Privacy policy

Band 9 is an IELTS preparation service. If you want to ask about anything on this page, or you want your data deleted, email hello@band9.uk — a real person reads it.

Only what the site actually needs to work:

• Your email address. Whichever way you sign in, we end up with this. It is how your results find their way back to you.
• Your name and profile picture — only if you sign in with Google, and only because Google hands them over with the sign-in. We do not ask you for them separately.
• What you tell the planner. Why you are taking IELTS, your profession, where you are going, Academic or General, your target band, when your exam is, and which package you looked at. All of it optional, all of it things you typed on purpose.
• Your diagnostic answers and result. What you answered, what was right, and the band range that came out.
• Basic usage measurement. Which pages get opened and roughly where in the world from, through Google Firebase Analytics. This is about the site, not about you.

• No payment details. Nothing on this site takes money yet. When it does, a payment provider will handle the card and we still will not see the number — and this page will say so before it happens, not after.
• No identity documents, no passport, no date of birth.
• We never sell your data, and we never hand it to anyone for advertising.

When you ask for a six-digit code, we do not keep the code. We keep a one-way scramble of it — enough to check the number you type, not enough to work out what the number was — and it deletes itself after ten minutes whether you use it or not. We also count recent requests per address so nobody can use the form to spam your inbox. Those counters expire too.

Your diagnostic answers are saved on your own device while you sit the test, so a refresh does not cost you the whole thing. Clearing your browser data removes them, and if you were not signed in, that is the end of them — we never had a copy.

Signing in also keeps a session in your browser so you are not asked again on every page. Ticking “this is a shared or public computer” at sign-in makes that session end when you close the browser.

We are a small operation and we do not run our own servers. Three companies handle data on our behalf:

• Google (Firebase) — hosting, sign-in, the database your results sit in, and analytics.
• Cloudflare — the service that issues sign-in codes, our domain, and forwarding for our email addresses.
• Resend — sends the sign-in email itself. Our account is in their Ireland region.

These companies are based in, or operate from, outside the UK, so your data may be processed abroad. They are each bound by their own contracts to protect it, and none of them is allowed to use it for their own purposes.

Your account and results stay until you ask us to delete them. Sign-in codes last ten minutes. Analytics is kept for as long as Google’s default retention, which is measured in months, not years.

If you want everything gone, email hello@band9.uk and say so. You do not have to give a reason.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, hand it to you in a portable form, or stop using it in a particular way. Ask at hello@band9.uk. We will not charge you and we will answer within one month.

If you think we have handled your data badly and we have not put it right, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, but it is your right either way.

This site is built for people preparing for IELTS, which is an adult exam. It is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly hold their data. If you think we have some, tell us and it goes.

The date at the top is the honest one — it moves when the words change, not when the site is redeployed. If we ever start collecting something new, this page changes in the same breath, not afterwards.

See also our terms and conditions.