Privacy notice
Three things can put personal data in our hands on this site: subscribing to the newsletter, answering the State of AI census, and reading a page. This explains what happens in each case.
Version 2026.1 · 10 September 2026
Who we are
The Brief: International Education Edition is published by Qualy Services OÜ, registration 16558543, Sepapaja tn 6, 15551 Tallinn, Estonia. We decide what happens to the data described here, which makes us the controller for it.
Write to privacy@qualyhq.com about anything on this page — that address also reaches our data protection contact for the LGPD in Brazil. For the census specifically, survey@thebriefinternationaleducation.com reaches the same team faster.
If you have a Qualy account or you paid a school or agent through Qualy, that is a different relationship with different rules: Qualy’s privacy policy covers it.
If you answer the census
| What | Why | Legal basis | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your answers, the language you answered in, and the country and kind of organisation you selected | The published research, and the personal benchmark we show you | Our legitimate interest in publishing research about this industry | Kept as research data. Identifying details are separated at the point the report is published |
| Your email address, if you leave one | Sending your results, and your benchmark against everyone else | Your consent, given in its own checkbox | Until you ask us to remove it |
| A one-way fingerprint of that address | Recognising that this year’s answers and next year’s came from the same person, without keeping the address itself | Our legitimate interest in year-on-year research | Removed with the rest of your data on request |
| Which link brought you in — a partner, a colleague’s referral, or the public link | Crediting referrals, and testing whether the figures shift depending on how people arrived | Our legitimate interest in a checkable sample | With the response |
| How long each section took, and a challenge that tells people from scripts | Keeping automated and careless submissions out of the results | Our legitimate interest in data that can be trusted | With the response |
Nobody sees your individual answers but us. An association that invites its members can see who started and who finished, so it knows whether to send a reminder — never what anyone said. Sponsors and supporters see the same published report everyone else does. Nothing is published as a cut of fewer than ten people, and free-text answers are only quoted with permission, or with everything identifying removed.
The three consent checkboxes at the end are separate on purpose: results by email, contact from the sponsor, and short quarterly follow-up surveys. Ticking none of them does not change the survey or your results page. You can withdraw any of them later by writing to us.
The methodology page sets out how responses are checked and what gets published.
If you just read the site
We count page views and a handful of steps in the census — started, finished, shared — so we can tell where people give up. This is stored against a random identifier in your browser, not against your name. We do not build advertising profiles, we do not record your screen, and there is no advertising or social tracking on this site.
Downloading an episode reaches our podcast host, which counts the download and records the IP address and app it came from, the way every podcast host does. Apple, Spotify and the rest also count your listening under their own policies, which we neither control nor see beyond aggregate numbers.
Who else touches the data
We keep the list short and we do not sell anything to anyone. These companies handle data on our instructions:
| Who | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| MongoDB Atlas | The database | European Union |
| Google Cloud (Firebase) | The application that runs the census | European Union |
| Cloudflare | Serving the site, and the anti-bot challenge | Global network |
| Postmark | Sending email | United States |
| PostHog | Counting visits and census steps | European Union |
| MillionVerifier | Checking an address can receive mail | European Union |
| Transistor | Hosting the audio | United States |
| GitHub | Serving these pages | Global network |
Where a company is outside the European Economic Area, the transfer runs on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. We also disclose data if the law requires it — and would tell you unless we were forbidden to.
What you can ask us to do
Wherever you are, you can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to what we are doing with it, or withdraw a consent you gave. Write to privacy@qualyhq.com and we will answer within a month.
Deleting a census response removes your answers and your contact details. Figures already published stay published: once a percentage has been calculated over hundreds of people it is no longer personal data and cannot be unpicked.
If we get it wrong you can complain to your data protection authority — in Estonia, the Andmekaitse Inspektsioon; in Brazil, the ANPD; in Australia, the OAIC — though we would rather you told us first.
Children
Nothing here is aimed at children. The census asks about your work, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. If you think we have, tell us and we will remove it.
Changes
When this notice changes materially we date the new version and say what changed. If the change affects something you have already given us — a new purpose for census answers, say — we tell the people concerned rather than relying on them re-reading this page.