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Privacy policy

Last updated: 26 October 2026.

MathTrail is a free, open-source project, made and run by ALT EdTech. Questions about this policy or about your child's data go to altedtech.info@gmail.com. How to connect it, and what to do when something looks wrong, is on the help page.

The short version

  • We store nothing. The service keeps no database and no files. Between one request and the next it remembers nothing.
  • Your child's profile lives in your own Google Drive, in a file you can open, copy or delete at any moment.
  • A pseudonym, never a real name. No birth date, no school, no photograph.
  • We count children without knowing who they are. A line of the log names a child by a code that changes every month and leads back to no one; what is kept for longer than two months are totals.
  • Nothing is sold, and nothing trains a model.
  • Deleting the file deletes the profile. There is no second copy anywhere.

What MathTrail is

MathTrail is an app you add to your own Claude or ChatGPT. It picks a topic and a difficulty for your child, asks the chat's own model to write a task, checks that task with a program, shows it, records the answer and explains the mistake.

MathTrail runs no language model of its own. The model that writes the tasks is the one inside the chat you are already using, and your relationship with that chat's provider is governed by their terms and their privacy policy, not by this one.

Who signs in

Only an adult — a parent or a tutor. The child has no account and no sign-in of their own. The chat platforms set their own age rules: Claude is for adults, and ChatGPT requires a parent's consent for teenagers. MathTrail is not aimed at children using a chat by themselves.

Children

MathTrail's tasks are for children in grades 1 to 6, roughly six to twelve years old. It is meant to be used with the adult typing in the chat while the child, beside them, answers by tapping an option on the card. The child has no account. The profile holds what the adult gives about the child, under a pseudonym, together with the child's answers, in the adult's own file; what the service's logs keep of those answers, and for how long, is set out below.

What is stored, and where

In your Google Drive

The profile is a single JSON file, mathtrail-profile.json, in a folder named MathTrail in your own Drive. You can open it, read it, copy it, move it or delete it like any other file, and Drive's bin and version history are yours.

It holds:

  • a pseudonym for the child, the grade, their interests and anything you asked to avoid;
  • an identifier for the child, so that the profile can be carried to a future edition;
  • the interface language, if you chose one;
  • the topic the lessons are kept to, if you or your child chose one;
  • the country you live in and, in the United States, your state, if you chose to give them — they are there only to count how many families each country has, and you may leave them out;
  • which topics are mastered, the rating numbers behind the difficulty, and a summary of past answers: per topic, when it was last given, how many attempts and successes there were, and which traps came up;
  • where the ratings stood before each of the latest answers, and at the start of each of the last seven days with answers, so that the progress can show what moved since the last task and over the week;
  • a counter of tasks accepted today, which is how the daily limit is kept, and how far the clock of the device your child answers on runs ahead of UTC or behind it: the card sends it with each answer, so that the day ends at your midnight;
  • the current task, with its answer encrypted so that it cannot be read out of the file before the child answers;
  • the next task, which the chat writes ahead while the child solves the current one, with its answer encrypted the same way, until it is asked for.

It does not hold the child's name, birth date, school, address, photograph or anything else that identifies them. The pseudonym is the only name involved, and it never appears inside a task.

On the server

Nothing. The service is a single program that answers a request and forgets it. It has no database, no disk and no cache of your data.

Your Google sign-in is not stored either: it is encrypted and placed inside the token the service hands to your chat, together with the country you signed in from, as described below. The key lives in Google Secret Manager and never leaves the server.

In the logs

The service writes counts, not content: whether a task was accepted or rejected, why it was rejected, how long it took, how many attempts it needed, how many bytes each part of the task the chat handed in took, whether a limit was hit, and which version of the instructions was used. The lines about the calls one task took share a random code made for that task, which joins them up and says nothing about the child.

To count how many children use MathTrail each day, week and month without knowing who any of them is, the lines about a task given, an answer and a topic mastered carry, between them:

  • a counting name for the child: a code made, with a key of the service's own, from the profile's identifier and the calendar month. It stays the same for one month and is different the next, and nothing about the child — the identifier, the pseudonym, anything else — can be worked out from it;
  • the chat (Claude, ChatGPT or another), the language of the task, the grade, the month the profile was made, and how many topics are mastered;
  • on the line about a task given, the country, and the state in the United States, if you gave them in the profile, and the country you signed in from, each as a short code;
  • for an answer, its topic, level and difficulty, whether it was right, the trap behind a wrong one, whether the hint was used, whether it was "I don't know", how quickly it came (within a minute, within three, or later), the chance of a right answer the service expected of its task, who chose the task (the service's rule, the chat or you), whether it was one of the first answers that find the level the child starts at, and, after those, the range the child's count of answers was in, such as 6 to 20.

Like every line about your sessions, these lines also carry an opaque code standing for your account: made with the service's own key from your Google account, it is neither your Google ID nor your email, and it changes at the first sign-in after that key is replaced. While the lines of two months are both kept, that code is what could join a child's two counting names. It also makes the lines about answers, while they are kept, a record of your child's answers one by one: right or wrong, never the letter chosen.

These lines are kept for at most 62 days. What is kept after that are totals — how many children, how many tasks, in which countries: totals for each day, totals for each week and each month told apart by one thing at a time, such as the country or the grade, and, for each month, the traps that wrong answers fell into, by topic and grade, and how the answers to the tasks the service chose came out against the chance it expected, by that chance and by how many answers the child had given. They hold no identifier of any kind. A total counts a group of children, and a group may be a single child; a total of fewer than ten is never shown publicly.

The logs never contain the pseudonym, the text of a task, the letter of an answer, an email address, a token, the child's identifier, or the address a request came from.

Separately, Google Cloud Run keeps by default the standard record of every request to any service on it: the time, the address it came from, what the browser says it is, the page that sent it, the full address asked for, the status, and the size and duration of the answer. During a sign-in, the address asked for carries what the chat and Google put in it after a question mark: Google's one-time sign-in code, which only the service can redeem, the domain of a Google Workspace account, and the email address the chat suggests signing in with, if it suggests one. MathTrail has Google Cloud keep no record of a request whose address carries such a part, so none of these is kept in this record any more. The other records hold no profile data, no task text, no answers and no email address, and each is kept for 30 days. Records of sign-in requests made before this update still hold them until their 30 days are up.

The country you sign in from

When you sign in, Google sends your browser back to MathTrail, and at that one moment the service looks up which country your browser's address belongs to, in DB-IP's free IP-to-Country database — a file the service keeps on its own server, so nothing is sent to DB-IP or anyone else. Only the two-letter code of the country is kept, sealed inside the token your chat holds; the address itself is neither stored nor written down. An address that belongs to no country, such as one of a private network, gives no country. Your chat's own requests come from its servers, not from you, so the country stays the one of your last sign-in.

You can have this country left out of what is counted: tick "Don't count the country I sign in from" in the form of the profile, or ask in the chat. From then on no line the service writes carries it, until you untick the box.

IP geolocation by DB-IP, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

What each of these is for

  • The profile — to choose each task and its difficulty, to show the progress and to keep the daily limit.
  • The sign-in and the code of your account — to reach your one file and nothing else, and to keep the limits of each account.
  • The countries — only to count how many families each country has. You may leave both out.
  • The logs — to run the service, to find faults and to see how the tasks hold up.
  • The totals — to know how MathTrail is used and how well its tasks fit children. They are shown only as totals of ten children or more, on this site's page "Research" and in applications for grants.

How long each is kept

  • The profile file — until you delete it. A deleted file waits in Drive's bin for 30 days unless you empty it. Drive keeps earlier versions of the file in its version history for a while, and MathTrail asks it to keep for good the first version of each day the profile changed, at most two hundred of them.
  • The token your chat holds — 15 minutes, renewed for up to 30 days at a time and for at most 90 days from the sign-in.
  • The two cookies of the sign-in — 10 minutes for the one that ties a sign-in together, and 180 days for the one that remembers the apps you approved.
  • The service's logs, and Cloud Run's record of requests — 30 days.
  • The copy of the lines children are counted from — 62 days.
  • Traces of how long requests took — 30 days. They cover about one request in ten, with the address, the browser, the path and the query blanked out.
  • Measurements of the service's work, such as how many calls succeeded — 24 months. They hold nothing about a child.
  • The totals — for years. They hold no identifier of any kind.
  • This website's access logs and your conversations — as long as GitHub and your chat provider keep them, under their own policies.

Google sign-in and Drive

Signing in asks Google for one permission, drive.file. It is the narrow Drive permission: it grants access only to files this app itself created. MathTrail cannot see, list or open anything else in your Drive, including files you made yourself.

To know whose sign-in it was, the service then asks Google which Google account gave that permission. Google tells it the account's identifier, not your email, and the service keeps only the code it makes from that identifier, described above.

Two consequences are worth knowing in advance, because they look like faults and are not:

  • Google asks for your permission every time you connect. The service keeps no long-lived Google credential of its own, so each connection has to obtain one afresh, and Google shows its permission screen each time.
  • A Google account allows about a hundred of these grants at once. After roughly a hundred connections the oldest one stops working, without a warning. Signing in again fixes it.

The token the service issues to your chat is valid for 15 minutes and is renewed automatically for up to 30 days at a time, and at most 90 days from the sign-in. After that you sign in again.

What reaches the chat's model

Everything a MathTrail tool returns is read by the chat's model, and so reaches your chat provider with the rest of the conversation. Over a lesson that is nearly everything the profile holds:

  • the profile and the progress — the pseudonym, the grade, the interests, the skills kept out, the notes you wrote, the language of the lessons, the country and state if you gave them, the topic the lessons are kept to, the ratings and how they moved, the topics mastered, the latest answers, the mistakes that repeat, and where the profile's file is in your Drive, with its link;
  • the material for a task — the topic, the difficulty, example tasks, the formats to follow, the grade, the interests and the free-form notes you wrote about the child, which are what lets the model pitch the wording at the right level;
  • an answer — whether it was right, the right option, the trap behind a wrong one and the solution.

Write the notes accordingly: they leave for the chat provider with everything else. The child's identifier is in no result, and the pseudonym never goes into the text of a task.

The text of the task itself is written by the model and travels back through MathTrail's checks.

What you can see, and what the chat shows

Chat hosts show the raw arguments of the calls an app makes. When the model submits a finished task, that submission — including the correct answer — is visible to anyone reading the tool-call log in the chat window.

MathTrail does not hide this and cannot. The answer is encrypted so that it cannot be taken from the profile file or handed out twice; it is not hidden from an adult who reads their own chat's log. If you want the task to be a surprise, do not scroll through the call log in front of the child.

Advertising, profiling and training

There is no advertising in MathTrail. Nothing about your child is used to build an advertising profile, and nothing is sold or given to a data broker. MathTrail does not use your child's data to train any model.

What the chat provider does with the conversation is covered by their own policy — the same one that already applies to every other message you send in that chat.

Cookies

This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from other domains.

The service sets two cookies during sign-in only, both strictly necessary: one that ties the start of a sign-in to its finish, and one that remembers which apps you have already approved so you are not asked twice. Neither is used for tracking.

Taking your data back, and deleting it

Everything is in your own Drive, so all of it is in your hands:

  • Export — open the MathTrail folder in Drive and download mathtrail-profile.json. That file is the whole profile.
  • Delete — delete the file. Empty Drive's bin to remove it completely. Nothing of the profile survives elsewhere.
  • Cut off access — go to your Google account's linked apps and remove MathTrail's access to your account. The service can then reach nothing.
  • Remove the app — disconnect MathTrail in your chat's own settings.

Deleting the file and revoking access are independent, and doing both leaves nothing behind.

Who else is involved

The people who run MathTrail can read the service's logs and the totals in Google Cloud, which hold what is described above and nothing more. There is nobody else.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the previous wording stays in the project's public history.

Languages

This policy is published in several languages. The English text is the authoritative one; where a translation disagrees with it, the English version applies.