Student data & privacy
Where student data goes — AutoMark's privacy posture for Australian teachers
For the teacher signing up, the head of department who gets asked about it, and the IT lead deciding whether to allowlist it. Everything below comes from our published privacy policy.
A scanned test is children's personal information
A scanned test paper is a child's name, their handwriting, and how they went. That shaped the architecture, not just the policy page: scans are stored in Australia, the roster holds almost nothing, no mark reaches a record until you commit it, and the images delete themselves on a clock. Where something below is a limit, it is written as a limit.
Where everything lives
- Australia, in a Sydney region. Scan images, the database, and backups.
- Encrypted in transit. The app is served over HTTPS only.
- Separated by account. Accounts are isolated from each other at the database level, not just in the screens.
What leaves Australia, and why
Six things go offshore. Each is a line here; each is named — the provider, the country, and exactly what it receives — in our privacy policy, the one page that names them.
- Reading the handwriting. The scan content goes to our OCR provider in the United States, which reads the answers off the page and returns them.
- Spelling, read letter by letter. With spelling turned on for a question, a crop of just that one handwritten answer — never the whole page — goes to two further AI providers for a verbatim reading.
- Payment. Your email address goes to our card processor when the account is created, and your card details go straight to it if you subscribe. No student data, and we never see a card number.
- Product analytics. Which screens are opened and which actions taken, so we can see where the app is slow or confusing. This one sits in the European Union.
- Email delivery. Account emails — address verification, password resets — travel through our email provider, carrying your address and a sign-in link and no student information.
- Beta and waiting-list emails. If you join the waiting list, your address goes to our marketing email provider in the United States so we can tell you when a place opens. Every message has an unsubscribe link that works, and no student data is ever involved.
During the beta the analytics also records a replay of your session. Student names are masked and scanned papers are blocked entirely before anything leaves your browser, so a paper's pixels are never sent. Other text on screen can appear, including answers AutoMark has read; the policy says so in those words.
No provider on that list trains on student work. That is a condition of how each one is used, and the policy sets out what each has committed to.
A teacher confirms every mark
AutoMark reads and marks; it does not decide. Every reading is checked back against the scan. Answers that pass mark straight through; anything that doesn't is put in front of you with the cropped handwriting beside it. You confirm every mark before it's recorded — no result is ever finalised by a solely automated decision.
After commit, a mark can still be corrected, and so can a paper matched to the wrong student. Both are recorded against the result as a correction rather than quietly overwriting it. More in the FAQ and on marking handwritten tests.
How long anything is kept
- Scan images are purged automatically at the end of the retention window — 180 days after the run is committed, by default.
- Marks and results are kept: they are your records for the year.
- You can export everything from Settings at any time, and any run or student as CSV.
- Deleting your account removes the lot: students, tests, marks, and the stored scan images.
What we don't collect
Students never touch AutoMark. No student accounts, no student logins, no student app, and nothing sent to a student or a parent. The whole surface is the teacher's.
The roster is correspondingly thin: the name you type, plus — only if you add them — a reference of your own, such as a class-list number, and a note. No date of birth, no address, no student email address. The privacy policy's list of student information runs to three items: student names, the scanned papers, and the per-question marks and results.
For your school's IT team
Send them the school network page. It carries the allowlist detail: every domain AutoMark uses, its dedicated address, the fact that all traffic is plain HTTPS request and response on one port, and what to do when a filter has held the site back as a newly registered domain.
It also asks that our hosts be exempted from TLS inspection: decrypting that traffic puts scans of student papers into an appliance's memory and logs, which creates a records-handling obligation for the school as much as for us.
Our security contact is security@automarkhq.com, also published at /.well-known/security.txt on every host.
Asking for access, correction or deletion
Export your account's data yourself from Settings. For an access or correction request — including one about student information a teacher has uploaded — email privacy@automarkhq.com. Raise a privacy complaint with us first; you can also take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
What we'd want you to check about any tool
Five questions worth asking before a class set goes anywhere near a piece of software. Ask them of us, and of whatever else you are looking at.
| What to ask | AutoMark's answer |
|---|---|
| Where is the data stored? | Australia — a Sydney region. Scans, results and backups. |
| What is it used for? | Reading answers off the paper, marking them against your key, recording what you commit. Nothing else. |
| How long is it kept? | Scan images purge 180 days after commit by default. Marks stay until you delete them. |
| Is student work used to train AI models? | No — not by us, and not by the providers listed above. |
| Who decides the mark? | The teacher. Nothing is recorded until you commit it. |
We hold no certification to wave at you, and we won't imply one. What we do is publish the answers a school's checklist asks for, in one place, so you can check them rather than trust them. If yours asks something this page doesn't, write to security@automarkhq.com.
One honest limit. The overseas reading step is not optional — reading handwriting is the product, and that happens at our OCR provider in the United States. If student work may not leave Australia at all under your school's rules, AutoMark is not the right tool, and we'd rather you knew now than after a term.
This page describes what AutoMark does; it is not legal advice, and it is not our place to tell you what your obligations are. The Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles are explained plainly by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
More on the same theme: the privacy and trust summary on the home page, what a subscription costs on pricing, and the short answers in the FAQ.
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