Privacy Policy
Registered address: 37 Hillmorton Road, Rugby, Warks, CV22 5AB.
Contact: admin@aitodidactia.co.uk
This describes what actually happens to your data on this platform, written to match what the system genuinely does, not a generic template. If you're an entrant, a reader rating stories, or an admin, the sections below tell you what applies to you.
What we collect, and why
If you submit an entry
| Data | Why we collect it |
|---|---|
| Your name, email address, and optional bio | To administer your entry, contact you about it, and — if you choose to add a bio — to publish alongside your story if it goes live |
| Your manuscript file and its extracted text | To store, display, and judge your entry, and to let the Aito agent give you feedback before you submit |
| Your category and AI declaration | Required for entry, and published alongside your story |
| Payment confirmation and a PayPal transaction reference | To confirm your entry fee was paid. We never see or store your card or PayPal account details — PayPal handles the payment itself, and only tells us whether it succeeded and a reference number for it. |
If you read and rate published stories
| Data | Why we collect it |
|---|---|
| Your rating and any optional comment | To display alongside the story and contribute to its average reader score |
| A one-way hash of your IP address | Solely to stop the same visitor rating the same entry more than once. We store the hash, never the IP address itself, and it can't be reversed back into your real IP. |
If you're an admin
Your email address and password are handled by our authentication provider (Supabase). We don't see or store your password ourselves — it's held as a one-way encrypted value that not even we can read back.
How your manuscript is used by AI
When you upload a manuscript, its text is sent to Anthropic's Claude AI to generate the pre-submission feedback you see before you pay. This is a live request made at the time you upload — the text isn't used to train any AI model, and Anthropic's own data handling for API requests applies to that processing. If Aito Voice Room features become available to writers in future, character voice generation would involve sending manuscript text to ElevenLabs in a similar way; this isn't yet active for writer-submitted entries — the three voices on our homepage are fixed demo recordings, not generated from anyone's real submission.
Cookies and local storage
We don't use advertising or tracking cookies. The site briefly stores a few technical details in your browser's temporary session storage while you're paying (which entry you're paying for, so we can confirm the right one when PayPal sends you back) — this is automatically cleared the moment payment completes or fails, and never sent anywhere beyond your own browser and our servers.
Who we share data with
We use a small number of specific providers to run the platform, and only share what each one genuinely needs to do its job:
- Supabase — hosts our database and handles admin login
- PayPal — processes entry fee payments; we never handle your card or account details directly
- Anthropic (Claude) — provides the AI feedback on your manuscript before submission
- Vercel — hosts the website itself
We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with anyone for marketing purposes.
How long we keep it
Published entries are kept as part of the permanent competition record, consistent with the publication licence you grant when you enter (see our Terms of Entry). If your entry isn't published — for example if you withdraw before payment, or an entry is rejected — we don't have a reason to keep your manuscript indefinitely and will remove it on request. Payment records are kept as long as we're legally required to for accounting purposes.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law, you can ask us to:
- Tell you what personal data we hold about you
- Correct anything that's inaccurate
- Delete your data, though note this may not be possible for an entry that's already been published under the licence you granted at entry — get in touch and we'll explain what's realistic in your specific case
- Object to how we're using your data, or ask us to restrict it
To exercise any of these, email admin@aitodidactia.co.uk. If you're not satisfied with how we've handled a request, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Children
This competition is for entrants aged 18 and over, and the platform isn't designed for use by children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.
Security
Data is stored with our providers' standard security protections in place, including encryption of data in transit. No online system is completely risk-free, but we don't hold anything beyond what's described above, and in particular, we never hold your raw payment details at all.
Changes to this policy
If how we handle data changes in a way that matters, we'll update this page and change the date at the top.