Privacy policy

• Account details you give us: name, username, email address, date of birth, level of study, and whether you are a student or an educator. Your password is stored only as a one-way cryptographic hash.
• Profile details you choose to add: photo, bio, institution and subjects of interest.
• What you publish: posts, uploaded media, comments, debate arguments, challenge entries, votes and reactions.
• Activity records: points and rank history, challenge and debate results, quiz attempts, classroom submissions and grades.
• Zilly conversations and requests: what you send to Zilly and what it replies.
• Purchases: order contents, delivery name, address and phone number, and payment status. We never receive or store your card or bank details — those go directly to our payment provider.
• Live rooms: when you take part in a live debate or class, your voice (and video, if you turn it on) is streamed to the others in the room while it happens. It is not recorded.
• Technical data: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and for each session your IP address and browser type, used for security. Your approximate country, worked out from your connection, is used to show prices in your currency.

• To run the service: showing your profile and work, ranking, running debates and challenges, fulfilling orders.
• To keep members safe: screening content, investigating reports, enforcing the community guidelines and preventing abuse.
• To contact you about your account: email confirmation, password resets, challenges, moderation decisions, orders and billing.
• To give schools and teachers insight into the students who have chosen to join them.

Other signed-in members can see your name, username, photo, bio, level, school, rank and points, and everything you publish. Zelo content is not shown to people who are not signed in.

Your school and teachers, if you join them, can see your public activity, challenge results, points and classroom submissions. They cannot see your Zilly conversations, bookmarks, originality checks or account settings.

Only you can see your email address, date of birth, points ledger, Zilly conversations, bookmarks and orders. A school you buy from sees the delivery details for that order.

We do not sell personal information and we do not show advertising. We share information only with the service providers needed to run Zelo:

• AI providers: Google (Gemini), and Anthropic or DeepSeek where we use them, process the text and images sent to Zilly and for safety screening, in order to return a result. Google may keep this content for a limited time to detect abuse and, on its free service, may use it to improve its products, including review by people. Please do not put personal details such as your address or phone number in messages to Zilly.
• Live rooms: LiveKit carries the voice, and video if you turn it on, of live debates and classes between the people in the room. Zelo does not record live rooms.
• Payments: Stripe or Paystack process card payments and receive your email address and the amount. If you pay by bank transfer to our Grey account, Grey and the banks involved see the transfer.
• Email and hosting providers: Vercel hosts Zelo and stores uploaded files, Neon stores our database, and our email provider delivers our emails.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone from serious harm.

Zelo uses one essential cookie, zelo_session, to keep you signed in. It is not readable by scripts and is sent only to Zelo. We use no advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

• Your account and content are kept until you delete them or your account.
• When you delete your account, your profile, posts, comments, votes and rank are erased. Records of purchases are retained in anonymised form for accounting and legal purposes.
• Sign-in sessions expire after 30 days; emailed links expire within hours or days.
• Moderation records are kept while your account exists so that decisions can be reviewed and appealed.

• See and correct your details in Settings.
• Delete any post or comment, or your whole account, at any time.
• Leave a school or class whenever you wish.
• Turn off activity emails in Settings. Emails about moderation, orders and billing are always sent.
• Ask for a copy of your information, or object to how it is used, by emailing support@zelo.app.

Depending on where you live you may have further rights under data-protection law, including the right to complain to your national regulator.

Zelo is for people aged 13 and over. We collect a date of birth to enforce this. Members under 18 are asked to confirm that a parent or guardian knows they are joining. A parent or guardian can ask us to close a child’s account by emailing support@zelo.app; we will verify the request before acting.

Passwords are hashed with scrypt, sessions use secure, HTTP-only cookies, payment details never touch our servers, and paid digital files can only be downloaded by their buyers. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting you, we will tell you.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will notify members before the change takes effect. Questions or requests: support@zelo.app.