Privacy Policy

Meliya — meliya.org. Last updated 6 September 2026.

Meliya is a learning app for children and families, with polls and quizzes alongside the lessons. This policy describes exactly what the running service stores, why, and how to have it removed. It describes the software as built, not an intention.

Our promise

We do not sell, rent, trade, or transfer your personal information to any third party for their own purposes, and we never use it for anything other than running Meliya and delivering the features you use — your account, your learning, and keeping the app safe. There is no advertising, no third-party ad tracking, and no analytics brokers. We do not build advertising or behavioural profiles of anyone, and we especially never do so for children. Your content is never used to train AI models. We collect the minimum we need, and you can ask for a copy of it or have it deleted at any time (see Contact).

You agree to this policy when you create or sign in to a Meliya account, and we ask you to accept it before you can use an account. You can read it here at any time, and if it changes materially we ask you to review and accept it again.

You can use Meliya without an account

Browsing polls and voting require no account and no sign-in. If you never sign in, we never learn your name or email address.

What is collected

If you sign in with Google, Facebook or X, we request only your basic profile and email address (X does not provide an email address at all, even if you grant one — that is a limit of X's own sign-in system, not a choice of ours). Meliya never receives your password on any of these services, and asks for no access to Gmail, Drive, Contacts, your Facebook friends, or your X posts and follows.

Problem reports and feedback

You can send us feedback from the About page, and report a problem from your profile menu. A problem report can carry a screenshot of the screen you are looking at, taken by the app when you choose to report, together with what you tell us and a few facts about the app and your device: the page you were on, the app version, the browser, the screen size, and the last few errors the app recorded. The screenshot is shown to you before anything is sent, and you can remove it or send a different picture instead. Nothing is sent until you press Send.

Reports and feedback go to our own mailbox and to the administrators' inbox inside Meliya, and are used only to find and fix the problem. If you give an email address so we can reply, it is used for that reply. Screenshots are kept with the report and deleted on request (see Contact).

Anonymous aggregate statistics

Meliya shows how different groups voted on a poll — for example, whether one age group leaned a different way than another. This section describes exactly how it works.

• Only from what is already in this policy. No new data is collected for this. It draws only on the gender, country and birth year/month already described above, and only for votes cast while those fields are filled in.
• Coarsened at the moment you vote. Your exact birth year and month become a wide age band (for example "25–34"), and your country becomes just the country — never a state/province or city. This coarsened snapshot is stored on the vote itself, separately from your profile, and statistics are computed only from that snapshot — never by looking up your live profile.
• Not retroactive. Because the snapshot is taken at the moment of voting, editing or clearing a field on your profile afterwards changes what is captured on your future votes but does not alter statistics already computed from past ones.
• Never shown for a small group. A breakdown only appears once a poll has at least 50 votes in total, and even then, any group of voters smaller than 25 people is hidden rather than shown as a small number — and if hiding one group in a chart would let someone work out its size by subtraction, the whole chart for that poll is hidden, not just the small piece. This threshold cannot be configured below 10 people under any circumstances.
• One dimension at a time. A breakdown can show age group, gender, or country — never a combination such as "women aged 25–34 in Canada" — which is another way small, identifiable groups are avoided.
• Country may come from your connection, not just your profile. If you have not set a country on your profile — including if you are not signed in at all — Meliya resolves an approximate country from your IP address at the moment you vote, then discards the address immediately; only the resulting country is kept, on the vote itself, the same way a profile-supplied country would be. This lookup runs against a table Meliya holds itself, so your IP address is never sent to another company. It is never exact — VPNs, mobile carriers and corporate networks routinely place people in the wrong city or even the wrong country — so treat it as a rough, population-level signal, never a fact about one voter. This is the only new use of your IP address beyond the abuse-prevention hash described above: it still never uses the momentary "Detect" location described above, and never plots an individual voter on a map — only country-level totals.
• No new categories of data. Political, religious, health, or similarly sensitive data remains uncollected, as stated throughout this policy.

What is not collected

• No advertising or third-party tracking, and no analytics service.
• No background or continuous location tracking, no contacts, and no files. Meliya never asks your device for its position unless you press “Detect” on your own profile, and even then the coordinates are used once to suggest a place name and are not stored. Location Meliya keeps: the country, state/province and city sitting in your profile — each one optional, each one editable by hand, and each one clearable at any time — and, on a vote itself, a country approximated from your connection when your profile does not supply one (see “Anonymous aggregate statistics” above). Your IP address itself is never stored either way.
• No plaintext or reversible passwords. If you create an account with a password instead of Google, Facebook or X, only a salted one-way hash is stored — the same industry-standard approach used by ASP.NET Core's own identity system.
• No political, religious, health, or similarly sensitive data of any kind.
• Your data is never sold, rented, or shared with advertisers.

Content generated by AI

Many polls on Meliya are generated by AI models running on private hardware, and are labelled “Created by Meliya” — Meliya is our AI study buddy, so that label tells you a machine wrote it, and lets you tell those apart from polls written by people. Polls submitted by people are checked by an automated moderation model before publication, and may be reviewed by a person. Your content is not used to train any AI model.

Where the data lives — Canada

Everything Meliya stores about you is stored in Canada. The service, its database and its media storage run in Microsoft Azure's Canada Central region (Toronto). Backups stay in the same region. No copy of the database is kept outside Canada.

The AI is ours, and it runs on our own hardware in Canada. Every model Meliya uses — to write lessons and questions, to check content for safety, to review pictures, to read questions aloud — runs on privately owned computers in Canada, reached from the service over an encrypted private link. No question, lesson, answer, profile or message is ever sent to a third-party AI provider (no OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or similar), and your content is never used to train any model.

We keep only what a useful learning environment needs. The tables above list every kind of data the running software stores and why. There is no hidden collection: if a piece of information is not needed for your account, your learning, or keeping the app safe, we do not ask for it and we do not keep it.

meliya.org is served directly from Azure Canada Central. (Our public test instance, dev.meliya.org, runs on the same private Canadian hardware as the AI and is reached through Cloudflare, which routes that traffic and sees the usual connection metadata; it holds test data only.)

Who else handles your data

A few companies process data for us, on our instructions and only to run the service. None of them may use it for their own purposes, and none receives it for advertising. This is the complete list.

That is the whole list. If it ever changes, this page changes, the date at the top changes, and we ask you to review the policy again.

How long it is kept

• Account details — until you delete your account.
• Polls and votes — kept while published, since results are cumulative.
• Abuse-prevention hashes — kept as long as the associated vote.
• Backups — kept for 7 days in the same Canadian region, then deleted automatically.

Your choices

• Sign out at any time; the session cookie is dropped.
• Link or use more than one sign-in method — Google, Facebook, X, or an email and password — from the "Linked accounts" section of "Edit profile". They all reach the same account when the email matches.
• Choose your profile picture from "Edit profile" — your sign-in provider's picture, an uploaded photo of your own (see above), or a pick from a set of AI-generated illustrations. Switching away from an uploaded photo does not delete the stored file, but it is no longer shown anywhere.
• Edit or clear your profile at any time from "Edit profile" — name, gender, country, state/province, city, and birth year/month are each optional and each independently removable, and nothing about them is shown to other users. Clearing a field stops it from being captured on any vote you cast afterwards; see "Anonymous aggregate statistics" above for why it does not change statistics already computed from earlier votes.
• Ask for a copy of the data associated with your account.
• Ask for deletion of your account and personal details. Note that polls and vote counts other people have interacted with may remain, with your name removed from them.
• Clear local storage in your browser to remove your theme and vote history from your device.

Where the place names come from

The country, state/province and city suggestions on your profile come from GeoNames, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The list is stored on Meliya's own server, so searching it and matching a detected position against it involve no request to GeoNames or to anyone else.

Your record shapes your practice

From 5 September 2026, Meliya keeps a learning record for each learner — you, a child you manage, or a student in a class — built from what is already stored when you practise: for each Quick Study question, what was asked, what you answered, whether it was right, and whether you asked for a hint; and your standing in the learning games by topic. Two things use it:

• Better practice for you. When Meliya writes a new practice set, a short summary of your recent record — how many questions, how many right, which skills you found hard and the wrong answer you gave most often — is given to our AI as context, so about half of the new set works on what you found hard. The AI runs on our own hardware in Canada (see "Where the data lives"); the summary contains counts and questions Meliya itself wrote, never your name or contact details.
• Your mentors can see it. A parent or guardian sees the record of a child they manage; a teacher sees the record of a student in a class they run — questions, answers, right or wrong, hints — and nobody else's. This is deliberate: it is how a mentor understands where a learner struggles and helps. An adult only ever sees the children and classes that are theirs.

The record covers completed practice only, is kept with the rest of your account data in Canada, and is deleted with your account (or with a child's profile when the responsible adult removes it).

Children and families

Meliya is a learning app for children, and it is designed to be set up and overseen by a responsible adult — a parent, guardian, caregiver or teacher.

Signing up. You must be at least 13 to create your own account. We ask for your date of birth when you register, and we do not create an account for anyone who tells us they are under 13 — instead we ask them to have a parent or teacher add them as a learner.

Younger learners. A child under 13 does not sign up on their own. A responsible adult adds the child as a learner on the adult's own account, confirms they are that child's parent, guardian or teacher, and consents on the child's behalf. For a learner managed this way we keep as little as possible — a first name or nickname, and an approximate age so lessons are age-appropriate — and the child has no separate login, password or email of their own.

Your control. The responsible adult can review a learner's information and ask us to delete it at any time (see Contact). Removing a child deletes their learning profile and all of its data. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account without a parent or teacher, contact us and we will remove it.

Consent is recorded. When a parent, guardian or teacher adds a child, they confirm their relationship and consent, and we store that confirmation with the date — so there is always a record of who authorised a child's participation. A 13–17 learner who holds their own account must put a parent or guardian's email on file.

How we keep children safe

Meliya is built so that everything a child sees is checked, nothing about them is sold or used to target them, and a responsible adult is always in the loop.

• Every piece of learning content is screened. Lessons, quizzes and the companion's messages that AI helps produce pass an automated child-safety check that is fail-closed — anything not clearly safe and age-appropriate is withheld rather than shown. AI content is generated on Meliya's own private hardware, never sent to a third-party AI provider, and is additionally reviewed by our moderation pipeline (and, where needed, by a person) before it reaches a learner.
• No ads, no tracking, no profiling of children. There is no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no behavioural or advertising profile — for anyone, and never for a child. A child's data is used only to run their lessons, show their progress, and shape the practice we write for them (see "Your record shapes your practice" below).
• Data minimisation for a child. A parent-managed child has only a first name or nickname and an approximate age — no email, password or login of their own. We collect nothing about a child beyond what their learning needs.
• A responsible adult oversees them. Parents, guardians and teachers can follow a child's activity and progress. Encouragement notes are one-way (adult → child); a child cannot exchange free-text messages with strangers, and open child-to-child messaging is not part of the app.
• Teachers act under their own responsibility. A teacher adds students to a class under a recorded attestation, can see each student's progress and their work — which questions they got right and wrong and what they answered, on practice they have already completed — because a mentor who cannot see where a student struggles cannot help; and can post one-way announcements. Teachers cannot see or touch any class or student that is not their own.
• Anyone can report content, and we act on it. Community-shared courses and other user content can be reported with one tap; reports go to a moderation queue, and content found to be unsafe is hidden and removed. Community courses are also gated by the same fail-closed safety check before they are ever shown.
• You are in control. A responsible adult can review or delete a child's data at any time (see Contact).

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date above changes, and we ask you to review and accept the updated policy the next time you use your account.

Contact

For any privacy request, including access or deletion, contact admin@meliya.org.