Last updated: 23 September 2026 Provider: Mathias Reimer, sole proprietor. Contact at the address below. Contact: hello@explica.app
Explica is used by students and teachers, usually under an agreement with a school. Where a school is the customer, the school is the data controller and Explica is the data processor — we handle student data only on the school's instructions. Individual subscribers are their own controller.
| Data | Why | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email address, profile picture | Sign-in and identifying you to your teacher | Google sign-in |
| Google account ID | Linking your sessions | Google sign-in |
| Text you highlight, plus the page title and URL | Producing the explanation, and showing your teacher your activity if you're in a class | You |
| Writing you submit for an assignment | Teacher review and feedback | You |
| Large-paste events in assignments, including the pasted text itself | Academic-integrity signals for your teacher | You |
| Reading activity on an assigned PDF: active time, which pages you spent time on, how many words you looked up | Showing your teacher engagement with the set reading | You |
| Words you save to your own vocabulary list | Your personal revision list, visible only to you | You |
| Class membership, organization membership, licence records | Access control and billing | School / teacher |
We do not collect: passwords (sign-in is handled by Google), payment card numbers (handled by our payment processor), browsing history, or the content of pages you visit that you did not highlight.
Private practice writing is not sent to any teacher and is not stored on our servers — it stays in your browser.
If your teacher sets a reading assignment, Explica records how long the reading was open and in use, which pages you spent time on, and how many words you looked up. It does not record anything about you beyond that: no camera, no keystrokes, no reading speed profile, and nothing at all about what you do in other tabs or applications.
Time only counts while the reading tab is focused and you're interacting with it, so leaving it open in the background records nothing. Your teacher sees these numbers as engagement signals — they are explicitly not treated as proof that you did or didn't read something.
Explanations are generated by an AI model, and models get things wrong. An explanation may be inaccurate, incomplete, or confidently mistaken — particularly for rare words, dialect, older texts, or a passage highlighted without enough surrounding context.
Explica is a study aid, not an authority. Students should treat explanations the way they would treat a helpful classmate's answer, and teachers should not use them as a source of truth for assessment. Nothing here replaces a dictionary, a grammar reference, or a teacher.
Only to run the service: generate explanations, show teachers class activity, enforce access, and provide support. We do not sell personal data, share it with advertisers, or use student data to train AI models.
| Subprocessor | Purpose | Data |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude API) | Generating explanations and writing feedback | The text you highlight or write |
| Google (Sign-In) | Authentication | Email, name, profile picture |
| Railway | Running the service and storing data | All stored data |
| Stripe | Subscriptions | Billing contact and payment details |
Anthropic does not train models on data submitted through its API.
We will notify customers before adding a subprocessor.
Data is stored in the United States. If your school requires data residency elsewhere, or a specific transfer mechanism for students in the UK or EU, contact us before signing — we would rather agree that in writing than surprise you later.
Retention is enforced automatically by a daily job, not by manual cleanup:
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| The explanation generated for a lookup | 90 days, then permanently deleted |
| The lookup itself (the word, the date) | 12 months, then permanently deleted |
| Submitted and in-progress assignment work | While the class exists |
| Uploaded reading PDFs and reading activity | While the class exists; deleted with it |
| The text of a flagged paste | 6 months, then permanently deleted (the count and size remain) |
| Words you saved yourself | Until you remove them or delete your account |
| Private practice writing | Never leaves the browser — we never store it |
| Account details | Until the account is deleted |
Deleting a class permanently deletes its assignments and submissions. Deleting an account removes that person's lookup history and writing.
Schools can request export or deletion of their students' data at any time: hello@explica.app. Retention periods can be shortened for a school that requires it; ask and we will put it in your agreement.
Explica is designed for classroom use and is likely to be used by students under 18, and under 13 in some settings.
We are willing to sign state-specific agreements where a district requires them — for example California's SOPIPA requirements, or a student-data-privacy addendum such as the NDPA.
Access, correction, deletion, export, and objection. Students at a school should contact their school first, since the school controls the data; the school can then contact us.
See our Security page.
We'll notify customers of material changes at least 30 days in advance.