AcademicHelp

GDPR overview

Implementation is concrete rather than declarative: the site never writes that it is GDPR compliant, but its privacy notice (Version 1, 8 August 2023) is built around Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Cypriot Law 125(I)/2018. Eight data subject rights are tabulated — information, access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection and withdrawal of consent — each exercised through a Data Protection Officer at dpo@academichelp.net. The supervisory authority is named: the Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection, Kypranoros 15, Nicosia 1061, Cyprus, +357 22818456. Encryption is promised to the standard required in the GDPR, and use is barred below the age of 16. As the publisher is established in Cyprus, no Article 27 EU representative is required. The gaps: no published processing agreement, no named subprocessor list, and a text untouched since 2023 that still invokes the defunct Privacy Shield.

Who owns the data?

A-Help Limited, the Cypriot publisher, declares itself data controller for personal data. For content, the terms give with one hand and take with the other: you keep all rights, title, and interest in the Product you create, including its intellectual property rights, but you simultaneously grant AcademicHelp an unlimited, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, assignable, royalty-free and sublicensable license over your content and that Product, for any purpose, expressly including developing AcademicHelp's technology or that of its affiliates. The license continues in perpetuity and survives termination. Uploaded files are collected and stored on the same footing.

Reuse rights

End users may reuse what they produce without asking permission: the terms confirm they own all rights, title and interest in the Product. Two limits apply anyway — the terms restrict the service to personal, non-commercial use, and the academic integrity statement forbids submitting generated content without substantial modification. On the publisher's side, the privacy notice tabulates the data collected: country, email address, first and last name, city, state, postal code and address, plus automatic technical data such as IP addresses, device type and interactions. The stated purposes are user verification, fraud and account-resale prevention, VAT and tax obligations, blocking restricted jurisdictions, billing and marketing, on legal bases of contract, consent, legal obligation and the user's own request. Data may be shared with marketing personnel, group companies, processors, third parties where consent is given, and authorities; anonymized aggregate data may be passed to third parties, and Google Analytics is the only third-party cookie provider named. Should A-Help Limited ever be acquired, customer data forms part of the transferred assets.

Data retention & training

Hosting summary

The privacy notice states that personal data is primarily stored and processed in the EU or European Economic Area, or in the United States. For a user in the EU, accepting the policy is presented as authorization to store data in the EEA and in the United States. Processing outside the EEA is justified by order fulfillment, payment processing and technical support. Where data is transferred, the publisher undertakes to apply the same protection principles, to favor a country the European Commission has deemed adequate, and otherwise to assess adequacy itself. Two limits deserve attention. First, the notice still relies on the Privacy Shield program for transfers to the United States, a framework invalidated in 2020, which marks the policy as unrevised since its Version 1 of 8 August 2023. Second, no hosting provider is named and no technical region is given, so the actual location cannot be verified from the published documents. The site itself is served behind Cloudflare on an anycast address, which says nothing about where application data resides. The publisher, A-Help Limited, is established in Limassol, Cyprus, placing it under EU jurisdiction and Cypriot supervision.