Privacy policy
Rainwater Private Tutoring is a one-person practice. I work directly with a small number of students and their families, and I treat the information you share with me the way I would want mine treated. This policy explains what I collect, why, who else touches it, and how to make me delete it.
1. Who I am and what this covers
Rainwater Private Tutoring is a sole proprietorship operated by Michael Rainwater, based in Athens, Georgia. I am the data controller for everything described here, and I am the only person with access.
This policy applies to:
- rainwatertutoring.com — this website and its inquiry and referral forms.
- assessment.rainwatertutoring.com — the diagnostic and practice tools.
- billing.rainwatertutoring.com — invoicing, payment, the engagement agreement, and the checkout for anything bought online.
- students.rainwatertutoring.com — the portal where a student I work with signs in to see sessions, assignments and shared files.
It does not cover third-party websites you reach by following a link from any of these.
2. What I collect
What you give me directly. When you submit the inquiry form or the referral form, I collect the name, email address and phone number you enter, anything you write in the message field, how you tell me you found me, and whether the student is under 18. I also record that you confirmed you are 18 or older, or a parent or guardian, and the time you did so, and I keep that confirmation with the inquiry. If you refer a family, I collect the contact details you provide about them. The form also records which page of this site you sent it from, the site you arrived from if that was a search engine or another website, and any campaign tags carried in the link you followed. That is kept with your inquiry so I can tell which pages are doing their job. It is not a cookie, and it is not used to follow you anywhere.
Assessment and diagnostic information. Some diagnostics ask for an email address before showing results. Where you take an assessment, I store the answers, scores and resulting analysis, along with a record of the session itself: when it was started and finished, the time spent on each question, answers entered and later changed, stretches with no activity, when the page was left or closed and for how long, text pasted into or copied from the page, and the type of device, browser and screen used. This is how I review the results with you and see how the work was done, not only what the answers were. It is kept with the rest of the student’s record, on the schedule in section 10, and it is never sold or used for advertising.
Online orders and bookings. When you buy college essay review or the Execution Diagnostic, or book a diagnostic session, through the checkout, I collect your name, email address and phone number, whether you are a parent or the student, the student’s name, and what the form asks about the work, such as the schools and deadlines an essay is for or a current SAT score. That opens an inquiry record, the same as the form does. Essay drafts you upload are stored with the order, and so are my notes on them. Booking a diagnostic session also creates a client record and the engagement agreement you sign.
Billing information. Invoices, amounts, payment status and receipts. I never see or store full card numbers or security codes — card details are entered directly with the payment processor and held by them, not by me.
Collected automatically. Standard server logs: IP address, browser and device type, referring page, timestamps.
Invoices and the email about them. When I email you, the links in the message pass through my own billing site on the way to where they lead, so I can see that a link was followed and when. Invoice emails also carry a one-pixel image that tells me when the message was opened, where your mail app loads images. When you open an invoice page, I record when, for how long, the type of device and browser, your IP address, and the approximate city and region it indicates. This is how I know an invoice reached you before I follow up on it. It is kept with your billing record, on the schedule in section 10, and it is never sold, shared, or used for advertising. If your mail app blocks remote images, the opens are simply not recorded; nothing else changes.
What I deliberately do not collect. I do not ask for Social Security numbers, government identification numbers, financial account numbers or health information, and you should not send them to me.
3. How I use it
- To answer your inquiry and arrange a conversation.
- To schedule, prepare for and deliver tutoring sessions.
- To produce diagnostic results, essay notes, progress reports and session notes.
- To invoice you and take payment.
- To send you messages about your engagement, and, only if you have asked for them, occasional notes about availability.
- To keep the sites working, secure and reasonably free of spam.
- To meet legal, tax and accounting obligations.
I do not use your information to build advertising profiles, and there is no behavioural advertising on any of these sites.
4. Who else touches it
A small number of providers process information on my behalf, under their own security commitments, and only for the purposes above:
- Vercel — hosting, server logs, and Vercel Analytics for aggregate traffic counts.
- Resend — delivery of email sent from the forms and to clients.
- Supabase — the database behind the assessments, client records, invoices and orders.
- Cloudflare — storage for files, such as essay drafts, uploads to the student portal, and assessment reports.
- Anthropic — the Claude tools I use to help draft notes and plans, described in section 9.
- Helcim, or my then-current payment processor — card processing and receipts.
Google Analytics was removed in September 2026 and no longer appears on any of these sites. Smith.ai answered my phone until September 21, 2026 and no longer does; section 8 covers calls it took before then.
Beyond those providers, I disclose personal information only to the parent or guardian of record for a student under 18; where you have asked me to, such as sending results to a school counsellor; to a collections agency or court for a genuinely past-due balance; or where the law requires it. I do not sell personal information, and I do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
5. Cookies and analytics
This site sets no third-party cookies and runs no advertising or cross-site tracking. I removed Google Analytics in September 2026. The only measurement left is Vercel Analytics, which counts page views without cookies or a persistent identifier and cannot follow you to other sites. The first-party cookies you may encounter are one that remembers you unlocked a private report for the length of your browser session, and, on the student portal, the one that keeps a student signed in.
Separately from the site itself, invoice emails and invoice pages record opens, link clicks and page views, as set out under Invoices and the email about them in section 2. None of that uses a cookie.
Because nothing here needs your consent to run, there is no cookie banner. The map on the inquiry page is a drawing that links out to Google Maps; nothing from Google loads until you follow that link.
Do Not Track. Browsers can send a signal, there is still no common standard for honouring it, and because I do not track you across websites in the first place the signal makes no difference. California law asks me to tell you that plainly, so I am. I also do not permit third parties to collect information about your activity across other websites through this one.
6. Children and parents
This is the part that matters most in a tutoring practice, so it is worth reading closely.
Students under 13. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) governs the online collection of personal information from children under 13. My website is written for parents and guardians, not for children. The inquiry form asks a student whether they are under 13 and, if they are, stops and asks a parent to write instead. I do not knowingly collect personal information online from a child under 13, and if I learn that I have, I delete it.
A parent or guardian may at any time ask me to review what I hold about their child, ask me to delete it, or refuse to let me collect any more — and refusing does not affect the child’s tutoring. Write to privacy@rainwatertutoring.com or call (706) 389-0528.
What parental consent looks like here. Before I work with any student under 18, a parent or guardian signs an engagement agreement with me, and nothing starts until they have. Section 9 says what I keep once we work together. If any part of it is not something you are comfortable with, tell me before the first session and we settle it in writing. The 2025 amendments to COPPA require separate, verifiable parental consent before a child’s information is disclosed to third parties for their own purposes or used to train AI models. I do neither, and if that ever changed I would ask you first, separately and in writing.
Students under 18. A parent or guardian is on every thread. Scheduling and billing go to the parent; instructional messages may go to the student directly. Session notes, results and reports for a minor go to the parent or guardian of record.
What I do not do. I do not ask a child for more than tutoring needs, I do not use children’s information for advertising or profiling, I never sell it, and I do not disclose it publicly.
7. Student work shown on this site
Some pages show worked problems and annotated homework from real sessions. Names, schools and anything that could identify the student are removed, and I ask the family’s permission before using any page. A parent can withdraw that permission at any time and the image comes down.
8. When you call or text
Calls and texts to (706) 389-0528 come to me. No answering service or automated assistant picks up, and I do not record calls. If you leave a message or text, I note your name, number and what you are asking about in my own records of who has been in touch, the same place an inquiry from the form goes.
Calls before September 21, 2026. Until that date an automated assistant from Smith.ai answered when I was with a student. It said at the start of each call that it was an assistant and that the call was recorded. Its summaries of those calls are in my records like any other inquiry. The recordings and transcripts are held by Smith.ai under its own retention, and it handled them for me under contract, not for any purpose of its own. If you called in that period and want yours deleted, tell me and I will ask Smith.ai to delete them.
9. What happens once we work together
Everything above is about using this website. Once tutoring starts, I keep session notes, plans, diagnostic results, assignments, the files we exchange, and progress reports for your student. They go to the person responsible for payment, and for a student under 18, to the parent or guardian of record.
- Recordings. I record a Zoom session only where the family has agreed to it, and I ask before the first one. Nothing on this website records you.
- AI assistance. I use Claude, made by Anthropic, to help me draft session notes, plans and summaries from my own records. It works only when I ask it to, on the records I open to it, and I read and correct everything before it reaches you. No AI tool contacts you or your student, and nothing is sent on its own. If you would rather I did not use it with your student’s records, tell me and I will stop; it changes nothing about the tutoring.
- When we finish. The records stay for the period in section 10, then I delete them. You can ask for them sooner, or ask me to delete them sooner.
Your engagement agreement sets out the plan, the schedule and the rate. Ask me for a copy before you commit to anything and I will send it.
One thing worth saying plainly: nothing on this website is an AI. There is no chatbot on any page. When you write to me through the form, a person reads it and a person answers.
10. How long I keep it
I keep information only as long as there is a reason to:
- Inquiries that do not become engagements — up to two years, then deleted.
- Active client records, meaning session notes, diagnostics and progress reports — for the engagement and up to three years afterwards, so a returning family’s history is intact.
- Online orders — essay drafts and my notes on them for up to three years after the order, like client records; the payment record as a billing record.
- Billing and tax records — as long as tax and accounting law requires, generally seven years.
- Recordings, where you have agreed to them — on the schedule set out in your engagement agreement.
- Server logs — per the retention settings of the providers named in section 4.
You can ask me to delete sooner. See section 11.
11. Your choices, and Georgia’s law
Whatever state you live in, you may ask me what I hold about you or your child and where it came from, get a copy, correct it, delete it (except records I am legally required to keep), and stop marketing email. Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop essential messages about an active engagement, such as an invoice or a schedule change.
Write to privacy@rainwatertutoring.com or call (706) 389-0528. I will confirm I am speaking with the right person, for a minor the parent or guardian of record, and respond within 30 days at no charge. I will not treat you differently for asking.
Georgia’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act took effect on July 1, 2026. It applies to businesses far larger than this one, but I honour the rights it describes anyway: access, correction, deletion, and opting out of any sale or targeted advertising, neither of which I do. It also prohibits processing a known child’s data for targeted advertising or sale, which I have never done and will not do.
12. Security
I use safeguards appropriate to a practice of this size: HTTPS across every site, access limited to me alone, reputable providers for hosting and payments, and private student reports that are encrypted and released only to someone holding the password I gave the family directly.
No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and I cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach of unencrypted personal information occurs, I will notify the people affected as quickly as I reasonably can, consistent with Georgia’s data breach notification law (O.C.G.A. §§ 10-1-910 to 10-1-912) and any other law that applies.
13. Visitors outside the United States
I operate in Georgia, USA, and my providers store data in the United States. If you contact me from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and processed in the US, where privacy law may differ from your own. By contacting me you understand that this transfer takes place. If you are somewhere that grants you additional rights over your personal data, write to me and I will honour requests I can reasonably verify.
14. Changes, and how to reach me
If I change this policy I will post the new version here with a new date, flag anything material at the top of the page, and email families with an active engagement directly. Continuing to use the sites after the new date means you accept the updated policy.
Michael Rainwater
Rainwater Private Tutoring
Athens, Georgia 30601
privacy@rainwatertutoring.com · (706) 389-0528
See also the terms of service and the accessibility statement.