Privacy Policy

Ako Insight Limited (“Ako Insight”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) provides an AI-assisted planning service for Aotearoa New Zealand educators. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

Our privacy contact is Epati Lafaialii. You can contact us at pati@akoinsight.co.nz.

Depending on how you use Ako Insight, we may collect:

• Account information, including your name, email address, optional school, sign-in provider, verification status, and account role.
• Teaching and service content, including prompts, chat messages, planning settings, generated or saved lesson plans, notes, reminders, feedback, and files you choose to upload.
• Usage and operational information, such as feature activity, model usage, token counts, approximate costs, timestamps, outcome codes, and correlation identifiers.
• Technical information, which may include device and browser information, IP address, pages visited, session activity, diagnostic data, and security events.
• Communications you send us, including support requests and feedback.

If you sign in with Google, we receive the basic account information needed to authenticate you, such as your name, email address, and provider identifier. We do not receive your Google password. Password-based credentials are handled by Firebase Authentication; Ako Insight does not store a readable copy of your password.

Ako Insight is designed for educators, not for use directly by children or students. Do not enter names or other information that identifies a student, or sensitive information about a student, into prompts, lesson plans, notes, feedback, or uploads. Use de-identified descriptions instead, such as “a Year 6 learner who benefits from visual instructions”.

If you use Ako Insight for a school or other organisation, you are responsible for having the authority to submit information and for complying with your organisation’s privacy, records, and safeguarding requirements.

We use personal information to:

• create, authenticate, secure, and administer accounts;
• provide chats, curriculum retrieval, lesson planning, image generation, file processing, saving, export, and synchronisation features;
• send account verification, security, and service messages;
• operate usage limits and protect the service from fraud, misuse, and security threats;
• diagnose faults, measure service performance, and improve reliability and features;
• respond to support requests and feedback; and
• comply with law, enforce our terms, and establish or defend legal claims.

To provide AI features, the prompt, relevant chat history, planning context, curriculum passages, and any attachment you submit for that request may be sent to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI services. AI outputs can be inaccurate or incomplete, so they should not be treated as decisions about a student or as a substitute for professional judgement.

Chat attachments are stored privately while they are validated and processed and are scheduled for deletion after the request completes or fails. Files attached to feedback may be retained with the feedback so that we can investigate it. Saved chats, plans, notes, and reminders remain associated with your account until deleted or no longer needed as described below.

We may share information only as needed with:

• Google service providers, including Firebase, Google Cloud, and Vertex AI, for hosting, authentication, storage, databases, analytics, and AI processing;
• monitoring and communications providers, including Sentry for error and performance monitoring and suppliers used to deliver service emails;
• professional advisers and contractors who need access to support Ako Insight and are required to protect the information; and
• regulators, courts, law enforcement, or other parties where disclosure is required or permitted by law, or reasonably necessary to protect rights, safety, and service security.

We do not sell personal information.

Some providers may process or store information outside New Zealand. Where New Zealand Privacy Act requirements apply to an overseas disclosure, we take reasonable steps to use providers and safeguards that provide comparable protection or otherwise meet Information Privacy Principle 12.

We use essential session and security cookies to keep you signed in, prevent request forgery, and protect the service. We also use Firebase Analytics to understand page views and feature use, and Sentry to identify errors and performance problems. Browser controls can limit some cookies, but blocking essential cookies may prevent sign-in or other features from working.

We retain account information and saved service content while your account is active and for as long as reasonably needed to provide the service, meet legal obligations, resolve disputes, maintain security, and enforce agreements. Different records may have different retention periods. Temporary uploads and operational records are removed when they are no longer needed, subject to technical, security, backup, and legal requirements.

You may request deletion of your account and associated content by emailing us. We will delete or de-identify information unless we need to keep it for a lawful reason. Residual copies may remain in protected backups for a limited period until those backups are overwritten.

We use reasonable technical and organisational safeguards designed to protect personal information, including authenticated access, private per-user storage, access controls, encrypted provider connections, security monitoring, and restricted administrative access. No online service can guarantee absolute security. Please use a strong, unique password and contact us promptly if you believe your account or information has been compromised.

You may ask whether we hold personal information about you, request access to it, or ask us to correct it. You may also ask us to delete your account or raise a privacy concern. Email pati@akoinsight.co.nz and describe your request. We may need to verify your identity before responding.

If we cannot resolve a privacy concern, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

If a privacy breach is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and affected people as required by the Privacy Act 2020.

We may update this policy as the service or law changes. We will post the revised policy here with a new effective date and, where a change is material, take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention.