Privacy policy

This Privacy Policy explains how personal data is handled when you use Mektebi (the platform at mektebi.ch), an online platform for Islamic education that connects mosques and their religious schools (mektebs) with their students, parents and teachers. The platform is operated by FETOSOFT DOOEL, a company established in the Republic of North Macedonia, and the processing of personal data described here is governed primarily by the Law on Personal Data Protection of the Republic of North Macedonia (Official Gazette of RNM No. 42/2020, as amended) (the "LPDP"). The LPDP is harmonised with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If your mosque/school is in Switzerland, your data is also protected by the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (revFADP), under which your school is the controller and FETOSOFT acts as its processor; the Swiss data-protection rules and the oversight of the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) apply to that processing. If you are in the European Union, the GDPR may also apply. We have written this policy in plain language, as the LPDP requires.

1. Who is responsible for your data

Mektebi is a multi-tenant platform, so two different parties are responsible for personal data, in two different roles under the LPDP:

• Your mosque / school is the controller of the personal data of its students, parents and teachers. It decides who is enrolled and what is recorded about them. If you are a student, a parent or a teacher, your school is your first point of contact for data-protection questions.
• FETOSOFT DOOEL is the processor for that data — we host and operate the platform on the school's behalf and on its documented instructions. We are also the independent controller for the limited data we collect in our own right: the registration and contact details of the person who signs a school up, our direct correspondence with that person, security and operational logs, and information about visitors to our public website.

The platform operator is:

FETOSOFT DOOEL
Goce Delchev 2/32
1300 Kumanovo, North Macedonia
Email: support@fetosoft.com

2. The personal data we process

Depending on your role, the following categories of personal data may be processed:

• Account & contact data: name, email address, phone number, password (stored only as a secure hash), preferred language, and the dates on which you accepted these terms and this policy.
• Profile data: honorific and (where relevant) Islamic title, gender, date of birth, language, the educational level a student is assigned to, and mentor/teacher relationships.
• Address data: street, city, region, postal code and country (stored encrypted).
• Educational records (for students): course enrolments, grades, lesson progress, attendance, and the family/guardian relationships needed to link a child to a parent.
• Content & uploads: profile photos/avatars, and the teaching materials (text, images, audio) that teachers publish.
• Technical data: a secure session cookie, and security/error logs needed to keep the service running. On the public website, and only for visitors who are not signed in and only if they agree, we also use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used (see section 4); it is never used inside the platform once you are signed in. We do not use advertising or advertising cookies, the mobile apps contain no analytics at all, and we do not log your sign-in IP address for profiling.
• Security data: if you enable two-factor authentication, the secret and backup codes needed to verify your logins.
• Messages: the chats you take part in — text, voice messages, photos, PDF files and cards linking to a lesson, course or assignment — and when you last read each chat (see "Chats and messages" below).
• Absences and notices: absence reports that parents send in advance (dates, an optional reason such as "sick", and an optional note), and records of which mosque notices you received, opened and confirmed.
• Learning progress: the recitations a teacher records (what was recited, the result, an optional note and, if the teacher makes one, an audio recording of the recitation), a learner's answers in lesson exercises (which can include drawings, a photo of a workbook page and a recording of the learner reading), teachers' remarks in progress reports, the reports published to families and whether they were marked as seen, and how far you listened in a lesson's audio.
• Sign-in and calendar data: a record of each device you are signed in on, and your private calendar link if you use it.

Special-category data and religious context

Because Mektebi exists to teach about Islam, the fact that someone is enrolled at a mosque or holds an Islamic title can reveal religious belief. Under the LPDP this is a special category of personal data and is treated with particular care. Where this data is processed for a school's members, the school (as controller) is responsible for obtaining the necessary explicit consent from members or, for children, their parents/guardians. FETOSOFT processes it only as instructed by the school.

Children's data

Many students are minors. Mektebi does not create direct relationships with children outside the school context: a child is added by their school, which is responsible for any consent required. In Switzerland there is no fixed digital age of consent — a child who has the necessary capacity of judgment may consent themselves, otherwise their parent or legal guardian consents; in the EU a minimum age may apply under the GDPR. If you believe a child's data has been provided to us without proper authority, contact your school or us, and it will be corrected or removed.

One login across several mosques

If you belong to more than one mosque on Mektebi, you have a separate profile at each mosque, and no mosque can see another mosque's records about you (such as enrolments, grades, attendance or notes); the platform enforces this separation. Your login — your name, email address, profile photo and password — is one account that you manage yourself. Your name, email address and profile photo are visible to every mosque you belong to. A mosque cannot change the login of a person who also belongs to another mosque.

Chats and messages

Mektebi has chats within each mosque. Learners and parents can write to their teachers and to the mosque office; teachers can write to their learners and to their learners' parents. Teachers can also run a class channel for each course and groups of learners, in which learners can reply only if the teacher allows it. Approved parents of a learner under 18 (or whose date of birth is not recorded) can read along in their child's chats but do not write in them. A message can be text, a voice message (up to 5 minutes), a photo, a PDF file (up to 10 MB) or a card linking to a lesson, course or assignment. The text of messages is encrypted at rest. Voice messages, photos and files are shown only to the people who can open the chat, through links that expire after five minutes. Teachers and administrators who run a chat can see who has read it.

Safeguarding. Because many learners are children, the administrators of a mosque can open every chat in that mosque. Chats never reach beyond one mosque.

Deleting messages. You can delete your own message within 15 minutes of sending it; its text and any file are then removed, including from replies that quoted it. Otherwise, chats are kept for as long as the mosque uses Mektebi: a course's class channel is deleted with the course; the chats with the mosque office and the parent–teacher chats about a person are deleted, files included, when that person is removed from the mosque; and all chats are deleted with the mosque's account. Messages that a removed person wrote in other chats remain, but no longer show their name.

Reporting and blocking. You can report a message with Report message and block a person with Block. You then no longer see the blocked person's messages or receive notifications about them, and they can no longer start a chat with you. A report goes to the mosque's administrators and, by email, to FETOSOFT. It contains the reported message, your reason if you give one, and the names and email addresses of the person reporting and of the author; the author is not told who reported them. FETOSOFT reviews reports within 24 hours (see our Terms and conditions).

Absence reports and health data

Parents can let the mosque know in advance that a child will miss class. An absence report contains the dates, an optional reason (sick, family, travel or other) and an optional short note; the note is encrypted at rest. The report appears as a card in the parent's chat with the mosque office about that child, where the mosque's administrators see it. The teachers of the classes concerned receive a notification without the child's name or the note, and see the note in their class list. The note is never included in a push notification, an email or the weekly summary. Absence reports are deleted 12 months after the end of the school year to which they belong.

The reason "sick", or a note that mentions an illness, is health data: a special category of personal data (Art. 9 GDPR and the corresponding rules of the LPDP; "sensitive personal data" under Art. 5(c) revFADP). It is processed only so that the mosque can organise its classes and excuse absences, on the mosque's behalf and on its instructions as controller. Please give only what the mosque needs to know: "sick" is enough, a diagnosis is not needed.

Mosque notices

The mosque, and its teachers if the mosque allows it, can send notices to families and staff, for example about a closure or with a permission slip, sometimes with a PDF or image attached. A notice arrives as a notification in the app and on the website; closures and urgent notices, and notices to people who do not use the app, are also sent by email. Mektebi records who received a notice, when they opened it and, where the notice asks for it, which parent confirmed it for which child. The mosque's administrators see these records by name; a teacher who sends a notice sees only the numbers. The records are deleted 12 months after the notice expires.

Progress tracking and reports

Teachers can record what a learner recites (for example a primer lesson, pages of the Qur'an or a passage learned by heart), with the result and an optional note, which is encrypted at rest. Mektebi uses these records to show the learner's progress to the mosque's staff, to the learner and to their parents. For each reporting period, the mosque can publish a progress report with a teacher's remark to the family. Each published version is kept as an encrypted snapshot, so that what the family received stays on record, and it can be downloaded as a PDF. When a parent marks a report as seen, the mosque's staff can see this.

Following a learner. Teachers and administrators can follow a learner of their mosque. They are then notified when someone else adds a note about the learner, logs a recitation or records an absence, or when the learner hands in an assignment. Only the mosque's staff can follow a learner, and these notifications stay within the mosque.

Recitation recordings and lesson exercises

A mosque can switch recitation recordings on; they are off until it does. A teacher who logs a recitation can then also record the learner reciting. Recording is optional: the teacher decides whether to record, and a recitation can be logged without a recording. The recording serves only the learner's teaching: the teacher can listen to it again, and the learner and their parents can hear how the recitation went. It is stored with that recitation entry and can be played by the mosque's staff, by the learner and by the approved parents of a learner under 18 (or whose date of birth is not recorded), through links that expire after five minutes. It is never published, never shared with other mosques, and never sent by email or in a push notification. Recordings are not used to recognise anyone by their voice and are not analysed automatically.

A recording is deleted at once when the mosque's staff remove it, when its recitation entry is deleted, when the learner is removed from the mosque or deletes their own account, and with the mosque's account. Learners and parents can ask the mosque at any time to delete a recording. Parents can also ask the mosque not to record their child; the mosque can then switch recordings off for that learner.

Lesson exercises. Teachers can add exercises to a lesson. A learner's answers are kept with the lesson and can include drawings or handwriting, a photo of a workbook page and a recording of the learner reading. A reading is uploaded only where the mosque has switched recordings on and has not switched them off for that learner; otherwise it stays on the learner's device. These files are shown to the same people as a recitation recording, through the same links that expire after five minutes. They are deleted when the learner is removed from the mosque and with the mosque's account; when a learner deletes their own account, their drawings, photos and recordings are deleted, and only the results of their answers stay with the mosque. When correcting homework, a teacher can add a short voice note; it is shown with the correction to the people who can see that homework.

Calendar subscription link

Learners and parents can show their class timetable in their own calendar app, such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. For this, Mektebi creates a private link. The calendar app you choose, and the company behind it, fetches this link from its own servers without signing in, so anyone who has the link can read the timetable. It contains the mosque's name, the course names, the dates, times and rooms of the classes from the past 30 days to about six months ahead, and, for a parent with several children, each child's first name. You can replace the link at any time on your timetable page; the old link then stops working at once. The calendar company processes the timetable under its own terms; it is not one of our sub-processors.

Sign-in sessions and where you left off

For each device on which you are signed in, Mektebi stores a session record: a hash (a one-way fingerprint) of a random key kept in your session cookie, when the session started and when the device was last used. It does not store your IP address or device type with it. Signing out deletes the record, so the session really ends; a device that has not been used for two weeks must sign in again, and changing your password signs out your other devices. For lessons with audio, Mektebi also remembers how far you listened and when you last opened the lesson, so that you can carry on where you stopped.

3. Why we process it, and our lawful basis

We rely on the following lawful bases under the LPDP:

• To provide the platform to a school and its administrators — performance of a contract.
• To process students', parents' and teachers' data on the school's behalf — under our processor relationship with the school, governed by the data-processing agreement required by the LPDP; the school provides the lawful basis (typically consent, including explicit consent for the religious context).
• To keep the service secure and working (authentication, error monitoring, abuse prevention) — our legitimate interests.
• To comply with legal obligations where they apply.

We do not make decisions about you by solely automated means that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Progress and attendance tracking are tools for your teachers, not automated decisions.

4. Cookies and similar technologies

Mektebi uses strictly necessary cookies — an encrypted session cookie and a security (CSRF) token that are required to log you in and keep the site safe. Because these are essential to a service you have requested, no consent is required for them. We also use your browser's local storage to remember interface preferences (such as theme and menu order) and your cookie choice. Which “Show me” tours you have finished is saved with your account preferences, so the list is the same on all your devices; your browser also keeps a copy of this list so that it works offline.

Language of the website. When you open the public website without being signed in, our server uses your IP address to work out which country you are visiting from, so that the site opens in a suitable language. The lookup uses a database kept on our own server: your IP address is not sent to anyone for this, and the country is not stored. In the mobile apps, the language of your device is used instead. A cookie (locale) keeps the language in which you last used the website for one year, so that it opens in that language again on your next visit. It contains only the language code. Because it only keeps a setting you used, no consent is required for it.

First screen in the mobile apps. In the Mektebi iOS and Android apps, a cookie (mektebi_known_device) is set when you sign in or create an account, and kept for five years. It contains only the value “1” and is not readable by scripts. It only tells the app that someone has signed in on this device before, so that the app opens on the sign-in page instead of the course list. It is not linked to your account, signing out does not delete it, and you can remove it by clearing the app's data. Because it only keeps a setting needed to open the right first screen, no consent is required for it.

Usage statistics (website only, with your consent). On the public Mektebi website, for visitors who are not signed in, we use Google Analytics (Google LLC) to understand how the platform is used and to improve it, on the basis of your consent. On your first visit, a notice asks for your choice. Analytics cookies are set only after you click “Accept”; if you click “Decline” or make no choice, none are set. Google's advertising features are always switched off on our side: Google Analytics is never used for advertising or ad personalisation. Please note: even before you choose, your browser loads the Google Analytics script from Google's servers, and Google receives limited signals without cookies (for example, that a page was viewed); as with any connection to a server, Google receives your IP address in the process. Your choice is stored in your browser. To change it, delete the stored data for mektebi.ch in your browser settings; the notice will then appear again. Once you are signed in, Google Analytics is never loaded inside the platform, and the mobile apps do not load it or show this notice (see section 5). We do not use any other analytics, advertising or cross-site tracking technology.

5. Mobile apps

Mektebi is also available as a mobile app for iPhone and iPad (from the Apple App Store) and for Android (from Google Play). The apps show the same Mektebi service as the website: the same data is processed, for the same purposes, and the same roles apply (your mosque/school is the controller and FETOSOFT is the processor; see section 1). Everything in this policy therefore applies to the apps as well. The points below are specific to the apps.

Push notifications

If you allow notifications, your device receives a push token — a technical identifier issued by Apple Push Notification service (on iPhone/iPad) or by Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (on Android). We store this token with your account so that we can deliver notifications to you, for example class reminders, new assignments, grades, certificates and messages. To deliver a notification, its content (a title, a short text and a link) is passed to Apple or Google, who act solely as delivery providers for this purpose. The token is removed when you sign out of the app on that device, and you can turn notifications off at any time in your device settings.

Notifications include, for example, a reminder the day before homework is due if it has not been handed in yet (to the learner and their parents), new grades, chat messages, mosque notices and absence reports. A chat notification shows the sender's name and the beginning of the message; for a voice message, photo or file it shows only the kind of message. You can switch off individual kinds of notification in your notification settings.

Microphone and camera

The apps use the microphone only while you record a voice message or a recitation (in a chat, for an assignment or a lesson exercise or, as a teacher, when you log a learner's recitation or add a voice note to a correction), and the camera only when you take a photo to send in a chat, to attach to an assignment or to answer a lesson exercise. Your device's operating system asks for your permission first, and you can revoke it at any time in your device settings. Recordings and photos are stored like any other uploaded file and are shown only to the people allowed to see that chat, submission, recitation or exercise (see section 7 and section 8).

No advertising, no tracking

The apps contain no advertising, no tracking and no third-party analytics.

Children

The apps follow the same rules for children as the rest of Mektebi (see "Children's data" in section 2): no tracking and no advertising. Minors' accounts are managed by the mosque/school staff and by their parents.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, in the app or on the website, under Settings → Danger zone → Delete account. The associated personal data is then deleted as described in section 9. Your other rights under section 10 remain unaffected.

6. Who we share data with (sub-processors)

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for commercial purposes. We use a small number of carefully chosen service providers who process data only on our instructions under a written processing agreement, as required by the LPDP:

We may also disclose data where required by law or to protect our rights, and to your own school, which is the controller of your data.

Public course catalogue

Courses that a mosque chooses to publish appear in the public course catalogue on the Mektebi website, which anyone can view without signing in. A published course shows its title and description, the mosque's name, the teacher's name and photo, and the number of enrolled learners. The mosque decides which courses it publishes.

Course library (sharing between mosques)

A mosque — its administrators or the teachers of a course — can share that course's content with other mosques through the Mektebi course library. Shared content is credited with the author's name and their mosque. It contains teaching content only (text, quizzes and embedded images or audio) and never learner data or mentions of people.

AI assistants you connect

Teachers and administrators can connect their own AI assistant (for example Claude or ChatGPT) to Mektebi to help them create draft courses. When you do, the course material you give the assistant, and the draft course content it reads back from Mektebi, is processed by that provider under your own account and its own terms; the provider is not one of our sub-processors. Mektebi never gives the assistant data about students, families or other people, and you can disconnect it at any time in Settings.

Access by FETOSOFT support staff

For support, and only when it is needed — for example to resolve a problem that you or your mosque has reported — authorised FETOSOFT support staff may access a mosque's data or sign in as a user (impersonation) in order to see the platform as that user does. Such access is used only for support and to keep the platform running, and the staff concerned are bound by confidentiality.

7. Where your data is stored and international transfers

Your personal data is stored within the European Economic Area (EEA): the application and database are hosted by Vultr in the Netherlands, and uploaded files (such as audio recordings, images and documents) are stored with Cloudflare R2 in storage bound to EU jurisdiction — all within the EEA, which Switzerland and the EU recognise as providing adequate protection.

The platform is operated by FETOSOFT DOOEL in North Macedonia, and our personnel access the data from there in order to operate and support the platform. North Macedonia is not on Switzerland's (or the EU's) list of countries with an adequate level of data protection. This access is therefore made under an appropriate safeguard — the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, in the version adapted for Switzerland and recognised by the FDPIC, which form part of the data-processing agreement concluded with your school. Some of our sub-processors (Postmark, Honeybadger, Google, Apple) process certain data in the United States, under the Swiss–U.S. / EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework where certified, or otherwise under the same Standard Contractual Clauses. Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S. company: your files remain stored in the EU, and any access by the provider is covered by the Data Privacy Framework or the same Standard Contractual Clauses. You may request a copy of the relevant safeguards from us at any time.

8. How we keep your data secure

Protecting your data is central to how Mektebi is built, and we want to be transparent about it. All communication with the platform is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS). In addition, sensitive personal data is encrypted at rest in our database — including postal and contact addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, religious titles (special-category data), guardian-relationship details, teacher notes, grades and grade/attendance remarks, two-factor-authentication secrets, and access tokens. Passwords are never stored in readable form (only as salted hashes), and your session cookie is encrypted and holds only a random key, which our server checks against its own session record (see section 2). All data is stored on access-controlled servers within the EEA, with strict separation between schools (each school sees only its own records — section 2 explains how your login works across several mosques), least-privilege access, optional two-factor authentication, and the other technical and organisational measures required by the LPDP.

The following are also encrypted at rest: the text of chat messages, notes in absence reports, teachers' notes on recitations, remarks in progress reports, and the published progress reports themselves.

9. How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only as long as necessary for the purposes above, in line with the storage-limitation principle of the LPDP. In practice, member data is retained for as long as the school keeps the account active. When an account or profile is deleted, the associated personal data is deleted or anonymised within 90 days, and removed from backups within the normal backup-rotation cycle. Where we are legally required to keep certain records, we retain them only for the period required by law.

Some data has its own, shorter retention period: absence reports are deleted 12 months after the end of their school year; records of who opened or confirmed a mosque notice are deleted 12 months after the notice expires; a recitation recording is deleted as soon as its recitation entry is deleted; session records of devices not used for two weeks are deleted; and a message you delete within 15 minutes loses its text and file at once. Chats are otherwise kept as described in section 2.

10. Your rights

Subject to the conditions in the LPDP, you have the right to:

• be informed about and access the personal data we hold about you;
• rectify inaccurate or incomplete data;
• erase your data;
• restrict or object to processing;
• data portability — receive your data in a portable format;
• withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing already carried out.

Because your school is the controller of your member data, the quickest way to exercise these rights is usually to contact your school. You may also write to us at support@fetosoft.com and we will act on the request or pass it to the responsible school, within the time limits set by the LPDP.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority:

• North Macedonia (lead authority): Agency for Personal Data Protection (Агенција за заштита на личните податоци / AZLP), Skopje.
• Switzerland: Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), Bern.
• European Union: the data-protection authority of your country of residence.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated version here and, where the changes are material, take reasonable steps to notify you.

12. Contact

For any question about this Privacy Policy or your personal data, contact us at:

FETOSOFT DOOEL
Goce Delchev 2/32
1300 Kumanovo, North Macedonia
Email: support@fetosoft.com

This document is provided for transparency and does not constitute legal advice; for the authoritative position please contact us.