Privacy Notice — Fairgrade LLC

Effective: 1 October 2026
Version: 2026-10-01 (first version)

The short version

• Fairgrade builds technology that makes collective intelligence trustworthy: our Marciano Method weights every judgement by the demonstrated credibility of the person making it. Fairgrade for Education is its first deployment, a platform on which students assess one another's work under an instructor's rubric, weighted by the method, with the instructor making every final decision. This notice covers that platform and our website.
• For students, your institution is in charge of your data and we work for it. For the staff who create accounts, and for visitors to our website, we are the ones in charge.
• We collect what the service needs: your name and email, your institution and role, the work you submit, the reviews you write and receive, and your scores.
• We never sell personal data, never use it for advertising, and never let anyone train an AI model on it.
• AI is an optional second opinion beside human judgement. When it is used, your work goes to the AI provider without your name, email or any identifier.
• Data is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States.
• You can delete your login yourself. Your work stays, with your identity removed, so your class's records stay whole.
• Questions and requests: privacy@fairgrade.com.

1. Who we are and what this notice covers

Fairgrade LLC ("Fairgrade", "we") exists to make collective intelligence trustworthy. Its engine, the Marciano Method, is original research in how to combine many judgements of uneven reliability into one that can be relied on: every judgement is weighted by the demonstrated credibility of the person making it, and disagreement is read as evidence. Fairgrade for Education, at app.fairgrade.com (the "Service"), is the method's first deployment: peer assessment in higher education, used by universities and colleges. The website at www.fairgrade.com describes the company, the science and the product.

This notice explains what personal data we collect through the Service and the website, why, who sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it. It describes the Service as it exists today; when the method is deployed elsewhere, a notice will describe that deployment.

It covers:

• Staff: instructors, teaching assistants and administrators who use the Service through an account, whether they created it, were invited to it, or reached it through their institution's sign-on or learning management system.
• Students: people enrolled in a class on the Service by their instructor or institution.
• Visitors: people who read www.fairgrade.com.

It does not cover your institution's own systems, its learning management system ("LMS"), or its privacy practices. Those are governed by your institution's policies.

2. Two roles: when we work for your institution, and when we decide

Data protection law distinguishes between the party that decides why and how personal data is used (the controller) and a party that handles it on the controller's instructions (the processor).

• Student data: your institution is the controller and Fairgrade is the processor. Your instructor or institution enrols you, decides what is assigned, who reviews whom, whether AI features are used, and when results are released. We act on those instructions under a data processing agreement with the institution. If you are a student and want to see, correct or delete your data, contact your institution first; we will help it respond. Under the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) we act as a "school official" with a legitimate educational interest, under the institution's direct control, and we never re-disclose education records except as the institution directs or the law requires.
• Staff account data, billing, support and product analytics: Fairgrade is the controller. We decide how the Service is run and improved, and this notice is our full account of it.
• Website visitors: Fairgrade is the controller.

On the Free, Instructor and Department plans, the instructor who creates the account acts for their institution and accepts our data processing terms on its behalf. Organization and Enterprise customers sign a negotiated agreement.

3. Who may use the Service

The Service is for higher education. It is intended for people aged 16 and over, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13. Where a student is under the age at which they can consent for themselves, their institution provides the authority for their use of the Service. If you believe a child under 13 has been enrolled, write to privacy@fairgrade.com and we will work with the institution to remove the data.

4. What we collect

4.1 Staff

• Identity and contact: name, email address, time zone, an optional profile picture (from Google or your institution's sign-on if you use it), and a login identifier from our identity provider.
• Your workspace: institution name, your role, which workspace you belong to, notification preferences.
• What you create: classes, sections, assignments, rubrics, reference files, announcements, and the grades and feedback you give.
• Billing (account owners and administrators): plan, subscription status and invoice history. Card details go directly to Stripe, our payment processor, and never reach Fairgrade.
• Activity: a log of actions taken in the workspace (for example, an assignment was published) used for the activity feed and for an audit trail.
• Legal acceptances: which version of our Terms, this notice and the data processing terms you accepted, when, and the IP address and browser used, so we can show it was done.

4.2 Students

• Identity and contact: name, email address, and a login identifier. If you arrive from your institution's LMS, the LMS sends us your name, email, its own user identifier and your role. If your institution uses your student number as that identifier, we hold it.
• Enrolment: the class and section you are in, when you joined, and your status.
• Your work: the files and text you submit (files are converted to PDF for review), comments, attempt number, and for timed assessments the start, save and submit times and whether you left the assessment tab.
• Assessment of your work: scores and written feedback from peers, from the instructor and, where enabled, from AI; your Fairgrade Score and its confidence; and a written summary of the feedback your peers gave you.
• Your reviewing: which submissions you were assigned to review, what you wrote, and your reviewing preferences.
• Anonymity check: when your instructor turns on anonymous grading, we scan your submission for your own name and email address and record whether they were found, which words matched and the short passage around each match, so you can be warned before peers see it.

We do not collect from students: date of birth, home address, phone number, payment details, or any special-category data (health, ethnicity, religion, political opinions, biometrics). We do not track your location.

4.3 Collected automatically

• Technical: IP address, browser and operating system, request identifiers and error reports, in server logs held in our own AWS account. These are used for security and to fix problems.
• Product analytics: which features are used and in what order, under an internal identifier. For students, our analytics never receive your name, email, institutional identifier, any title, score, feedback or free text. For staff, they also hold your name, email and institution domain, so that we can exclude our own team's activity and understand institutions rather than individuals. For everyone, your IP address is used to work out an approximate location (country, region, city) and is not kept. See Section 8.
• Session replay (currently on): during our beta, our analytics tool records how pages are laid out and where users click so we can find usability problems. All text and every input field is masked in the recording; chat is excluded. See Section 8.

4.4 From others

• Your institution or instructor: when they enrol you, invite you, or upload work on your behalf.
• Your institution's LMS (Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle, Blackboard): through LTI 1.3, the LMS sends the identity and role above and the course context. If your institution enables it, we send final grades back to the LMS gradebook and receive roster updates from it.
• Your institution's sign-on (SAML or OpenID Connect) or Google sign-in: the identity assertion (name, email, identifier).

5. Why we use it, and the legal basis

We do not use personal data for advertising, we do not build profiles for any purpose other than the scoring described in Section 6, and we do not sell or rent personal data.

6. The Marciano Method, credibility, and automated decisions

Fairgrade's scoring method weights each peer review by the demonstrated credibility of the reviewer, estimated from how their past reviews have tracked the eventual outcome, and combines the weighted reviews into a Fairgrade Score. Credibility estimates are internal instruments of the scoring method. They are not shown to peers, are not a grade, and are not shared outside the Service.

No grade on Fairgrade is decided solely by a machine. The instructor reviews the weighted consensus and any AI second opinion, may adjust anything, and finalises every grade. Fairgrade therefore makes no decision about you based solely on automated processing that has legal or similarly significant effects on you.

7. Artificial intelligence

AI on Fairgrade is a second opinion beside human judgement, never the source of a grade. The features change over time, so this section describes what kinds of data may go to an AI model and under what rules. The current list of AI features, and which provider runs them, is kept up to date on our page "How Fairgrade uses AI" at /ai and on our subprocessor page at /subprocessors.

What may be sent to an AI provider:

• a submission (file content or text), the assignment brief, the rubric and any reference material the instructor attached, for optional AI scoring the instructor enables for a specific assignment;
• the written peer feedback on a submission, to produce the summary of peer feedback a student sees with their results, when the instructor publishes results with feedback visible;
• an assignment brief or rubric document an instructor uploads, for a readiness check that tells the instructor whether the document has enough substance to grade against. Student data is not involved.

What is never sent: your name, email address, student number, login identifier or any other direct identifier. If you write your name inside your work, it travels with the work; the anonymity check (Section 4.2) exists to warn you first.

What the provider may do with it: only return a result to us. Our AI providers are bound by contract not to use our data to train or improve their models. Data sent for a request is retained by the provider only for the short period its abuse-monitoring policy requires.

What comes back: a score per rubric criterion with a confidence, and written feedback with the model's reasoning. It is stored with the submission, labelled as AI-produced, and weighed by the instructor.

Fairgrade does not use AI to detect whether a student used AI, and does not police AI use.

8. Analytics, session replay, support chat and email

• Product analytics run through our own domain using Mixpanel, under an internal identifier. Events describe actions (an assignment was created, a grading run started, a plan changed), never their content. Staff have a profile holding name, email, role, plan and institution domain; students have no profile. For everyone, the IP address is used once to derive an approximate location (country, region, city) and is not stored. On www.fairgrade.com the same tool records anonymous page views.
• Session replay is on during our beta for staff and students, with all text and inputs masked and chat blocked. We use it to find usability problems. We will update this notice when it is turned off.
• Support chat is provided by Crisp, hosted in the European Union. When you open a chat, Crisp receives your name and email so we can help you; for staff it also receives your role, plan and institution name so billing questions can be answered without asking. Anything you type into the chat goes to Crisp.
• Email is transactional only: invitations, assignment published and submitted, reviews assigned and reminders, results, billing, conversion failures, the anonymity warning, and notices about these documents. Staff can turn routine notifications off in Settings. Notices about changes to these documents cannot be turned off. We send no marketing email to students.

9. Who sees your data

• Your institution and its staff. Instructors and administrators of your workspace see student data as part of running the class: submissions, reviews, scores, feedback and the anonymity-check result. Administrators see who is in the workspace and the activity log.
• Your peers see the work they are assigned to review and the reviews they receive, without names: reviewers and authors are anonymous to each other during review, and the anonymity is enforced by our servers, not only by the screen. An instructor can choose to show reviewers' names to authors when publishing results; until then, and by default, they stay hidden.
• Your institution's LMS, when the instructor enables grade sync or roster sync (Section 4.4).
• Our subprocessors: the companies that host or support the Service and handle data only on our instructions. The current list, with what each one sees and where it is, is published at /subprocessors and is, today:

We tell customers before adding a subprocessor, as set out in the data processing agreement.

• Fairgrade staff, only when needed to support you or keep the Service running, through a separate staff sign-in with multi-factor authentication, with every administrative action logged.
• Authorities, when the law requires it. Where the request concerns student data we refer it to the institution unless the law forbids that.
• A successor, if Fairgrade is acquired or merges, under this notice and with notice to customers.

We do not sell personal data, do not share it for advertising, and have not done so.

10. Where your data is and international transfers

The Service is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States (N. Virginia region). Support chat data is held in the European Union. If you use the Service from the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, your data is transferred to the United States. We rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum where it applies, and our subprocessors are bound by the same or equivalent terms. Institutions that need a copy of the clauses can request one at privacy@fairgrade.com. Enterprise customers may contract for a dedicated deployment in another region.

We have no establishment in the EU or the UK and have not appointed a representative there.

11. How we protect it

• Databases, files and backups are encrypted at rest with AWS-managed keys. Connections between your browser and the Service use TLS 1.2 or higher, and browsers are told never to connect insecurely. Connections between our application and our database are encrypted and the database refuses unencrypted ones.
• The database and application run inside a private network and are not reachable from the internet. Files are stored privately and are downloaded through short-lived links that our servers create only after checking who you are and what you may see.
• Every request carries a short-lived signed token verified on our servers; permissions are checked on the server for every action; every record belongs to exactly one workspace and a session cannot read another workspace's data.
• Secrets live in a managed vault, never in code or images.
• Fairgrade staff reach administrative tools only with multi-factor authentication through a separate identity boundary, and every administrative call is written to an audit log. Institutions on the Organization and Enterprise plans can require multi-factor authentication for their own users.
• Uptime is monitored externally and published at status.fairgrade.com.

No system is perfectly secure. If a security incident affects your personal data, we will inform the affected institution without undue delay under our agreement with it, and inform individuals and regulators where the law requires. We do not yet hold third-party security certifications, and this notice does not claim any; our trust page at www.fairgrade.com/trust sets out what is in place, in progress and planned. Security reports: info@fairgrade.com, as on our trust page.

12. How long we keep it

Downgrading a plan never deletes anything; it restricts access. Institutions can ask for their data to be returned or deleted at the end of their agreement.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you and receive a copy;
• correct it (staff can change name and time zone in Settings, and email through privacy@fairgrade.com; students, ask your instructor for enrolment details);
• delete it (staff and students can delete their own login in Settings, which anonymises rather than erases their work, as Section 12 explains; an instructor with active classes must archive or hand them over first, so no class is left without an instructor);
• receive your data in a portable format;
• object to or restrict processing based on our legitimate interests, including product analytics;
• withdraw consent where processing relies on it;
• complain to a supervisory authority: in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office, in the EEA the authority in your country.

How to ask: write to privacy@fairgrade.com from the email address on your account, or say who you are and how we can verify it. We answer within one month, extendable where the law allows, and never charge for a first request. We will not treat you differently for exercising a right.

Students: because your institution is the controller, we will pass your request to it and help it respond, unless the law lets us answer directly. This is not a delay tactic; it is how the law allocates responsibility, and it means your institution sees the same request.

Automated requests: we honour browser Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out of any sale or sharing, of which there is none.

13.1 California residents

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA, as amended) gives California residents rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out of sale or sharing of personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. In the last 12 months we have collected the categories in Section 4 for the purposes in Section 5, from the sources in Section 4, and disclosed them to the service providers in Section 9. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not collect sensitive personal information other than login credentials. Student education records are handled for your institution under FERPA and are largely exempt from the CCPA; requests about them go to your institution. You may use an authorised agent; we will verify the agent's authority and your identity. Requests: privacy@fairgrade.com.

13.2 EU, EEA and UK

The legal bases for our processing are in Section 5, transfers are in Section 10, and the rights above apply in full. Where we process on the instructions of your institution, your institution is the controller and the point of contact for your rights.

14. Cookies and similar technologies

We use no advertising cookies and no third-party tracking pixels. We do not show a cookie banner; instead this is the full list:

You can block or delete cookies in your browser; blocking the session cookie will sign you out. Analytics can also be limited by the "object" right in Section 13. The full list is at /cookies.

15. Changes to this notice

Each version of this notice carries its effective date. When we make a material change we publish the new version at least 30 days before it takes effect, email every account owner and administrator, and show a notice inside the Service until the change is live. Institutions are told so they can inform their students. Staff are asked to acknowledge the new version at their next sign-in, and continuing to use the Service after the effective date also means it applies to you. Previous versions are available on request.

16. Contact

Fairgrade LLC, a Delaware limited liability company Privacy requests and questions: privacy@fairgrade.com Security reports: info@fairgrade.com Data Processing Addendum: /dpa · Subprocessors: /subprocessors · Cookies: /cookies · How Fairgrade uses AI: /ai