How Alto handles your information

Alto is a lesson-planning assistant for K-12 teachers in Georgia, made by Alto Tech LLC (“Alto”, “we”). This policy covers the Alto website and app, and everyone who uses them: teachers and school staff with an account, and visitors to our public pages.

Alto is built for adults. There are no student accounts, students never sign in, and Alto is not directed to children. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires. If you are under 18, please don’t create an account.

If your school district has a signed data agreement with Alto, that agreement controls how your district’s information is handled wherever it differs from this policy.

Alto is offered to educators in the United States. It isn’t offered in the European Union or the United Kingdom, and the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) does not apply to it.

This is everything Alto collects, and how it gets it.

What we don’t collect: student names, student ID numbers, student accounts, student email addresses, precise location, your contacts, or advertising identifiers. Alto never asks for student names and tells teachers not to enter them. If identifying student information is entered anyway, we treat it as student data under the laws below and delete it when a teacher or school asks.

We use your information only to:

• Run Alto: save your work, draft and edit with AI when you ask, publish to Google Drive when you choose to, and send the emails Alto needs to send (sign-in links, invitations, receipts).
• Apply your plan: measure usage against your allowance, and bill through Stripe.
• Keep Alto secure: prevent abuse, investigate problems, and protect accounts.
• Help you when you contact us.
• Improve Alto using totals that identify no one, such as how many units were drafted or how much a kind of request costs. We don’t study the content of your work to do this.
• Meet legal obligations.

We never use your information to advertise to you, sell it, build profiles of students, or train AI models. How Alto uses AI is explained in plain detail on How Alto uses AI.

Alto is designed so teachers can plan for real classes without identifying students. Where student information does reach Alto, we follow these laws:

• Georgia’s Student Data Privacy, Accessibility, and Transparency Act (O.C.G.A. § 20-2-660 and following). We don’t use student data for targeted advertising, build student profiles for any purpose other than K-12 school purposes, sell student data, or disclose it except to the service providers listed below, who are bound by contract. We keep reasonable security, and we delete student data within 45 days of a request from a school, a district or the teacher.
• FERPA. When a district uses Alto, we act as a “school official” under the district’s direct control: we use education records only to provide Alto to the district and never disclose them further.
• COPPA. Alto has no student users and collects nothing from children. Teachers who plan for students under 13 must not enter information that identifies them.

Parents: Alto doesn’t hold student accounts. If you believe a teacher entered information about your child, contact your school or email us at privacy@altotechservices.com, and we’ll work with the school to delete it.

You own everything you put into Alto and everything Alto drafts for you. We hold only the permission we need to store your work, show it to you and the people you share it with, and process it to provide Alto. That permission ends when you delete the work. Details are in our Terms of Service.

We share information only with the companies below, and only what each one needs to do its job for Alto. Each is bound by contract to protect it and to use it only to provide its service to us. We are responsible for how they handle it on our behalf. None of them may use your information for their own advertising or to train AI models.

Your choices. Google sign-in, Google Drive and web search are off unless you turn them on, and you can turn them off at any time in Settings. The other providers are needed to run Alto; to stop all sharing, delete your account.

Changes to this list. Before a new provider receives personal information, we update this list and email account holders at least 30 days ahead. Every new provider is held to the same terms as the ones above.

Otherwise, we share information only: with your district, if you are a member (district administrators see your membership and the plans you share with the district, never your private work); with people you choose to share a document or a class with (a co-teacher, para or student teacher you invite sees the class’s units and documents, and its IEP section only at the level you set; their Alto conversations stay theirs and yours stay yours); when the law requires it and the request is valid, telling you first unless we are legally barred; and if Alto Tech LLC is ever sold or merged, with a successor that must keep this policy’s promises.

Alto shows no ads, anywhere. We don’t use your information to target ads, we don’t let advertisers or ad networks on Alto, and we share nothing with advertisers. Alto uses no third-party trackers, tracking pixels, web beacons or analytics services. The only activity Alto records is what happens inside Alto, to run it and apply your plan. Because there is no advertising, there is nothing to opt out of.

Alto uses only cookies it needs to work. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies.

Alto also keeps small preferences in your browser’s local storage, such as your theme and which plan rows you folded. They never leave your device.

• Encryption. All traffic to Alto uses HTTPS with TLS 1.2 or newer, and browsers are told to use HTTPS only (HSTS). Information is encrypted at rest by our providers with AES-256, and Google access tokens are encrypted again by Alto (AES-256-GCM).
• Each account sees only its own work. The database enforces it on every request, not just the app’s screens.
• Passwords. At least 12 characters, with an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter and a number, and passwords known from public data breaches are refused. Passwords are stored only as a secure hash. You can also sign in with your school Google account.
• Two-step sign-in. Any teacher can require a code from an authenticator app at sign-in (Settings). It is required for Alto’s administrator account.
• Limited staff access. Only Alto’s owner can use the admin console, which requires two-step sign-in and records its actions in an audit log. We don’t open your work unless you ask us for help, to investigate abuse or a security problem, or when the law requires it.
• Sessions. Changing your password signs out your other devices, and closing your account signs you out everywhere.
• If something goes wrong. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you, and your district for district accounts, without undue delay and as Georgia law requires, with what happened and what we are doing about it.

• While your account is open, we keep your work so you can use it.
• Things you delete go to Trash and are deleted for good after 30 days.
• Deleting your account (Settings, Close your account, then “Permanently delete my account and work”) removes your account, work and uploaded files at once. Copies in our backups are gone within 30 days.
• Closing your account without deleting keeps your work for 60 days in case you want it back. After that it is deleted automatically.
• District accounts follow the district’s agreement. A district can ask us to delete its records at any time, and we do so within 45 days.
• Any deletion request sent to privacy@altotechservices.com is completed within 45 days, and usually much sooner.
• Anthropic deletes drafting requests within 30 days, except content its safety systems flag or the law requires it to keep.
• OpenAI keeps drafting requests for at most 30 days, for abuse monitoring.
• Baseten keeps no copy of the lesson-review requests it handles.

After deletion we keep only what identifies no one or what the law requires: usage totals with your name, email and content removed; payment records that Stripe and tax law require; and a security record that the account was deleted.

Wherever you live, you can:

• See and take your information. Everything you make is in Alto, and documents export to Word, Google Docs and print. Ask us for a copy of anything else.
• Correct it in Settings, or by asking us.
• Delete it, piece by piece or all at once (Settings, Close your account).
• Turn off optional sharing: disconnect Google Drive in Settings, or stop using web search.
• Unsubscribe from any email that isn’t needed to run your account.

Email privacy@altotechservices.com for anything else. We answer within 45 days and won’t treat you differently for asking.

Alto’s use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. The use of information received from Google Workspace scopes will adhere to the Google User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

• Google sign-in gives Alto your Google name, email address and profile picture link, used only to sign you in and to show your picture in your account menu.
• Google Drive (if you connect it) lets Alto create and update the documents and forms you publish, and read the Google Docs and Sheets you pick to bring into Alto, such as a pacing guide. Alto can’t see any other files in your Drive. When you import a file, its text is sent to our AI provider to bring it into your unit, under the same no-training terms as everything else.
• Google data is used only for these features. It is never sold, used for advertising, or used to create, train or improve any AI model.
• No person at Alto reads it unless you ask us to, for security, or when the law requires.
• Disconnect any time in Settings, or from your Google account’s permissions page.

If we make a material change, we email account holders and show a notice in Alto at least 30 days before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page is the current version.

Alto Tech LLC, Georgia.
Privacy and data requests: privacy@altotechservices.com