Privacy policy

student24 is a study platform for the South African K53 learner's licence. This policy explains what we collect and why, in plain language.

What we collect

• Your name, email address and phone number, given when you create an account.
• If you sign in with Google instead: your name, your email address and the identifier Google uses for your account. We never see your Google password.
• Your learning progress: which lessons you watched, how long you spent watching each one and how far through you got, and your quiz and exam attempts and scores.
• When you used the portal and for roughly how long, worked out from the times of your first and last request in a sitting.
• Anything you post in the community.
• Standard server logs, including your IP address, used for rate limiting and abuse prevention.

What we do not collect

• We do not ask for your identity number, address or bank details.
• We do not store card details. Payments for driving lessons happen directly with the instructor.
• We do not sell your data or share it with advertisers.

Why we keep it

To show your progress, to mark your quizzes, to rank the leaderboard, and to keep your account secure.

How long people spend on each lesson is kept for one further reason: it shows us which lessons are too long, which ones people give up on, and which ones they have to watch twice. We use it to fix the course. It is not used to rank you and is never shown to other students.

Who can see it

Your points and your completion percentage appear on the course leaderboard. Your name does not: other students see only the first letter of each part of it, and you are the only student who sees your own name there in full. Your name does appear next to anything you choose to post in the community. Your email address and phone number are never shown to other students.

The people who run student24 can see your account, your progress and the time you spent on each lesson. Every change they make to an account is recorded with who made it and when.

Where it lives, and who processes it

Your account and progress are stored in MongoDB Atlas and served by an application running on Amazon Web Services in Ireland, so your information is stored and processed outside South Africa. Lesson videos are hosted and delivered by Cloudflare Stream, so Cloudflare sees the request for a video and your IP address when you watch one. The websites themselves are served by Netlify. Fonts are served by Google Fonts. Each of these is bound by its own security and privacy commitments; none of them receives your quiz answers or your progress.

The AI tutor, when you use it, sends your question and the relevant lesson text to a language-model provider so it can answer. It does not send your name, email or scores.

If you apply to teach

Instructors and driving schools who apply on the application page give us their name, South African ID number, email, phone number, the areas they cover, their licence and instructor's certificate details, their car's details and, for a school, its registration number or its owner's name and ID number. They also upload a photo of their ID and, for an instructor, their instructor's certificate, and may upload a profile photo or logo. We verify the email address with a link; we do not verify the phone number.

We use this only to decide whether to list the applicant and, if we do, to show learners the listing. Documents are stored privately on Amazon Web Services in Ireland, encrypted, and are seen only by the student24 staff who review applications. They are never shown to learners and never shared. If an application is declined or withdrawn, we delete its documents within 90 days and keep only the outcome. An applicant can ask for a copy of their information, or for it to be deleted, at support@student24.co.za. Emails about an application are sent by Microsoft Azure Communication Services, from data held in South Africa.

Your choices

You can ask for a copy of your data or ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it — your progress, your attempts, the time recorded against each lesson, the record of when you were online, anything you asked the tutor and anything you posted. Email support@student24.co.za from your registered address and we will action it within 30 days.

Cookies and storage

The portal sets up to four lasting cookies: two that keep you signed in (an access token and a refresh token, both httpOnly so page scripts cannot read them), one that remembers light or dark mode if you choose one rather than following your device, and one that remembers whether your sidebar is collapsed. Signing in with Google sets one more for a few minutes, to make sure the person who comes back from Google is the person who left, and removes it as soon as you return. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party analytics. This marketing site sets no cookies at all.

If you install the portal to your home screen it registers a service worker. Ours passes requests through to the network and keeps one page of its own, which is what you see if you open the app with no connection. It stores no lessons, no answers and nothing about you. The portal also uses your browser's local storage to remember that you dismissed the install bar.

Logs

Our servers write one line per failed or slow request, holding the route, how long it took and the HTTP status. We do not log tokens, passwords, request bodies or quiz answers. Logs are kept for troubleshooting and are discarded on the platform's own schedule.

Children

The learner's licence starts at 17 for light motor vehicles and 16 for motorcycles under 125cc. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 16.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date above and tell you in the portal.