudflare — if the site is hosted or proxied through Cloudflare, or uses the optional Cloudflare Worker in this project to cache published tutor/review/resource data at the edge (see the project's README), Cloudflare may process visitors' IP addresses and request data as part of delivering the site. Any cached data is limited to the same public profile information already published on the site — never the private application data described below.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use advertising or analytics trackers on this site.

How long we keep information

Enquiry and contact messages are kept only as long as needed to respond to them. Tutor profile information is kept for as long as a tutor remains listed, and is removed or amended on request or when a tutor is unpublished. Some cached copies of public profile data may be held briefly (currently up to a few minutes) in your own browser's local storage purely to make pages load faster on a return visit — this is stored on your device, not on our servers, and only ever contains information already published on the site.

An unsuccessful tutor application (one that isn't taken forward to a listing) is deleted once it's no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for, rather than kept indefinitely — subject to any legitimate reason we may have to retain particular information for longer (for example, a record needed to handle a dispute or complaint, or a legal obligation).

Emails we send

At launch, we only send essential, service-related emails — for example a reply to an enquiry or contact message you've sent, or communication with a tutor about their own application or membership. We do not send marketing or newsletter-style emails at this stage.

Your rights

Depending on the information involved, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or object to our use of your personal information under UK GDPR. To exercise any of these rights, contact us via the Contact page. [OUTSTANDING: confirm and publish the actual process and timeframe for responding to these requests, and add the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) once it's confirmed whether Trusted Tutors needs to register with the ICO.]

Children's information

Trusted Tutors is intended for use by parents, guardians and adult students. Where a parent or guardian sends an enquiry on behalf of a child, we only use the information provided to pass the enquiry to the relevant tutor and to respond to it.