Privacy Policy

TutorPathway.com, operated from the United Arab Emirates, is responsible for this policy. You can contact us about privacy at any time through our contact page.

We act in two roles:

• Controller — we decide how and why we process: website visitor data; account data of everyone who signs up; marketplace data (tutor profiles, identity documents, parent and child profiles, inquiries, messages, tutoring requests, proposals, reviews, reports, favourites and saved searches); subscription records; and security records.
• Processor — inside an organization's workspace (the business software), the tutor or tutoring centre decides what it records about its students, guardians, lessons, assessments and finances ("customer data"). We process customer data only on the organization's instructions, to provide the Service. Questions about customer data should go to the tutor or centre first; we will help them answer.

When a parent shares a child with a marketplace tutor, the tutor's workspace receives a student record for that child. From then on, the tutor is the controller of the records they keep in their workspace, and we are their processor.

In line with the PDPL we process personal data lawfully, fairly and transparently; only for specific, clear purposes; limited to what is necessary; accurate and kept up to date; kept no longer than needed; and protected with appropriate security. We do not sell personal data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use children's data for marketing or profiling.

Website visitors. Pages you request, your IP address and browser details in our server logs, and the essential cookies described below. If you use the contact form, the details and message you send.

Accounts. Name, e-mail address, password (stored only as a secure hash), language and time zone, two-factor and passkey settings, notification preferences, sign-in times and audit records of sensitive actions.

Parents and guardians (marketplace). Mobile number, country and city, your confirmation that you are at least 18 and the parent or legal guardian of the children you add, and the date of that confirmation. Child profiles you create: a first name or nickname, grade, curriculum, subjects, goals and preferred lesson format. Favourites, collections and your private notes on them (encrypted), saved searches and alert settings, tutoring requests, inquiries and messages.

Tutors (marketplace). Your public profile: display name, photo, headline and introduction, languages, self-declared years of experience, teaching format, subjects, grade bands, curricula and rates, service areas, weekly availability and an optional intro video. Your activation declarations and when you accepted them. Your identity check: the Emirates ID document you upload, the review outcome, dates and any reviewer notes (see the Identity Check Notice).

Marketplace communications. Inquiries, messages, tutoring requests and proposals between parents and tutors. Their text is encrypted at rest. Attachments are not supported in marketplace messages.

Reviews and reports. Reviews you write or receive, responses, review reports, trust & safety reports (the description is encrypted), and — for conversation reports — the references (ids) of the most recent messages in that conversation.

Subscriptions. Plan, status, trial and renewal dates. Payments are taken by Paddle, our merchant of record; card details are collected and stored by Paddle, never by us.

Workspace (customer) data. Whatever an organization records about its students, guardians, lessons, homework, assessments, reports, invoices and payments.

Legal acceptances. Which version of each document you accepted, when, and the IP address and browser user agent used at that moment.

• To provide the Service: accounts, workspaces, the marketplace, search, messaging, notifications and the family portal.
• To check tutors' identity before they can be listed, and to keep the marketplace safe: contact-detail rules, rate limits, blocks, review checks, reports, warnings and restrictions.
• To manage trials and subscriptions, with Paddle.
• To send service messages you need (security alerts, identity-check decisions, trial reminders, inquiry and message notifications without their content, alerts for saved searches you created) — you can switch off the optional ones in your notification settings.
• To answer support requests.
• To prevent abuse and fraud, investigate reports and meet our legal obligations.
• To improve the Service using aggregated statistics that do not identify anyone.

Under the PDPL and other applicable laws we rely on: the performance of our contract with you (to provide the Service you signed up for); your consent where it is required — for example when you explicitly choose to share your child's details with a tutor, which you can withdraw for the future by ending the arrangement; compliance with legal obligations (for example tax, accounting and responses to authorities); and, where the applicable law allows, our legitimate interests in keeping the Service secure and safe, balanced against your rights. For customer data, the organization decides the legal basis.

TutorPathway has no independent student accounts. Children do not register, sign in or message anyone. Only a parent or legal guardian aged 18 or over can create a child profile, and child profiles are never public.

Before a parent shares a child with a tutor, the tutor sees at most the child's grade and curriculum — never the child's name. When the parent ticks "Share my child's details with this teacher", the tutor's workspace receives the child's first name or nickname, grade and curriculum, together with the parent's name and e-mail address. The parent's mobile number, the child's goals and the parent's other children are not shared. See the Safeguarding Policy.

Emirates ID documents are encrypted and stored on private storage. Only authorised platform administrators can open them, through short-lived signed links, and every view and decision is recorded in our audit log. They are never shown to parents, never sent to an AI provider and are deleted 90 days after the review decision, unless a legal hold applies. After deletion we keep only the review outcome and dates. "Identity checked" means only that the document was reviewed and approved; it says nothing about qualifications, background or permits. Full details are in the Identity Check Notice.

Profile views. Tutors see how often their public profile was viewed and how often it appeared in search results. We do not store the viewer's IP address, user id or browser. Each visitor is represented by a one-way code that changes every day, so repeat views on the same day count once and visitors cannot be traced across days. A tutor's own views and known bots are not counted. Small numbers are never shown exactly: any count below 3 — even zero — is shown as "fewer than 3". Tutors never see who viewed their profile. Raw view events are deleted after 90 days; only daily totals are kept.

Searches. To understand demand, we count searches per day by subject and emirate or city, and how many searches found no tutor. These counts contain no search text, account, IP address or other personal data.

• The public sees published profiles of identity-checked tutors, published reviews (with the reviewer's first name only) and, from 3 published reviews, the tutor's average rating. Tutors' contact details are never public.
• Tutors see parents by first name in conversations. While a tutor cannot respond (for example after the trial without a subscription, or while restricted), they see only the number of waiting inquiries — never names, child details or content.
• Parents see tutors' public profiles and their own conversations, requests and proposals.
• Platform administrators see counts and statuses for the marketplace, the identity documents under review (audited), the reviews held for moderation, and reports. They can read the referenced recent messages of a reported conversation only while the report is open or being investigated, and every such view is audit-logged. They cannot see workspace student records unless the organization owner grants time-limited support access, which is also audit-logged.
• Reporters see only the status of their own reports. Reported people are never told who reported them.

The business software has an optional AI assistant that an organization owner must turn on. By default, before anything is sent to the AI provider, student names are replaced with pseudonyms and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses, private notes and learning-needs fields are removed. An owner can choose identified mode only after recording a lawful basis. AI output intended for families is saved as a draft and must be approved by a person. AI is not used to make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on anyone.

Marketplace data (inquiries, messages, requests, proposals, reviews, reports, parent and child profiles) and identity documents are never sent to an AI provider.

We share personal data only as needed to run the Service, with:

• Hostinger — website hosting, database, file storage and e-mail delivery. Our servers are currently located in Mumbai, India, which means your data is stored outside the United Arab Emirates.
• Paddle — subscription checkout, payments, invoicing and tax, as merchant of record. Paddle's checkout page may set its own cookies.
• Anthropic (United States) — AI text generation, only for organizations that turn on the AI assistant, and only pseudonymised content by default.
• Professional advisers, and public authorities where the law requires it or a child's safety is at risk.

These providers may process data outside the UAE. Where the PDPL or other laws restrict transfers, we rely on the safeguards they permit, such as the provider's contractual data protection commitments.

• Accounts: while the account is open. After a deletion request, the account is anonymised once the 30-day grace period ends.
• Identity documents: deleted 90 days after the decision; the outcome and dates are kept.
• Locked inquiries: if the tutor cannot respond within 30 days, the inquiry expires and its content is erased.
• Tutoring requests: close automatically after 30 days.
• Raw profile-view events: 90 days (daily totals are kept).
• Data exports: the download is deleted after 7 days.
• Audit logs: 36 months.
• AI request evidence trails: 12 months.
• Workspace records: as long as the organization keeps them, under its own retention settings (archived students are anonymised after the organization's retention period, 7 years by default). Invoices, payments and audit logs are kept as the law requires.
• Legal acceptance records: kept as evidence of what was accepted, also after an account is anonymised.
• Legal holds: while a legal hold is active, the records it covers are kept even if a deletion was requested or a retention period has ended. They are deleted once the hold is released.

We protect personal data with encryption in transit, encryption of sensitive fields at rest (marketplace messages, inquiries, proposals, private notes, report descriptions, identity documents), private file storage with expiring signed links, separation of each organization's data with access checks on every request, role-based permissions, two-factor authentication and passkeys, optional antivirus scanning of uploads, and audit logs of sensitive actions. Profile photos are re-encoded, which removes hidden location and camera data. No system is completely secure; if a personal data breach affects you, we will notify you and the competent authority where the law requires it.

Under the PDPL you have the right to be informed about how we process your data; to access it and receive a copy; to have it corrected or completed; to have it erased where it is no longer needed or processed unlawfully; to restrict or object to certain processing; to withdraw consent at any time for the future; and not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that have significant effects on you.

• Download your data: from Settings → Privacy & my data you can request a ZIP file of your personal data, including your marketplace data. The download link is available for 7 days.
• Delete your account: from the same page. Deletion takes effect after a 30-day grace period, during which you can cancel. Workspaces you run alone are closed with your account.
• Anything else: contact us through the contact page. We may need to confirm your identity first. For records a tutor or centre keeps in its workspace, contact them; we will help them respond.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the UAE Data Office or another competent data protection authority.

We use only essential cookies, needed for the Service to work:

• a session cookie that keeps you signed in and remembers your language choice and comparison list;
• an XSRF-TOKEN cookie that protects forms against cross-site request forgery;
• a "remember me" cookie, only if you tick "Remember me" when you log in.

Your browser's local storage remembers your light or dark appearance choice and which announcements you dismissed. On the subscription page, Paddle's checkout may set its own cookies for payment and fraud prevention. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.

We may update this policy. Each update gets a new version number, and signed-in marketplace users are asked to accept new versions of the documents that apply to them. For material changes we also tell account holders within the Service or by e-mail.

For any privacy question or request, contact us through our contact page.