Privacy Policy

The Good Teachers exists to publish teachers' own words. That only works on trust, so this page describes exactly what we collect, where it goes, and what we will never do with it. It describes the site as it actually works today, not as it might work later.

The short version

• You can read the whole site without giving us anything.
• We ask for information only when you submit a story, and we ask for the least we can.
• We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not share your email with anyone outside our editorial team.
• “Anonymous” means your name is hidden from readers. It does not mean it is hidden from us — see below, because this is the one place people are most often misled.

What we collect when you submit a story

The submission form asks for:

• Your story — title, an optional summary, and the text itself.
• Your email address. Required. This is how our editors reach you about your story — to ask a question, suggest an edit, or tell you it is going live. It is never published and never shown to readers.
• Your name, school and location — optional, and published alongside your story unless you submit anonymously.
• Your confirmation that the story is yours to share and that you agree to editorial review.

What “anonymous” actually means

If you choose to submit anonymously, your name and location are not published, and they are not shown to readers anywhere on the site.

Your email address is still recorded, and our editors can still see it. We keep it because a story we cannot ask a question about is a story we cannot responsibly publish, and because you deserve a reply either way. If that is not acceptable to you, please do not submit — we would rather lose the story than mislead you about this.

Keeping the submission queue fair

One editor reads every submission, oldest first. To stop that queue from being flooded with junk and burying a real story underneath it, we keep a short record of how often the submit form is used from one email address and from one network connection.

We do not store your email address or your network address for this. We store a one-way cryptographic scramble of each — the kind of thing that can confirm a guess but cannot be reversed back into the original — along with nothing else but a timestamp, and only for 48 hours. This exists purely to notice unusual volume; it is never used to identify you, and it is never shown to anyone, including our editors. Submitting a normal number of stories, even several in one day, or sharing a connection with colleagues doing the same, will never trigger it.

Writing about your students

Classroom stories often involve children. Please change names and leave out details that could identify a particular student — a school plus a class plus a first name is often enough to identify someone. Our editors look for this, but you know your classroom and we do not. If we think a story identifies a child, we will ask you to change it before publishing.

Sharing a photo in the gallery

The photo you choose is converted to a smaller, web-friendly format on our server and stored — in the same Vercel Blob storage described below — the moment you submit it. It is reviewed by our editors before it appears publicly, exactly like a story. We do not ask for an email address to share a photo; if you would like one taken down later, write to us with a description of it and roughly when you shared it, and we will find and remove it.

The same caution about students applies here, more directly: a photograph can identify a child even where a story's words do not. Please share only what you have permission to share, and avoid photos that clearly identify a student who is not your own child.

Right-click and drag-to-save are turned off on gallery photos. This is a courtesy, not a security measure, and we say so on the page itself: it stops a casual save, not a determined one. A screenshot happens at the operating system level, entirely outside anything a website can see or prevent, and we are not going to claim otherwise.

What is stored on your own device

Some things stay in your browser and never reach us. We cannot read them, and clearing your browser data deletes them:

• Your draft, saved automatically as you write so you do not lose work — including any cover image you attach.
• Your reading list, if you bookmark stories.
• Your light or dark theme choice.

A cover image stays in your browser only while you are still writing. The moment you submit, it is uploaded and stored — in Vercel Blob, alongside the story text. It is kept for as long as the story is, and deleted the moment the story is (a takedown, or a deletion request). The file is reachable by its exact link without needing to be logged in — the same way an emailed photo attachment is — but that link is not shown anywhere on the site until an editor publishes the story, and never at all for a story that is rejected or that you ask us to remove.

Where your story is stored

Submitted stories are stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted by Neon in Singapore. The site itself is hosted by Vercel and served from Mumbai. This means your information is processed outside India. We are telling you because you have a right to know where your words physically live, not because we are asked to bury it in a footnote.

Who else is involved

• Vercel — hosting. Their servers keep standard request logs, which include IP addresses, as every web server does.
• Neon — the database described above.
• Google Analytics — if enabled, this tells us how many people visit and which stories are read. It sets cookies and sends Google information about your visit. It is not used for advertising, and we do not send it your email or the contents of your story.

Fonts are served from our own domain rather than fetched from Google, so simply reading the site does not tell Google you were here.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent your information to anyone.
• We do not run advertising or advertising trackers.
• We do not send marketing email. There is no mailing list.
• We do not have user accounts or passwords yet, so there are no login credentials to lose.

How long we keep things

Published stories are kept as long as they are published — the point of an archive is that it lasts. Submissions that are rejected, and the email addresses attached to them, are kept only as long as we need them to explain the decision, and are deleted on request.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or unpublish a story you have had second thoughts about. Write to hello@thegoodteachers.in and we will act on it. You do not need to give a reason to have your own story taken down.

If you submitted anonymously, tell us the story title and the email you used, so we can find it.

Changes to this page

When the site starts doing something new with your information — storing cover images, adding accounts — this page is updated at the same time, and the date at the top changes. We will not quietly widen what we collect.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or anything that reads wrong here: hello@thegoodteachers.in.

See also our Terms & Conditions, which cover who owns a published story.