CreativeTrail High School Privacy Policy

1. Overview

CreativeTrail is an educational writing-process platform operated by Benton Growth Labs LLC. This Privacy Policy describes how CreativeTrail collects, uses, stores, and shares information in connection with its High School product mode.

CreativeTrail's High School mode is designed for school-authorized classroom use. It helps teachers and students document the writing process, including planning, source work, drafting, revision, reflection, and process evidence.

CreativeTrail is not an AI detector and must not be used as the sole basis for grading, discipline, or academic-integrity decisions. CreativeTrail provides process evidence and teacher-facing support, but teachers and schools remain responsible for educational decisions.

2. Scope of This Policy

This policy applies to CreativeTrail High School mode.

It does not apply to separate College mode deployments, research studies, or future products unless those deployments expressly reference this policy.

CreativeTrail may also display demo or presentation materials, including founder-provided sample writing. Demo or presentation pages are not intended for student use and must not be used to enter real student data.

3. High School Eligibility

High School mode is intended only for students who are at least 13 years old and who access CreativeTrail through a school, teacher, district, or other authorized educational program.

Students under 13 may not use CreativeTrail unless CreativeTrail has implemented an approved consent process and the school or parent/guardian authorization required by applicable law.

4. Information We Collect

4.1 Teacher and School Account Information

For teachers and school users, CreativeTrail may collect:

• Name
• Email address
• Account login credentials or authentication information
• School, class, or course information
• Role, such as teacher or administrator
• Class names, assignment names, prompts, due dates, and classroom settings
• Communications with CreativeTrail, including pilot requests or support messages

Teachers may sign in using standard account authentication and, where enabled, Google OAuth.

4.2 High School Student Identity Information

High School students do not need to provide an email address to use the High School student flow.

For High School students, CreativeTrail may collect or generate:

• Student name, encrypted in the browser before being stored
• Pseudonymous student code
• Student PIN hash
• Class code
• Enrollment record
• Confirmation that the student is 13 or older
• High School access session information

Student names in High School mode are encrypted before storage. CreativeTrail's servers store encrypted identity data, not plaintext student names. The teacher can unlock student names locally using the teacher's roster passphrase. CreativeTrail does not store the teacher's roster passphrase.

Although student names are encrypted, High School student work and activity may still be linked to a student code, class, assignment, teacher, and enrollment record.

4.3 Student Writing and Classroom Work

CreativeTrail may collect and store student work created in the platform, including:

• Assignment responses
• Drafts
• Final writing submissions
• Revision history
• Autosaved writing content
• Source work
• Source annotations
• Uploaded or processed source materials, including extracted PDF text where applicable
• Mind map or planning work
• Reflection responses
• Responses to Socratic or process prompts
• Teacher comments, annotations, and feedback
• Generated writing-process reports

This information is treated as student educational content.

4.4 Process and Activity Information

CreativeTrail records information about the student writing process.

In High School mode, CreativeTrail does not store raw input logs — such as raw typed text, raw pasted text, raw key names, or raw selected text — in process-event rows. Instead, High School mode stores aggregate or sanitized process-event information, such as counts and general activity metrics.

High School aggregate process information may include:

• Writing activity counts
• Typing, deletion, paste, and revision counts
• Large insertion counts
• Focus and selection counts
• Mouse and keyboard activity counts
• Timing and sequence information
• Document length and cursor-position related aggregate information
• Replay or undo-related counts
• Flags indicating that raw input logs were not stored

Important: even though High School mode does not store raw input logs in the same way as College or Developer modes, CreativeTrail may still store the student's drafts, final writing, revisions, source work, prompt responses, reports, and other student-created content.

4.5 AI Processing Information

CreativeTrail may use approved AI services to support educational features such as:

• Generating Socratic writing prompts
• Selecting or ranking reflection questions
• Scoring or categorizing student responses
• Summarizing writing-process evidence
• Evaluating process evidence
• Generating teacher-facing report elements

For High School mode, CreativeTrail uses Anthropic as its AI provider for student-content AI processing.

AI inputs may include limited excerpts or summaries of student writing, source work, prompt responses, revision information, or process evidence. AI outputs may include questions, feedback, scores, rationales, summaries, or report elements.

CreativeTrail does not use AI outputs as the sole basis for grading, discipline, or academic-integrity decisions, and schools must not do so.

4.6 Technical and Security Information

CreativeTrail may collect technical information needed to operate and secure the service, including:

• Session cookies
• Authentication records
• Device/browser metadata
• Server logs
• Deployment and error logs
• IP addresses or request metadata collected by hosting infrastructure
• Security, debugging, and reliability logs

CreativeTrail is hosted on Railway and uses Railway Postgres for database storage. Railway may process hosting, database, deployment, and operational logs as part of providing infrastructure.

5. How We Use Information

CreativeTrail uses information to:

• Provide the High School writing-process platform
• Allow teachers to create classes and assignments
• Allow students to join classes and complete assignments
• Preserve writing-process evidence
• Generate process reports
• Support teacher review and classroom feedback
• Maintain account security
• Debug, monitor, and improve platform reliability
• Respond to support requests
• Comply with legal, contractual, and school requirements
• Improve CreativeTrail using aggregated or deidentified information where appropriate

6. How We Do Not Use Student Information

CreativeTrail does not use High School student information to:

• Sell student personal information
• Serve targeted advertising to students
• Build advertising profiles
• Market unrelated products to students
• Let third parties use student data for their own advertising purposes
• Make fully automated disciplinary decisions
• Act as a standalone AI detector

CreativeTrail does not knowingly collect High School student email addresses through the High School student flow.

7. School Control and Educational Use

High School mode is intended for school-authorized use.

When CreativeTrail receives student data through a school, teacher, district, or educational program, CreativeTrail uses that data to provide the educational services requested by the school or teacher and as otherwise described in this policy or the applicable school agreement.

Schools remain responsible for determining how CreativeTrail is used in the classroom and how CreativeTrail outputs are interpreted.

8. Sharing and Subprocessors

CreativeTrail may share information with service providers that help operate the platform. Current or expected service providers for High School mode include:

• Railway — hosting, database infrastructure, deployment logs, and operational infrastructure
• Railway Postgres — database storage
• Anthropic — AI processing for supported educational features
• Google OAuth — teacher or school-user sign-in, where enabled
• Transactional email provider — teacher account, verification, reset, or support emails, where enabled

CreativeTrail may also share information:

• With the teacher, school, district, or authorized educational program responsible for the class
• With authorized CreativeTrail personnel who need access for support, security, debugging, or operation
• If required by law, legal process, or to protect rights, safety, and security
• In connection with a business transfer, subject to appropriate protections for student data

CreativeTrail does not sell High School student data.

9. Internal Access

Access to student data is limited to authorized CreativeTrail personnel with a legitimate operational need, such as support, debugging, security, compliance, or service operation.

Production admin, impersonation, raw audit, and export tools are restricted to authorized personnel and are not used for casual review.

10. Data Retention

CreativeTrail retains High School student-linked data while the class, pilot, or school-authorized use is active.

Unless a school requests a different period or applicable law or agreement requires otherwise, CreativeTrail's default High School retention practice is to:

• retain student-linked High School data during the active class or pilot;
• retain it for up to 90 days after the class or pilot ends for teacher review, support, and school-requested records; and
• after that period, delete or deidentify student-linked drafts, final writing, revisions, source work, prompt responses, reports, and session records where feasible.

CreativeTrail may retain aggregated or deidentified information for a longer period to improve the product, evaluate reliability, understand usage, or demonstrate product effectiveness, provided the information is not reasonably linkable to a student, class, teacher, school, or unique writing sample.

CreativeTrail may retain technical logs, security records, backup copies, and legal/compliance records for longer where reasonably necessary.

11. Deletion and Deidentification Requests

Schools, districts, or authorized teachers may request deletion or deidentification of High School student data.

Parents or students who want to access, correct, delete, or deidentify student data should generally contact the school first, because CreativeTrail is provided through the school-authorized classroom relationship.

CreativeTrail will assist the school with reasonable deletion or deidentification requests, subject to technical feasibility, legal obligations, school requirements, security needs, and backup limitations.

Because High School student names are encrypted, deleting or deidentifying student data may require more than deleting names. It may also require removing or breaking links between student codes, classes, enrollments, assignments, writing records, reports, and process evidence.

12. Security

CreativeTrail uses technical and organizational measures designed to protect information, including:

• High School pseudonymous student access
• Browser-side encryption of High School student names
• PIN hashing
• Signed High School access cookies
• Role-based and class-based access controls
• Route-level authentication and authorization checks for student report and classifier endpoints
• Authentication for teacher accounts
• Server-side storage in Railway Postgres
• Limiting High School raw input-log storage
• Limiting internal access to authorized personnel

No system can be guaranteed completely secure. CreativeTrail will continue to improve its security controls as the product develops.

13. Backups

CreativeTrail does not currently enable Railway database backups, but hosting or infrastructure providers may maintain operational logs or backup-like copies as part of their normal systems.

If backups are enabled in the future, deleted information may remain in backups for a limited period before backup rotation. CreativeTrail will not use backup copies for active product features except where necessary for disaster recovery, legal, security, or operational reasons.

14. Changes to This Policy

CreativeTrail may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. For school deployments, CreativeTrail will provide notice of material changes to the school, teacher, or other authorized contact.

15. Contact

Questions about this policy or CreativeTrail's privacy practices may be sent to:

Benton Growth Labs LLC / CreativeTrail
Email: contact@bentongrowthlabs.com