Privacy Policy

We collect the information you provide when you create an account, buy a programme, take part in a programme, post in a community room, contact us, or otherwise use the Services. Depending on what you do, this includes:

• Account details — your name, email address, phone number, sign-in method, profile photo, language, country and time zone.
• Date of birth — asked once before your first post in a community room, to confirm that you are 18 or over. We store the date so that we do not need to ask again.
• Community name — the name you appear under in rooms. It defaults to the name on your account and you can change it in Account settings.
• Institutional identifiers — such as a student, admission or staff number, where your Institution uses Lightbulb to run its programmes.
• Learning activity — the programmes you enrol in, your progress, completions, streaks, assignments, quiz answers, results and anything you submit as part of a programme.
• Content you post — messages, questions, replies, images and files you share in community rooms; reactions; pins; who you mention; the reports you make and the people you block.
• Payment information — when you buy something we receive confirmation of the payment, the amount, currency, and a transaction reference from our payment partners. We do not receive or store your full card number.
• Messages to us — support requests, feedback, survey answers, and messages you send to Lora on the Site, including any name, email address or message you leave for us to follow up.

We do not ask for sensitive personal information such as racial or ethnic origin, religious or political beliefs, health information, or sexual orientation. Please do not include such information in messages, assignments or your profile; if you do, it is treated as content you chose to share.

All information you provide must be true, complete and accurate, and you must tell us if it changes.

When you use the Services we automatically collect:

• Device and connection data — IP address, device model and identifiers, operating system and version, app version, browser type, language, mobile carrier or internet provider, and the country you appear to be connecting from.
• Usage and diagnostic data — pages and screens viewed, features used, searches, buttons tapped, timestamps, session length, referring links, crash reports, and error logs.
• Push notification token — if you allow notifications, a token that lets us send them to your device.
• Room presence — whether you are currently online in a room, which other members of that room can see, and which messages you have read, so we can show unread counts and avoid notifying you twice.
• Cookies and similar technologies on the Site, as described in our Cookie Policy.

We use this information to keep the Services secure and working, to understand how they are used, and to improve them.

We may receive information about you from:

• Your Institution — if a school, academy or training provider enrols you on Lightbulb, it may provide your name, contact details, student number, cohort, enrolment status, attendance, marks and results, and may link them to your account.
• Sign-in providers — when you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive the profile information they share with us, typically your name, email address (or an Apple relay address if you hide your email) and profile photo. We do not receive your contacts.
• Payment partners — Paystack, Apple and Google send us confirmation and status of your purchases and subscriptions.
• Publicly available and marketing sources — for Institutions and prospective partners, we may collect business contact details from public sources or professional networks to reach out about the Services.

The App asks for the following permissions only when you use a feature that needs them: camera and photo library (to add a profile photo, attach an image in a room, or submit work); microphone (for audio features in programmes); and notifications (for room, programme and account alerts). We do not request access to your contacts, calendar, or precise location. You can change these permissions at any time in your device settings.

There are two kinds of room, and they have different audiences:

• Questions rooms — one for each programme on sale. Unless the Institution turns this off, a Questions room can be read by anyone, including visitors without an account, so that people considering a programme can see the conversation. Only members can post. Treat anything you post in a Questions room as public.
• Study groups — one for each cohort. Only the learners enrolled in that cohort, the educators allocated to it, and the Institution's founders and administrative staff can see it.

In every room, other members can see your community name, your messages, images and reactions, when you joined, and whether you are online. Educators and Institution staff appear under their real names. In a study group, the Institution's educators can also see each enrolled learner's real name and email address, because they teach that cohort. Learners never see other learners' real names, emails or phone numbers through a room. The Institution can see who is a member of its rooms, the reports made in them, and the moderation actions taken.

Your community name defaults to the name on your account. You can change it in Account settings up to two times in any 30-day period; names are unique, checked against reserved words and our moderation tools, and shown in the room in place of your account name. Before your first post we ask for your date of birth, which we keep on your account to confirm that you are 18 or over. It is not shown to other members. We do not verify it against documents, but giving a false date breaches our Terms.

To keep rooms safe we screen content automatically as it is posted:

• Text is checked by our own rules and by an automated classifier operated by OpenAI. Messages that appear to breach the guidelines may be held for review or hidden.
• Images are checked by Amazon Rekognition for unsafe content before they are delivered, and are not shown to anyone until the check passes. If the check cannot run, the image is not delivered.
• Borderline cases may be sent to an AI model operated by Anthropic for a second opinion before any action is taken.

These providers process the content only to return a result to us; they do not use it to train their models. For each check we keep a record of the outcome, the category scores, which provider was used, and how long it took. We keep these records to audit our moderation, to handle appeals, and to improve our rules. Automated decisions are reviewed by a person if you appeal.

When you report a message, the report — including the reason you chose, the message, and your identity as the reporter — is visible to the Institution's educators and staff who moderate the room, and to Lightbulb. The person you report is not told who reported them. When a breach is confirmed, a strike is recorded against the member's membership in that room, with the reason; the member is shown the reason. Strikes are counted per room, and the Institution can clear them by restoring the member.

A narrow set of reports — those involving child safety, credible threats of violence, or a risk that someone may harm themselves — are also sent automatically to Lightbulb's safety team, so that a person at Lightbulb reviews them the same day. Where we believe someone is in danger, we may contact emergency services or the authorities and share the information necessary to keep that person safe. Questions in a Questions room that go unanswered for 24 hours are escalated by email to the Institution and, where the Institution has not named its own contact, to Lightbulb, including the question text and the community name of the person who asked.

When you block a learner, their messages are hidden from you in every room. The blocked person is not notified and cannot see that they have been blocked; the block is stored on your account only. Educators and Institution staff cannot be blocked. You can see and undo your blocks at any time in Account settings.

Lora is an automated account that posts in rooms — a welcome note, announcements when a message is pinned, and details of upcoming live sessions (topic, time and joining link) supplied by the Institution. Lora's messages are generated from information the Institution and the Services already hold; Lora does not read your private data to compose them, and they are labelled so you can tell they are automated.

Images you share in a room are stored in a private storage bucket operated by Amazon Web Services and served through time-limited signed links, so that only people who can see the room can open them. Links expire, and the files are not indexed by search engines. We may compress images when you upload them and remove metadata such as location tags.

Room activity can reach you by push notification and email — replies and mentions, bundled digests, and reminders for educators. Notifications may include short excerpts of messages and the community name of the sender. You control them per category and per room in your settings, and by default we do not send pushes between 10 pm and 7 am your local time. Push notifications are delivered through Expo's push service and your device platform (Apple or Google).

A room is a shared record for the people in it. When you leave a room, are removed from it, or delete your account, the messages you posted remain in the room, shown under the community name you used at the time. After you delete your account they are no longer linked to any account, and your membership, community name, settings, reactions, reports and blocks are deleted. A study group becomes read-only 30 days after its cohort ends; rooms are archived when a programme is retired, and members keep access to the history. If you need a specific message removed, ask the Institution's educators, who can hide it, or contact us.

Subject to applicable law, you have the right to: access the personal information we hold about you and receive a copy; correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete; delete your information; restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on legitimate interests and direct marketing; receive your information in a portable format; not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that has legal or similarly significant effects on you, and to ask for human review of such a decision; and withdraw consent at any time where we rely on it, without affecting processing that took place before withdrawal.

To exercise these rights, use the tools in the App (Account settings let you edit your details, change your community name, manage notifications, manage blocks and delete your account), submit a data subject access request, or email support@lightbulb.study. We may need to verify your identity before acting. We respond within the time allowed by law — normally within 30 days — and do not charge a fee unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive. Requests about programme data held for an Institution will be passed to, or should be made to, the Institution.

You can opt out of marketing emails by clicking the unsubscribe link in any marketing message, adjusting your notification settings, or emailing support@lightbulb.study. We will still send you service messages that are necessary to run your account — such as receipts, security alerts, programme notices from your Institution, and room notifications you have turned on.

To stop the Meta Pixel measuring your visits to our web app, block third-party cookies or use a tracker blocker in your browser. You can also control how Meta uses this information for ads in your Facebook or Instagram ad settings.

To delete your account, open the App, go to Account, and choose Delete account. If your account is linked to an Institution through a student or admission number, the App will ask you to request deletion through the Institution's registry instead, because the Institution controls that record. When your account is deleted we remove it from our active systems as described in "How Long Do We Keep Your Information?"; messages you posted in community rooms remain in those rooms, unlinked from any account.

If you have a concern about how we handle your information, please contact us first at support@lightbulb.study and we will do our best to resolve it. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in Nigeria, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC); and if you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another jurisdiction with a data-protection authority, with the authority in your country.