Privacy Policy
The short version
We collect what's needed to give you real feedback and remember your work across a season — your essays, drafts, notes, and account information. We don't sell your data. We don't let parents see a student's individual drafts. We share information outside Margin only when legally required, when you've consented, or when reasonably necessary to protect someone from serious harm — see our Safety Statement → for that specific process.
What we collect
Account information: name, email, and (for a family account) whether you're registering as a parent/purchaser or as a student user.
Essay content: prompts, drafts, notes, favorited comments and sentences, and conversation history from brainstorming and shaping sessions.
Usage information: which features you use and how often, along with information about your device, browser, IP address, and approximate location as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, and improve the service.
Payment information: handled by our payment processor, Stripe; Margin does not directly store full payment card numbers.
We do not collect more than we reasonably need to operate the service and support you if something goes wrong.
How your information is used
To generate feedback on your essays, using an AI system (see How Margin Uses AI →). To save your essay history, notes, and favorites so they're available across sessions and devices. To operate the free trial, season pass, and any scholarship/nomination access. To respond to support requests and, in the rare safety-related case described in our Safety Statement →, for human review. To improve Margin's feedback quality over time, we may use anonymized or aggregated data — information that's been stripped of anything that could identify you individually — to understand overall usage patterns and make the product better.
We do not sell student data, and Margin does not use your essays to train AI models. When Margin sends essay content to Anthropic's commercial API to generate feedback, Anthropic processes that content under its commercial data terms and does not use it to train its models unless Margin expressly opts in. Margin has not opted in.
Third-party service providers
We may use third-party service providers to host, secure, process payments, analyze usage, and operate Margin. These providers may process information on our behalf, subject to contractual obligations to protect your information.
Who can see what
Parents/purchasers can manage the account and billing but cannot see a student's individual essay drafts, notes, or conversations. See our FAQ for the reasoning behind this.
Authorized Margin personnel can access flagged content only as described in our Safety Statement, and general account/support information as needed to help you.
No one else — Margin does not share your essays with schools, colleges, or any third party, except as described below.
When information may be shared
When required by law. When you (or, for a minor, a parent/guardian) explicitly consent — for example, opting in to the anonymous draft-progression showcase described elsewhere on our site, which always requires a separate, specific confirmation before anything is used. When reasonably necessary to protect someone from serious harm, per our Safety Statement.
Data retention
We retain account information, essays, revisions, feedback, and other content you save in Margin for as long as your account remains active or as needed to provide the service. We may also retain limited information when reasonably necessary to maintain security, prevent fraud or misuse, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, or comply with legal, tax, accounting, or regulatory obligations.
When you request account deletion, we delete or de-identify your account and user-created content from our active systems, except for information we are legally required or otherwise permitted to retain. Information contained in routine system backups may remain until those backups are overwritten or expire and will not be restored to active systems except when necessary for disaster recovery.
Essay content sent to Anthropic's commercial API is subject to Anthropic's own retention practices. Anthropic states that standard API inputs and outputs are ordinarily deleted from its backend within 30 days, although information may be retained longer in limited circumstances, including suspected violations of its usage policies or legal requirements. Anthropic does not use Margin's API inputs or outputs to train its models unless Margin expressly permits that use; Margin has not done so.
We may retain payment and transaction records for the periods required by tax, accounting, fraud-prevention, and financial regulations. When retention is no longer reasonably necessary for the purposes described above, we delete or de-identify the information.
Security
We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal information. No method of electronic storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Minors' privacy
Many Margin users are under 18. We do not knowingly collect more information from a minor than is reasonably necessary to provide the service.
Your choices
You can request a copy of your data, or ask questions about what's stored, by contacting us at hello@margin.education. You may request deletion of your account and associated content by contacting us at hello@margin.education — see Data retention above for what deletion does and doesn't cover.
Changes to this policy
We'll update this policy as Margin evolves and will note the date of the most recent change below. Material changes affecting how your data is used will be communicated directly, not just posted quietly.
If you have questions about this policy, please contact hello@margin.education.
Last updated: July 29, 2026 (revised).