Privacy.

Last updated 22 August 2026. QuizBlast is made and operated by Jon F Lizenby, an individual operating as a sole proprietor in Indiana, United States. The data controller for everything described below is that person, not a company. Questions, requests, or anything in this document that isn't clear: support@quizblast.net.

The two modes

Most of the time, nothing reaches us at all

QuizBlast runs a game in one of two ways, and they have completely different privacy stories.

Cloud mode requires a teacher account. Direct mode never does. Everything below applies to cloud mode unless it says otherwise.

Students

What we collect from students

Students never create an account, never give us an email address, and are never asked for one. When a student joins a game, two things exist:

• The display name they type in. Whatever the student enters to identify themselves on the scoreboard. Many teachers ask students to use first names, initials, or nicknames — that choice is the teacher's, and QuizBlast neither requires nor verifies a real name.
• A random session identifier generated for that game, so their device can reconnect to the right seat if the Wi‑Fi drops mid‑question. It means nothing outside that one game and is not linked to anything else.

Both exist only while the game is running. They live in our relay's memory to route messages, and in the student's own browser in sessionStorage, which the browser erases when the tab closes. We set no cookies on student devices and store no persistent identifier. When the game ends, nothing about that student remains on our servers.

What we never collect from students

• Answers and scores are never stored on our servers. They stay on the teacher's Mac, which is the only place a game's results exist.
• No student email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, photos, or contact details — we never ask for any of them.
• No advertising, ever. No advertising networks, no ad identifiers, no third‑party tracking or analytics on any student page.
• No profiling, no behavioural targeting, and nothing sold or rented to anyone, under any circumstances.

Teachers

What we collect from teachers

Only what running the service requires:

• Your email address. This is the entire account. Signing in emails you a six‑digit code — there is no password to lose. Codes are stored only as a cryptographic hash, are single‑use, and are deleted within the hour.
• Your plan and billing status — free or Cloud Pro, when it renews, and an identifier linking you to your Stripe customer record.
• Basic account activity — when the account was created, when it was last used, and running totals of how many games you have hosted and how many students have joined them. These are counts. They contain nothing about who those students were.
• The network address your Mac connects from when it opens a game room, recorded in our infrastructure logs and kept for 30 days.

We do not see or store your payment card. Card details go directly from you to Stripe, whose systems we never receive them through.

Problem reports you choose to send

QuizBlast has a Help → Report a Problem command. Nothing is sent unless you use it. There is no analytics or telemetry running while you teach — no event tracking, no session recording, no third‑party SDK of any kind. (The app does check for updates, and registers itself once for ratings; both are described below, and neither carries anything about your lesson.)

When you do use it, the app shows you the entire report before it sends, in full, so you can read it, copy it, save it to a file, or close the window. A report contains what you type, your app version, your macOS version, your Mac's model, whether you were hosting locally or through the cloud, counts of students connected, and the app's own technical log — the same diagnostic messages macOS already records on your Mac.

It contains no student names, no answers anyone gave, and no question text. That is enforced in the software rather than promised here: the app is built so those values are never written to its log in the first place, and an automated test plays a real game and fails the build if a student's name can be found anywhere in a finished report.

If your Mac has recorded a crash or a freeze, macOS's own diagnostic report for it may be attached — the app tells you when that is the case, and you can see it in the preview. Problem reports are kept for 30 days, like our other logs.

Ratings you choose to send

QuizBlast has a Help → Rate QuizBlast command — a star rating and an optional note. It exists because QuizBlast isn't sold through the App Store, so there is no store page where teachers could say whether it's any good.

A rating is stored anonymously, and we mean that literally rather than as a reassurance. What gets saved is the star rating, your note if you wrote one, the app and macOS versions, whether you were hosting locally or through the cloud, and a range for how many students were in the room (1‑10, 11‑30, 31+). No name, no email, no account, no network address, and not even a precise time — only the date. There is no column in that table that could identify you, which is why we can quote the overall numbers publicly without asking anyone's permission.

Two consequences worth being upfront about. First, we cannot reply to a rating, and we cannot pick yours out to delete later — we store nothing that links a rating to you, so there is nothing to search by. If you want an answer, email us instead. Second, the note you write is the one place in QuizBlast where a student's name could end up stored, so the app asks you not to include one.

The one identifier the app keeps

To keep ratings honest, the app has to be able to show that a rating came from a real copy of QuizBlast that has genuinely been used — otherwise the numbers would only show how patient someone was. So the app generates a random identifier for itself, and registers it with us once, the first time you finish a real game. That identifier is limited to a handful of ratings, spaced out over time. It raises the cost of faking ratings rather than making it impossible — no honest system can promise that — and the totals are watched for the pattern that abuse would make. It is a random number. It is not derived from your Mac, your hardware, your account or your email, and it is never sent anywhere else.

When you send a rating, that identifier travels with it so our server can check two things: that this copy of QuizBlast has existed for more than a day, and that it hasn't already rated this version. Then the identifier is discarded and the rating is stored without it. The two are never saved together.

This is the only thing QuizBlast reports about itself, it happens once, and it carries nothing about your lesson, your students, your decks or your account. Aside from this and the update check, the app does not talk to us in the background while you teach.

Your decks and questions

The questions, answers and images you write are yours. Decks live on your Mac. In cloud mode, question content and any attached images pass through the relay so students can see them, and images are held briefly in memory so thirty students don't each pull the same file through your connection. Deck content is never written to our disks and is discarded when the game ends or the cache fills. We do not read, mine, or use your questions for any purpose other than delivering them to your students.

Who else is involved

The four companies in the chain

QuizBlast is one person, not a data broker, and the list of others who touch anything is short and complete:

• DigitalOcean — the server the relay runs on, and the encrypted off‑site backups of the account database. Located in the United States.
• Cloudflare — sits in front of the service to handle encryption and absorb attacks. Traffic passes through, and is not retained by us there.
• Stripe — payments. They hold your card details and billing record; we hold only an identifier pointing at it.
• Resend — sends your sign‑in codes and billing emails. They process your email address to deliver them.

That is the whole list. Nobody is paid for access to data, and no data is shared for anyone's marketing.

Retention

How long anything is kept

• Student data: for the duration of the game. Nothing survives it.
• Sign‑in codes: hashed, single‑use, deleted within the hour.
• Infrastructure logs: 30 days, then deleted automatically.
• Problem reports you choose to send: 30 days, then deleted automatically.
• Ratings you choose to send: kept indefinitely, because they are anonymous — there is nobody for them to be about. The app's random self‑identifier is never stored alongside a rating. On our side we keep it while it is in use and delete it after 180 days with no rating sent; the app simply registers a new one the next time it needs it, so nothing breaks and nothing is kept that isn't doing a job.
• Backups of the account database: 30 days.
• Your account: until you ask us to delete it. Education is seasonal — we don't delete accounts for going quiet over a summer.

Your choices

Seeing it, or getting rid of it

Email support@quizblast.net and ask. You can request a copy of what we hold about your account, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Deletion is permanent and immediate: the account row and every sign‑in record for that address are erased, not merely hidden. If you have a paid subscription we will cancel and settle it first, so that deleting an account can never leave a card being charged for something that no longer exists.

There is no self‑service deletion button in the app on purpose — a mis‑tap that irreversibly destroys an account is a worse outcome than sending an email.

Schools & districts

For the privacy officer

When a school or district uses QuizBlast, we act on the school's behalf and under its direction with respect to student information. Concretely:

• We collect no persistent identifier from a student device, and no student contact information of any kind.
• We hold no education records. Scores and answers never reach our servers; they remain on the teacher's computer.
• We never use student information for advertising, never build profiles, and never sell or rent it. This is a design property, not a policy promise — the data isn't collected in the first place.
• We do not knowingly collect information from any student beyond the display name and session identifier described above, whatever their age.
• A school may direct us to delete anything associated with its teachers or domain, and we will.

If your district requires a signed data privacy agreement, student data privacy addendum, or a completed vendor questionnaire, email support@quizblast.net. Where a signed agreement with your district conflicts with this page, the signed agreement governs.

Security

How it's protected

In cloud mode, all traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign‑in codes are stored only as hashes. Administrative access requires a second factor beyond a password, and the secret behind that second factor is encrypted with a key held outside the database, so a stolen backup does not carry it. Backups are encrypted and stored off‑site.

No system is perfect, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. If you believe you have found a security problem, email support@quizblast.net — you will get a real reply from the person who wrote the code.

Elsewhere

If you're outside the United States

QuizBlast is operated from the United States and its servers are located there, so using it means your information is processed in the US. If you are in a region with statutory rights over your personal data — access, correction, deletion, portability, or objection — email us and we will honour the request. The same address, the same person, the same answer.

Changes

If this page changes

The date at the top moves whenever it does. If a change meaningfully reduces the protection described here, teachers with accounts will be emailed before it takes effect — not notified afterwards by a silently edited page.