Privacy notice

What the tools on this site do with data, and what we keep. The mock orals store no recording and nothing a student said.

Last updated 8 October 2026.

The short version

Most of this site works without an account. The mock orals keep no recording and none of the words a student says. We do hold some personal details: the email address of anyone with an HQ Society account, the work students upload for marking, what people type into our forms, and what Stripe tells us when someone pays. Everything below says which is which, and how long we keep it.

The mock orals

A student's answer is sent to commercial AI services, which transcribe it, mark it and use it to choose the next question. We have not trained or fine-tuned anything, and no student data has ever been used to build or tune a model.

We keep no audio. The recording is never written to our storage at any point.

We keep none of the words either. What we keep for a session is a random session number generated in the browser, the date, and a few anonymous counts that tell us whether the tool worked. That is the entire record. It contains nothing a student said and nothing that identifies anyone.

We are on the paid tier of every AI service we use, not the free tier, and that distinction is the reason we pay. The paid terms say the provider does not use what it receives to train or improve its models. Free tiers allow both, and allow human review.

HQ Society accounts

An account needs only an email address. Signing in sends a link to that address and stores a sign-in cookie in your browser. Accounts also receive our occasional newsletter. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link, and you can turn it off in your account settings.

Study Hubs

We run Study Hubs for Chinese Continuers, Chinese and Literature, Japanese Beginners and Japanese Continuers. Some pages open to anyone. The rest ask you to sign in with your HQ Society account, and the Study Hub then sets its own sign-in cookie. On the Chinese Continuers and Chinese and Literature Study Hubs, that cookie also records which parts you have paid for.

On the Japanese Study Hubs, the cards you collect are saved in your own browser. They do not move to another device, and we never see them.

On the Chinese Study Hubs you can like a card. A cookie holding a random number remembers which cards you liked. It is not linked to your name or your email address.

The study tutor on the Chinese and Literature Study Hub sends the message you type to a commercial AI service to write a reply. We do not keep the conversation.

Paying for a Study Hub

Payments go through Stripe. Card details go to Stripe and never reach us. Stripe tells us the email address you paid with, what you bought and whether it was refunded, so the Study Hub can open the parts you paid for. A school that asks for an invoice gives us the billing details its finance office needs, and nothing beyond that.

Written work sent in for marking

Each practice set you buy on a Study Hub includes one written feedback. You upload your handwritten paper on that set's page, as a PDF or as photos, together with your name, school and email address. It is stored privately so that it can be marked, and nobody outside HQ Society sees it. The files and the record of your submission are deleted automatically 90 days after you send them. Email us if you want them removed sooner.

Listening Studio

Listening Studio, our recording tool for teachers, needs an HQ Society account. The text a teacher enters is sent to commercial AI services to draft the script and to record the audio. Everything a job produces, including the text you entered, is deleted automatically seven days later. Unfinished work is saved in your own browser.

Teachers who asked us for papers

Teachers who asked us for paper packs gave us a name, a school and an email address. We use them to reply, and sometimes to tell you when new papers are ready. We do not sell these details and we do not share them. Reply to any of our emails and ask, and we remove them.

The contact and error-report forms

The contact form, the Report an error form and the feedback box in Listening Studio send what you type to our inbox. Your name and email address are optional on the error form. We keep error reports for a year so that we can track the fixes.

Counting visits

We count page views with an analytics service that uses no cookies and builds no profile of anyone. Our paper pages also count downloads, as plain numbers with nothing attached that identifies a person. There are no advertising networks and no tracking services.

Usage limits

So that one visitor cannot run up the bill for everybody, the tools count requests per network. The counter never stores an IP address, holds a number and nothing else, and is deleted within two days.

How long we keep things

Mock oral session counts: one year.
Written work sent in for marking: 90 days.
Listening Studio jobs: seven days.
Error reports: one year.
Your account, details from teachers who asked for papers, and emails you send us: until you ask us to remove them.

The time limits above are enforced by the storage itself, rather than by someone remembering to run a script.

Asking us something, or asking us to delete something

Email info@hqsociety.com. If you are a school assessing these tools and you need something more specific than this page, ask and we will answer it properly. If you want every record from the dates your students used a tool removed, tell us the dates and we will remove them.

Changes

If what the tools do with data changes, this page changes with them and the date at the top moves.