Student Data

01A student account is a username and a password

Signing up takes two fields. A student picks a username and a password, and that is the whole account. No real name, no date of birth, no school name.

An email address can be added afterwards, and it is genuinely optional: a student can register and use every part of the site without one. Its only purpose is to confirm the address and to reset a forgotten password. It can be removed again at any time, and the account carries on unchanged.

The username does not have to be a real name, and nothing on the site ever asks for one. A school that would rather run pseudonymous accounts — physics7a, physics7b, and so on — can do exactly that, and the site will never know the difference.

02What we do not collect

This is the most useful list on the page.

• No required email address. An account works with a username and a password alone; one address may be added on purpose, for password recovery and nothing else.
• No real name, date of birth, year group or school name.
• No home address, phone number or parent contact details.
• No photographs, audio or video of a student.
• No payment card details — those belong to Stripe, not to us.
• No advertising identifiers, behavioural profiles or interest categories.
• No location data. The closest thing is the IP address checked when someone signs in, used only to rate-limit attempts so accounts cannot be brute-forced, and stored only as a hash.

Two forms elsewhere on the site do ask for an email address: the free formula sheet on the Trial page, and the school demo request form. Neither is part of a student account, and no student has to touch either one to use the lessons. The recovery address described above is separate from both, and equally optional.

03Site analytics without advertising profiles

Google Analytics measures visits and how pages are used. It may receive the page address, referrer, browser and device details, approximate location derived from network information, and engagement events. GioPhysics uses that information to improve the learning experience. It is not used to grade a student, build an advertising profile, or sell or rent student information. There is no Meta pixel, session recording or social advertising tracker.

The necessary __Host-gio_session cookie is set at sign-in, holds an opaque session token and nothing else, and is HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax. It keeps a student signed in. Google Analytics may separately set measurement cookies; GioPhysics does not set advertising cookies.

04What learning data is recorded

Once a student is signed in, the site keeps the record it needs to show progress and pick up where they left off:

• Section progress — which sections of a lesson are complete, out of how many, and how many questions were answered correctly out of those attempted.
• Solved questions — which question in which collection was solved, with its title and the page it lives on.
• Exam attempts — an exam title, a date, a score and a maximum score.
• Membership and billing status — the plan, whether it is active, who granted it, and Stripe’s customer and subscription identifiers.
• Sign-in records — a hashed session token with its expiry. The raw session token is never stored, and no IP address is held against the account: rate limiting keeps a hash of the address in a separate record of its own.
• A recovery email address, only where one has been added — the address, a normalised copy used to check it is not already on another account, and whether it has been confirmed. Confirmation and reset links are stored only as hashes; the confirmation link lasts 24 hours and the reset link one hour, and the reset link works once.

That is the record. It is kept for as long as the account is open and removed when the account is deleted.

05Exam scores are entered by the student

Every exam score in a student’s record was typed in by that student. GioPhysics does not receive results from a school, an exam board or any other third party, and there is no import, sync or upload from a school system.

So a score here is a student’s own note to themselves, not an official result. If a student never enters one, that part of the record simply stays empty.

06Who can see a student’s record

• The student, signed in to their own account.
• The person who runs GioPhysics, where it is needed to operate the service, fix a fault or answer one of the requests below.
• Under a school licence, whatever teacher access that licence provides for. What it covers is set out in the school’s written quote before anything is set up.

Nobody else. Student learning data is not sold, licensed or handed to advertisers or data brokers, and it is not used to build a profile of anyone.

07Access, correction and deletion

A student, a parent or guardian, or the school that holds the licence for an account can email [email protected] and ask for any of these:

• A copy of everything held against the account.
• A correction to anything that is wrong — a username, an exam score.
• Deletion of the account.

Deletion is a cascade, not a flag. Removing an account removes the user record together with that account’s sessions, section progress, solved questions, exam attempts, membership and billing rows, and any recovery email address held against it.

A recovery address can also be removed on its own, from inside the account, without deleting anything else. That deletes the address and any confirmation link still outstanding.

One thing does not travel with it. If a demo request was ever sent from the account, that enquiry — the name, contact details and notes on the form — is kept separately and survives the deletion, so that a conversation already under way is not lost halfway through. Ask for it to be removed as well and it will be.

A school can make these requests for the accounts on its own licence without going through each student.

08Where the data lives

The site is served from Cloudflare Pages, its server-side logic runs in a Cloudflare Worker, and the data sits in Cloudflare D1 — a SQLite database at the edge. Cloudflare therefore stores and processes this data on its global network as part of running the site.

Payments are separate and they are Stripe’s. Subscriptions run through Stripe Payment Links, so card numbers, expiry dates and CVCs are entered on Stripe’s own pages and never reach GioPhysics servers or its database. What comes back is a Stripe customer and subscription identifier, the plan, and whether it is active.

Where email delivery is configured, one more company is involved: Resend, which delivers confirmation and password-reset messages. An address is passed to it only to deliver that message. Where delivery is not configured, no mail is sent at all. No other company receives student data.

09Age

An account may be held by someone aged 13 or over. Accounts are not knowingly created for under-13s.

A student under 18 should have a parent or guardian’s permission to hold an account. Where a school holds the licence, the school administers its students’ accounts and can ask for any of them to be deleted.

10Before you roll it out to a class

You do not have to create a single student account to try the material. The first lesson of every one of the 29 physics modules is free and open, and so is every simulation and interactive lab. Set one as tonight’s homework, watch what the class does with it, and no student data is created at all.

• Trial the free lessons first. No accounts, no sign-in, nothing recorded.
• Agree a username convention before you create accounts. Pseudonymous usernames work perfectly well here.
• Decide whether students add a recovery email address at all. Nobody has to, and an account without one still works in full — the trade is that a forgotten password then cannot be reset by email.
• Tell students that exam scores are theirs to enter, and optional.
• Forward this page to whoever signs off software at your school. If they need something that is not answered here, email and ask — you will get it in writing.