Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Information You Provide

• Voice recordings: Checkride.bot is a voice-only app. When you take a practice exam, your microphone records your spoken answers and a recording of that audio is sent to our cloud backend so it can be transcribed and evaluated (see Section 3, Third-Party Services). Audio is captured only during an active exam session.
• Exam session data: The text transcriptions of your spoken answers, the AI examiner’s questions and evaluations, and your performance against the Airman Certification Standards (ACS).
• Exam preferences: Selected exam types, aircraft class, ACS areas and tasks, voice settings, and mode preferences.
• Knowledge test codes: If you choose to enter them, the incorrect-response codes from your FAA Airman Knowledge Test Report, so the AI examiner can weight those ACS elements in your session. Entering them is optional.
• Checkride dates and outcomes you report: If you choose to tell the App the date of a real checkride, and afterward whether you passed or did not pass the oral portion, we record that (see Section 1.2 for what is transmitted). Providing this is optional.

We obtain your permission before any audio leaves your device: on first launch, the App presents a notice that explains what is sent and to whom, and you must tap “Agree & Continue” before you can start an exam.

1.2 Information Collected Automatically

• Apple transaction identifiers: When you make a purchase, we receive a transaction identifier from Apple to verify your entitlement.
• Session metadata: Timestamps, exam duration, ACS areas covered, and performance scores.
• Exam session identifier: A per-exam identifier used to maintain conversation continuity during an active session.
• Device identifier: A persistent identifier stored on your device. We use it as a first-party analytics key and to verify your entitlements. It is not your name, and it is not shared with third parties for advertising.
• Cross-device identifier: A random identifier we generate and store in your private iCloud so we can recognize you as the same person across your Apple devices and across AIVIATION’s own apps for first-party analytics. It is stored in your iCloud account and is not shared with third parties.
• Device model and operating system version: Sent to our backend when an exam session is created, and included with product-analytics events, so we can diagnose problems and understand which devices the App must support. We do not send your device’s name, which can contain your real name.
• Product-analytics events: First-party usage events — such as app opens, screens viewed, onboarding and paywall steps, and exam start, turn, and finish events — sent to our own AIVIATION backend. These events carry the identifiers described above. We use them only for our own product analytics; they are never sold and never shared with third parties for advertising.
• Real-checkride outcome events: If you set a checkride date in the App, we record an event containing the certificate you are pursuing, how many days away the checkride is, where in the App you set it, and whether you have granted notification permission. If you afterward report the outcome of the oral portion, we record an event containing the certificate, the outcome you reported, where in the App you reported it, how many days elapsed since the checkride date, how many practice sessions you had completed for that certificate, and, if you choose to list them, the ACS areas you say the oral covered. These events carry the same identifiers as our other product-analytics events. We use them to understand whether practice in the App corresponds to real-world results.
• IP address: Our backend records the IP address of each request to its access logs as a routine security and operations measure. See Section 5 for how long those logs are kept.
• Website analytics: The checkride.bot website records limited page-view and link-click information, as described in Section 7.

Under Apple’s App Privacy framework, data transmitted alongside a persistent device identifier is treated as linked to you. On that basis, the audio, exam session data, purchase history, product-interaction events, and identifiers described above are all disclosed to Apple as “Linked to You,” even though we never collect your name, email address, or an account.

1.3 Information We Do NOT Collect

• We do not collect your name, email address, phone number, or physical address.
• We do not collect location data. The App contains no location features.
• We do not use advertising trackers, third-party advertising SDKs, or tracking pixels, and we do not track you across other companies’ apps or websites. We do collect first-party product analytics for our own use only (see Section 1.2).
• We do not retain your voice recordings long-term — our copy of the audio is stored only to process your exam turn and is deleted automatically within one day (see Section 5). Our speech-to-text provider makes its own separate use of that audio, described in Section 3.2.
• We do not create user accounts and the App has no sign-in — we recognize your device through the identifiers described in Section 1.2, not through a username or password.
• The optional free-text note you can write after a real checkride (“Anything we didn’t prepare you for?”) is stored only on your device. It is never transmitted to us and never included in any analytics event.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide and operate the exam preparation service.
• Convert your spoken answers to text (speech-to-text) and evaluate them against the ACS.
• Generate the examiner’s questions and synthesize the examiner’s spoken voice.
• Track your progress through ACS areas of operation.
• Generate performance scores and debrief reports.
• Verify your purchase entitlements through Apple StoreKit.
• Determine free trial eligibility.
• Apply returning customer discounts.
• Enforce the fair-use session limits described in our Terms and Conditions, and otherwise detect and prevent abuse of the Service.
• Review the quality of the AI examiner’s questions and evaluations, as described in Section 4.
• Understand how the App is used and improve its features, using first-party analytics.
• Diagnose errors, maintain security, and keep the Service running.
• Comply with applicable law and respond to lawful requests, and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

3. Third-Party Services

3.1 Apple

Payments are processed entirely by Apple through StoreKit. We receive transaction identifiers to verify purchases but do not process or store payment card information. Apple’s privacy policy applies to payment processing: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/

3.2 Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services hosts our backend and provides, as our service provider, the speech-to-text, AI evaluation, text-to-speech, and storage that the App depends on. Your voice recording, the text transcription of it, your exam session data, and your product-analytics events are processed and stored on AWS. Except for the speech-to-text use described immediately below, AWS processes this data on our behalf under the AWS Data Processing Addendum: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-processing-addendum/

Speech-to-text is an exception. The AWS service that converts your spoken answers into text stores and uses the audio it processes to develop and improve that service. That is AWS’s own use of your audio, not ours, and it is separate from the AI evaluation described in Section 3.3. We have not opted out of it. We ourselves use your audio only to transcribe your answer during the exam, and we delete our copy of it within one day (Section 5).

3.3 Anthropic (through Amazon Bedrock)

During an exam, the text transcription of your spoken answers, together with your exam context, is sent to Anthropic’s Claude model, which we access through Amazon Bedrock, to evaluate your answers and generate the examiner’s questions. AWS states that Amazon Bedrock does not store your prompts and completions, does not use them to train any model, and does not share them with third-party model providers: AWS Bedrock data protection. Anthropic’s privacy policy is available at https://www.anthropic.com/policies/privacy.

A separate copy of your exam transcript is reviewed for quality outside of Amazon Bedrock. That is described in Section 4.

4. Quality Review of Exam Transcripts

We run a nightly internal review of recent exam sessions to check whether the AI examiner asked appropriate questions, graded answers correctly, and cited FAA regulations accurately. This review reads a copy of the exam session record, which includes the text transcriptions of your spoken answers along with the examiner’s questions and evaluations. It does not use your voice recording.

We perform this review using Anthropic’s Claude assistant, which is a separate service from the Amazon Bedrock path described in Section 3.3. Anthropic therefore receives a copy of exam transcript content in the course of this review. Anthropic’s privacy policy is available at https://www.anthropic.com/policies/privacy.

We use this review only to find and correct quality problems in the AI examiner. Our internal quality records may quote portions of an exam transcript in order to document what went wrong. Those records are kept on our own systems and are not published.

This review never involves your name, email address, or an account, because we do not collect them (Section 1.3). The App does not currently offer a way to exclude your individual sessions from this review. If you would prefer that your exam transcripts not be reviewed in this way, please do not use the App. Questions about this review can be sent to privacy@aiviation.dev.

5. Data Retention

• Voice recordings are stored by us only to process your exam turn. Our copy is held in encrypted temporary storage and deleted automatically within one day, and we keep no long-term archive of your audio. This period describes our own retention; our speech-to-text provider retains and uses that audio separately, on its own terms, as described in Section 3.2.
• Exam session data (the text transcriptions of your answers, the examiner’s questions and evaluations, and your scores) is deleted automatically up to 90 days from the date of the session.
• Operational logs generated while processing your exam are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically. These logs contain short excerpts of the transcribed text of your answers, so they are a second, shorter-lived copy of that text.
• Backend access logs, which record the IP address of each request, are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically.
• Product-analytics events, including the real-checkride outcome events described in Section 1.2, are kept for one year and then deleted automatically.
• Purchase and entitlement records and free trial records are kept indefinitely. They are not deleted on a schedule, because we need them to verify what you have purchased and to prevent repeated use of the one-time free trial.
• Internal quality records from the review described in Section 4 are kept as long as they remain useful for tracking and correcting AI examiner quality problems.

In deciding how long to keep personal information generally, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure, the purposes for which we process it and whether we can achieve those purposes another way, and any applicable legal, accounting, or reporting requirements, including the need to establish or defend legal claims and to prevent fraud and abuse. When we no longer need personal information, we delete it or remove the information that makes it identifiable to you.

You may request deletion of your data at any time by contacting privacy@aiviation.dev. See Section 11 for your rights and how we handle a request.

6. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We disclose personal information to:

• Service providers that operate the Service on our behalf, as described in Section 3 — Apple, Amazon Web Services, and Anthropic.
• Professional advisors, such as lawyers, accountants, auditors, and insurers, in the course of the services they provide to us.
• Authorities and others, including law enforcement, government authorities, and private parties, where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary or appropriate to comply with applicable law or legal process (such as a subpoena or court order), to enforce our Terms and Conditions, or to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of you, us, or others.
• Business transferees. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, sale of assets, insolvency, bankruptcy, or receivership, personal information may be disclosed to the counterparties and their advisors and transferred as part of that transaction.

7. Tracking and Other Technologies

The checkride.bot website runs a first-party analytics script on every page, including this one. For each page load it records the page path, the hostname of the site that referred you (not the full referring URL), and any UTM campaign parameters in the address. When you click a link to our App Store listing, it records that click.

This script sets no cookies, writes nothing to your browser’s local storage, and generates no identifier for your browser. It sends nothing at all if your browser transmits a Do Not Track signal or a Global Privacy Control signal. There are no third-party analytics, advertising, or social-media scripts on the site.

Our backend also records the IP address of each request to its access logs, as described in Sections 1.2 and 5. We do not use cookies for advertising, and we do not operate a separate cookie notice, because the practices described in this section are all of the tracking technologies the Service uses.

8. Aggregated and De-Identified Data; AI Model Training

We may create aggregated or de-identified data from the information we collect — for example, average scores by ACS area across all users — by removing the information that makes it identifiable to you. We may use and disclose that data for our lawful business purposes, including analyzing and improving the Service. We do not attempt to re-identify it.

We do not use your exam content to train AI models. We do not build, fine-tune, or train any model on your voice recordings, your transcribed answers, or your scores. AWS states that data submitted through Amazon Bedrock is not used to train any model (Section 3.3). We use your exam transcripts to evaluate and correct the AI examiner’s behavior, as described in Section 4; that review changes the written instructions we give the model, not the model itself.

9. Data Security

We use technical, organizational, and physical safeguards designed to protect the personal information we collect. These include:

• Encryption of data in transit between the App and our backend, and encryption of data at rest in our cloud storage.
• Authentication and authorization on our backend interfaces.
• Access controls that limit which systems and personnel can reach personal information.

Security risk is inherent in all internet and information technologies, and no safeguard is perfect. We cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.

10. Children’s Privacy

Checkride.bot is not directed to anyone under the age of 16. The App is designed for student pilots and certificated pilots preparing for FAA practical tests. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone under 16, we will delete it. If you are a parent or guardian and believe we have collected information from a child under 16, please contact us at privacy@aiviation.dev and we will promptly delete it.

11. U.S. State Privacy Rights

This section applies to residents of U.S. states whose privacy laws apply to us and grant the rights described below, including California (CCPA/CPRA), Virginia (VCDPA), Colorado (CPA), Connecticut (CTDPA), Utah (UCPA), and Nevada (NRS Chapter 603A). Not every right is available to every resident, and these rights are not absolute — we may decline a request where the law permits.

11.1 Your Rights

• Know and access. You can ask what categories of personal information we have collected about you, the categories of sources, the purposes, the categories of third parties we disclose it to, and you can request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct. You can ask us to correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you.
• Delete. You can ask us to delete the personal information we collected from you.
• Portability. You can request a copy of your exam history and scores in a portable format.
• Appeal. If we deny your request, you can appeal. Our denial will explain how. We will respond to an appeal in writing within the period the applicable law allows, and if we deny the appeal we will tell you how to contact your state attorney general.
• Opt out of sale, sharing, and targeted advertising. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising or targeted advertising, and we do not use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. There is accordingly nothing for you to opt out of, but you may still submit a request and we will confirm this to you in writing.
• Sensitive personal information. We do not intentionally collect sensitive personal information, and we do not process any information for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you.
• Non-discrimination. We will not deny you the Service, charge you a different price, or provide you a different level of service because you exercised a privacy right.

11.2 How to Submit a Request

Email privacy@aiviation.dev, or write to us at the address in Section 16. You may also call us at 316-302-5551.

Verification. Because the App has no accounts, we cannot identify you by name or email. To locate your data we need the device identifier shown on the App’s Settings screen. We may ask for additional information to verify your identity or your state of residence before we act on a request, and we may decline a request we cannot verify. We use information you provide for verification only to process your request.

Authorized agents. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request. We may require proof of the agent’s authority, such as a valid power of attorney, or written and signed permission from you, and we may ask you to verify your own identity directly.

11.3 Additional Notices

California — Shine the Light. Under California Civil Code Section 1798.83, California residents may request the names of third parties to which we disclosed certain personal information during the preceding calendar year for those third parties’ own direct marketing purposes, and the categories of information disclosed. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes. To submit a Shine the Light request anyway, email privacy@aiviation.dev with the subject line “Shine the Light Request,” and include your first and last name, your mailing address, and a statement that you are a California resident.

Nevada. Nevada residents may direct a business not to sell certain personal information for monetary consideration. AIVIATION LLC does not sell personal information. Our designated address for requests under NRS Chapter 603A is privacy@aiviation.dev.

Other states. Residents of other states may have similar rights under their own laws. If you believe a right applies to you, contact us and we will tell you whether it does and how to exercise it.

12. Your Choices

• Microphone. You can revoke the App’s microphone permission at any time in iOS Settings. The App cannot conduct an exam without it.
• Stop future collection. Deleting the App stops all further collection from your device. The App does not currently include a separate in-app switch to turn off product analytics.
• Website analytics. Enabling Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser stops the website analytics described in Section 7 entirely.
• Optional information. Knowledge test codes, checkride dates, and checkride outcomes are optional. The App works without them.

13. Other Sites and Services

The Service contains links to websites and services operated by third parties, including Apple’s App Store and the other AIVIATION apps. Those links are not an endorsement of, or a representation that we are affiliated with, any third party we do not control. We are not responsible for the practices of websites and services we do not operate. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of the other websites and services you use.

14. International Data Transfer

We are located in the United States, the Service is offered only in the United States, and the information we collect is processed and stored in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to the United States, where privacy laws may not be as protective as those where you live.

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by updating the “Effective Date” at the top of this page and, where appropriate, through a notice in the App. Continued use of the App after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

16. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or would like to exercise a privacy right, contact us at: