Privacy Policy

• What you send us. Your name, email and phone, plus your student’s name, grade, school and events, when you book a consultation, enroll, or write to us. This includes scholarship and coaching applications, and reviews.
• Portal accounts. Parents, students and coaches have accounts with an email and password. Passwords are stored scrambled (hashed), never as plain text. Accounts also hold class attendance, tournament results, files students turn in, and profile pictures.
• Payments. Stripe processes payments. We see that a payment was made and its amount, but we never see or store full card numbers.
• Scheduling. Acuity Scheduling handles bookings, and sends us the details you enter when you book.
• Class recordings. Online classes may be recorded on Google Meet or Zoom so students can review them later. We keep recordings and their transcripts in our Google Drive, and share them only with enrolled students and our staff.
• Basic site data. We count how many times each page is viewed and which website or link sent the visit, without recording who viewed it. Sign-in cookies keep you logged in to the portal. When someone leaves a review, we store a scrambled version of their internet address so we can stop spam.

We use this information to run our classes and coaching, manage accounts, schedule sessions, handle billing, answer your messages, and improve our teaching. For example, we turn our own class recordings into searchable transcripts for building lessons. We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.

We share information only with the services that run our site and classes, and only what each one needs: Railway (website hosting), Stripe (payments), Acuity (scheduling), Resend (email), Cloudinary (images), Google (Drive and Meet), and Zoom. We will also share it if the law requires us to.

Most of our students are in middle or high school. A parent or guardian signs up and manages each student’s account. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13 without a parent’s consent. Parents can ask to see, correct, or delete their child’s information at any time.

Our internal tool, Argument Institute Drive Sync, connects only to The Argument Institute’s own Google accounts. It copies and transcribes our class recordings, and it does not access anyone else’s Google data. Our use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

We use reasonable safeguards to protect your information. We keep it while your account is active or while we need it to provide our services, and we delete it when you ask us to, unless the law requires us to keep it.

Email us to see, correct, or delete your information, or to stop receiving emails from us. We will answer within 30 days.

If we change this policy, we will post the new version here and update the date at the top. Questions? Email theargumentinstitute@gmail.com.