Privacy Policy — CertSage

CertSage is a mobile app that coaches you through technology certification exams with an AI study coach. This policy explains exactly what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how you get it deleted. It is written to describe what the app actually does today — not what it might do later.

1. Who we are

CertSage is published by Van Manh Le, an individual developer based in Australia ("we", "us", "our"). For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, we are the data controller for the personal data described here.

Privacy contact
support.certsage@integolutions.com

Use this address for any question about this policy, to exercise your rights, or to request deletion of your account and data.

This policy covers the CertSage mobile application (Android package com.certsage.app, and the iOS app under the same identifier) and the backend services it talks to. It does not cover the third-party websites we link out to, such as official certification documentation.

2. The short version

Question	Answer
Do you show ads?	No. There is no advertising SDK and no advertising identifier is collected.
Do you sell my data?	No. We do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
Do you track me across other apps?	No.
Do you use third-party analytics?	No analytics or crash-reporting SDK is embedded in the app.
Does an AI see my messages?	Yes — your coaching conversations are sent to Anthropic to generate replies. See section 6.
Can I get everything deleted?	Yes. Email us and we action it within 30 days. See section 12.
Do you see my card details?	Never. Payment is handled entirely by Google Play or Apple.

3. What we collect

a. Account and profile

Email address — required to create an account and to sign you in.
Password — only if you sign up with email and password. It is stored by our authentication provider as a salted hash. It is never visible to us and cannot be recovered, only reset.
Google or Apple sign-in identity — if you choose that route, we receive the account identifier, your email address, and the display name and profile picture URL those services choose to return. We do not receive your password.
Preferred name — what you would like the app to call you. Asked once, after sign-up.
Occupation — chosen from a fixed list of ten options, one of which is "Prefer not to say". There is no free-text box, deliberately.
Time zone — the IANA identifier reported by your device (for example Australia/Brisbane), so daily usage limits reset at your local midnight rather than in UTC.
Notification preferences.

b. Your study goals

Asked once per certification you take on, and editable at any time in Settings:

Your self-rated experience level with that technology.
Your reason for studying, chosen from a fixed list.
A free-text description of your motivation, in your own words — optional. Please do not put sensitive personal information in this field; it is sent to our AI provider as context for the coach.
Your target exam date and weekly study goal.

c. Learning activity

Which certification tracks you are enrolled in, which is currently active, and a record of each switch between them — including the reason you gave and your readiness score at that moment.
Each study session: its mode (Interactive, Listening or Reading), when it started and ended, and which topic it covered.
The messages you send to the AI coach and the replies it gives, stored as a transcript so the coach has continuity within a session.
Every quiz question shown to you, the answer you gave, whether it was correct, and the resulting mastery score for that concept.
Practice exam attempts and per-question results.
Derived progress data: readiness percentages per domain and overall, study streaks, session counts and average scores.

d. Subscription and payment

We never receive, process or store payment card details. Purchases are processed by Google Play (or the App Store on iOS) under their own terms.
Through our subscription manager, RevenueCat, we receive and store: a pseudonymous customer identifier (your account's internal UUID), your plan tier, the platform you purchased on, subscription status, renewal date and auto-renew flag.
We keep a verbatim copy of the subscription events sent to us, so a billing dispute can be reconstructed exactly as it happened.

e. Operational records

For each AI call made on your behalf: the model used, token counts, the resulting cost, the type of task and a timestamp. This exists to keep the service affordable and to enforce fair-use limits — not to profile you.
Standard server logs kept by our hosting provider, which include IP addresses and request timestamps, used for security, abuse prevention and debugging.

4. What we do not collect

Stated explicitly because the absence is a design decision, not an oversight:

No advertising identifier, no ad networks, no ad profiling, no cross-app tracking.
No location data of any kind, precise or approximate.
No contacts, photos, files, calendar or SMS access.
No microphone or camera access. The Android app does not request the RECORD_AUDIO or CAMERA permission. Voice input is planned for a future version; this policy will be updated before it ships.
No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDK is embedded in the app.
No push notification tokens are currently collected. Push is not active in this version.
No health, financial, biometric, racial, religious, political or sexual-orientation data. We have no field for it and do not want it.

The Android app requests only these permissions: internet access, and — for playing Listening-mode audio with the screen off — wake lock, foreground service, media playback foreground service, and notification display. None of them read personal data from your device.

5. How we use your data

To create and secure your account, and to sign you in.
To deliver the core product: generate coaching replies, quiz questions and explanations, track what you have mastered, and calculate your readiness score.
To choose what to recommend you study next.
To apply your subscription entitlements and enforce free-tier usage limits fairly.
To keep the service running and affordable — monitoring AI cost per user, diagnosing failures, and preventing abuse.
To respond when you contact us.

We do not use your data to build advertising profiles, and we do not use your study data for any purpose other than running the app you are using it in.

6. How AI processing works

CertSage is built around an AI coach, so this section matters more than most. We use third-party AI providers, and we tell you precisely what reaches them.

Sent to Anthropic (Claude)

When you talk to the coach, take a quiz, or open the home screen, we send:

The messages you type to the coach, and the conversation so far in that session.
The names of the certification, domain, sub-topic and concepts you are studying.
Your progress state — which concepts you are weak on, improving on, or have not seen.
Your study goals, including the free-text motivation you wrote, your experience level and your target exam date.
Your first name, used only to open the home-screen greeting.
Short summaries of your recent sessions, for continuity.

We do not send your email address, your password, any payment information, or any device identifier.

Sent to OpenAI (text-to-speech only)

Listening-mode audio is generated in advance from narration scripts that we write and review, and then cached and served to every learner. No personal data of any kind is sent to OpenAI — it never receives your messages, your progress or your identity. We use no OpenAI text model.

Training, retention and human review

Anthropic and OpenAI both state that data submitted through their commercial APIs is not used to train their models. We have not opted into any programme that would change that.
Those providers may retain API inputs and outputs for a limited period for safety and abuse monitoring, under their own policies, which are linked in section 7.
We may read stored session transcripts when investigating a specific fault or a report of abuse. We do not read them routinely.

Automated decision-making

Your readiness score and the topics recommended to you are generated automatically. These affect only what the app suggests you study. They produce no legal effect and no similarly significant effect on you within the meaning of GDPR Article 22, and nothing about your account, billing or access depends on them.

Please do not type sensitive personal information into the coach. Chat messages are stored against your account and sent to our AI provider to produce a reply. Treat the coach as you would a study group, not a private diary.

7. Who else processes your data

We use the following providers. Each acts as a processor or sub-processor on our behalf, is bound by a data processing agreement, and receives only what it needs.

Provider	Role	What it receives	Location
Supabase	Database, authentication, file storage and server functions	All account, profile, study and subscription data described above	Singapore (`ap-southeast-1`)
Anthropic	AI coaching, quiz generation and scoring	Coaching messages, progress state, study goals, first name — as listed in section 6	United States
OpenAI	Text-to-speech for Listening mode	Narration scripts written by us. No personal data.	United States
RevenueCat	Subscription and entitlement management	Pseudonymous account identifier, purchase and subscription status	United States
Google Play	App distribution and payment processing	Your purchase details, handled entirely under Google's own policy	Global
Google / Apple sign-in	Optional authentication	Only used if you choose that sign-in method	Global

We may also disclose personal data where we are legally required to — for example in response to a valid court order or lawful request from a regulator. We will not do so voluntarily.

If CertSage is ever sold or transferred, your data may transfer with it. You would be told before that happened and given the opportunity to delete your account first.

8. Legal bases for processing (UK/EU GDPR)

What we do	Legal basis
Create your account, deliver study features, run the AI coach, apply your subscription	Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b)
Optional profile answers: occupation, free-text motivation, target exam date	Consent — Art. 6(1)(a). You may leave them blank or choose "Prefer not to say", and withdraw at any time by clearing them in Settings.
Security, abuse prevention, fair-use enforcement, cost control, fixing faults	Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f). We have balanced these against your rights and consider the impact minimal.
Keeping financial and subscription records	Legal obligation — Art. 6(1)(c)

We do not process special-category data under Article 9, and we do not ask for any.

9. International data transfers

Our database, authentication and file storage are hosted in Singapore (Supabase region ap-southeast-1). Anthropic, OpenAI and RevenueCat are based in the United States. Using CertSage therefore involves transferring personal data outside the UK, the EEA and Australia, to countries that do not have a UK or EU adequacy decision.

Those transfers are made under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum where applicable), incorporated into each provider's data processing agreement, together with the technical measures described in section 13. You can request a copy of the relevant safeguards by emailing us.

10. How long we keep it

Data	Kept for
Account, profile, study history, chat transcripts, quiz and exam results	As long as your account exists. Deleted when you delete your account.
Subscription status	Deleted with your account. RevenueCat and Google retain their own records under their own policies.
AI cost records and billing event logs	Retained after account deletion, with the link to your account removed — see the note below.
Server logs	Per our hosting provider's retention schedule, typically a short rolling window.

The one exception, stated plainly. When you delete your account, our AI cost records and raw billing event logs are not destroyed — the reference to your account is set to null, so the rows survive as anonymised financial and operational records with no way to tie them back to you. We keep them because accurate cost and billing history has to outlive the accounts it came from. Everything that identifies you is removed.

11. Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us to:

Access the personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy.
Correct anything inaccurate. Most profile and goal fields you can edit yourself in Settings.
Delete your account and personal data — see below.
Export your data in a portable, machine-readable format.
Restrict or object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
Withdraw consent for the optional fields, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.

Email support.certsage@integolutions.com from the address on your account. We respond within 30 days. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

If you are in the UK or EEA and are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you may complain to your local supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. In Australia, you may complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. We would rather you raised it with us first.

12. Deleting your account

You can have your account and all associated personal data permanently deleted. Full instructions, and what is and is not removed, are on our account deletion page.

In short: email support.certsage@integolutions.com from your account's email address with the subject Delete my account. We confirm within 7 days and complete deletion within 30.

13. How we protect your data

All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with TLS. The Android build blocks unencrypted connections outright.
Data is encrypted at rest by our hosting provider.
Every table enforces row-level security: a request carrying your credentials can only ever read rows belonging to you, enforced by the database itself rather than by app code.
Passwords are salted and hashed by our authentication provider. We never see them.
Graded results and quiz answer keys are writable only by our server, never by the app, so results cannot be forged and answers cannot be read ahead of time.
Access to production data is limited to the developer named in section 1.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law.

14. Children

CertSage is intended for adults pursuing professional technology certifications. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it. Where local law sets a lower age of digital consent, that lower age applies.

15. Changes to this policy

We will update this page when the app changes, and revise the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your personal data — for example adding voice input, push notifications or a new AI provider — we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Previous versions are available in this page's public revision history.

16. Contact us

Van Manh Le
Publisher of CertSage
Australia

support.certsage@integolutions.com