BTA Tutor Portal

Who we are

Better Tuition Academy Pty Ltd (“BTA”, “we”, “us”) operates the BTA Tutor Portal at thebtaonline.au and provides in-person and online tutoring services to families on Sydney's Northern Beaches and North Shore.

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and disclose your personal information. It applies to families using the BTA Tutor Portal and to tutors employed or contracted by BTA. We comply with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

What information we collect

We collect the following kinds of personal information:

Account information: name, email address, role (tutor / parent / student), campus, year level (for students), and a profile picture or avatar.
Educational records: homework submissions, quiz results, mastery scores, calendar events, lesson notes, exam plans, and progress through study materials.
Communications: mail sent through our platform between tutors and parents/students, AI tutor conversations, and friend connections.
Files and uploads: documents you upload, including study notes, exam notifications, or timetable photos.
Technical information: IP address, browser type, device type, and cookie data needed to deliver the service. We do not use third-party advertising trackers.
Payment information: billing details processed through Stripe; we do not store full card numbers.

How we collect it

Information is collected when you sign up, log in, complete profile fields, communicate via the platform, upload files, sit assessments, photograph timetables or exam notices, or when your tutor records lesson notes. We also receive lesson schedule data from Teachworks (our scheduling system).

Information about children

Our service is used by school-age students, including children under 13. In family accounts, parents or guardians create the family account and consent to their child's use of the platform. For school accounts, students join with a class code under their school's authority: the school, as the data controller, warrants that parental or guardian consent has been obtained for each enrolled student, including those under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13 outside the family-account or school-account frameworks.

Parents can review and request deletion of their child's data at any time by contacting contact@thebta.au.

How we use your information

To deliver tutoring services, including scheduling and lesson notes
To personalise the student experience (calendar, exam prep, study suggestions)
To enable the AI study tutor and exam-prep coaching features
To communicate with parents and students about lessons, billing, and the service
To improve the platform via aggregated, de-identified usage analytics
To meet legal, accounting, and child-safety obligations

AI features and photo uploads

The portal includes AI-powered features (study tutor chat, exam-prep planner, timetable and exam-notice photo capture) that send data to Anthropic's Claude API for processing. We have measures in place to ensure:

Photos are not retained. When you upload a timetable or exam-notice photo, the image is sent to the AI for parsing and then discarded. We store only the structured text we extract (subjects, times, dates, topics), not the photo itself.
Personal identifiers are stripped. Our AI prompts explicitly instruct the model to ignore names, school names, teacher names, and other identifiers visible on uploaded images.
No training on your data. Anthropic does not train its models on data submitted via the Claude API.

How we share information

We share personal information only with:

Your tutor and the parent account in your family - within the bounds of their role
BTA staff for the purpose of administering the service
Service providers who help us run the platform: Supabase (database + authentication, hosted in Tokyo, Japan - AWS ap-northeast-1), Vercel (web hosting, compute in Tokyo, Japan), Anthropic (AI processing, United States), Resend (email delivery, United States), PostHog (product analytics, European Union, consent-gated), Stripe (payments, United States), Teachworks (lesson scheduling)
Regulators or law enforcement where required by Australian law

We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for third-party advertising or marketing analytics.

Cross-border data transfers

Our database and web hosting run in Tokyo, Japan, and some service providers (Anthropic, Resend, Stripe) process data in the United States; PostHog processes analytics in the European Union. By using the platform you consent to your personal information being transferred and processed in those jurisdictions, subject to the protections those providers have in place under their own privacy frameworks.

How we protect your information

All data in transit is encrypted via HTTPS
Database access is restricted by Row-Level Security policies that prevent users from accessing other families' data
Passwords are hashed by Supabase Auth and never visible to BTA staff
API keys and service credentials are stored in environment variables, not in source code
Tutors only see students linked to them through their teaching schedule

Your rights

Under Australian privacy law you have the right to:

Access the personal information we hold about you
Correct information that is inaccurate or out of date
Request deletion of your account and associated data
Make a complaint about how we handle your information

To exercise any of these rights, email contact@thebta.au. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Cookies

We use a small number of cookies to deliver the service. See the cookie consent banner shown on your first visit for the breakdown. The cookies fall into two categories:

Essential - sign-in session, theme preference, paywall state. Always on.
Analytics - PostHog, loaded only after cookie consent and never initialised on student app routes. We do not use Google Analytics or similar third-party trackers.

Data retention

We retain personal information while your account is active and for up to two years after account closure to allow for billing reconciliation and re-enrolment. After that period we delete or de-identify your records, except where we are required to retain them for a longer period under Australian law (for example, tax records).

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Material changes will be announced via email to the registered parent account.

Contact

Better Tuition Academy Pty Ltd
Email: contact@thebta.au
Phone: 1800 002 085