Privacy

Halqa for iPad · last updated 4 August 2026

Halqa collects nothing. There are no accounts, no analytics, and no servers of ours for anything to be sent to.

How it works

Halqa runs entirely on one iPad. That iPad serves the game to phones over your own local network — the same Wi-Fi everyone in the room is already on. It works with no internet connection at all.

There is exactly one thing that reaches the internet, and only when you ask for it: installing a game from a link. If you paste a halqa.education address and press Install, the iPad fetches that file and nothing else. It sends no information about you, your room or your session, it accepts links from no other site, and it never does this on its own. Nothing about a session ever leaves the iPad by any route.

The saved log

Halqa keeps a record of what a session did — rounds starting, answers arriving, teams joining by name — so that a facilitator can export it if something goes wrong. Normally that record lives in memory only and goes when the app closes.

It can be kept on the iPad instead, and it is off until you turn it on. The switch is behind the ⋯ menu, beside Export Error Log. It is there because an app that has crashed cannot export anything, so the failures most worth diagnosing are the ones that leave nothing behind.

This is the whole of what it holds. Every line is a timestamp and one short phrase:

Which activity was started, and when.
Each round opening, being revealed, skipped, or looked back at.
Team names, with their seat numbers, as teams join or rejoin — see the warning below.
That a team answered, and which round it answered — never what it chose or wrote.
Pacing: pausing and resuming, and how much time was left.
Annotation being cleared from a page — that it was cleared, never what was on it.
For an activity that carries its own program: that a team sent it an action, and the action's name — a label the activity's author chose, never anything the student wrote. Likewise a control you pressed that belongs to such an activity.
Housekeeping: an activity installed or hidden, the theme changed, joining locked, the room cleared.
The server starting and stopping, and the address it was reachable at while it ran — including a server that stopped on its own and was restarted, and, at the next launch, that a previous run ended without stopping.
Halqa leaving the screen while a session is running, and how many seconds later it came back.
Somebody opening the lesson review, with how big that document was and how long it took to build — never who opened it.
Any error the app showed you, which can include the name of a file you were importing.
The app's version at each launch.

A real excerpt, in full:

2026-08-30 10:14:52  app_launch: Halqa 2.0 (21)
2026-08-30 10:15:31  game_start: photosynthesis
2026-08-30 10:15:44  join: Table 3 (seat 1)
2026-08-30 10:16:02  answer: Table 3 on r-2
2026-08-30 10:16:20  reveal: r-2
2026-08-30 10:16:58  blank_page: blank-1
2026-08-30 10:31:07  ISSUE: Server stopped unexpectedly

Turning the log on or off is itself recorded, so a gap in the file is never ambiguous about which it was.

It does not hold what any student chose, typed or tapped; scores or standings; anything drawn on a slide; any address, device identifier or location; or anything at all from a phone beyond the team name that phone was given.

Team names are the one thing here that could identify somebody, and only if your class uses real names as team names. If that matters for your room, ask for table numbers or invented names — which is worth doing anyway, since the same names appear in the session CSV you can already export.

When it is on: the file stays on that iPad, is excluded from device backups, is deleted automatically after three weeks, and can be deleted by hand from the same menu. It is sent nowhere — if you want it looked at, you export and share it yourself, the same as any other file.

What students provide

A team name, typed by the students themselves, and a seat number the app assigns. That is everything.

Nobody signs in. There are no accounts and no passwords.
Team names exist only while the session is running, and are gone when it ends or the server is stopped.
Nothing identifies an individual student. A team is a name someone chose and a number.
No device identifiers, advertising identifiers, or location data are read or stored.

What the facilitator can export

A facilitator can export a log of what happened in a session — teams joining, rounds revealed, rounds skipped — as a file. That file is created only when they ask for it, and it stays on the iPad unless they choose to share it. It is a record of the session, not a record of individual students, and Halqa never sends it anywhere.

Children

Halqa is used in classrooms, so students are often children. Because no personal information is collected from anyone, none is collected from children either. Students do not create accounts and are never asked for anything about themselves.

Third parties

There are none. Halqa contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no third-party SDKs of any kind. No data is shared or sold, because there is no data to share or sell.

Games you install or create

Games are files stored on the iPad. Games created with the help of an AI assistant are written by the facilitator, on their own device — that conversation happens in the assistant, under whatever terms the facilitator has with its provider. Halqa itself sends nothing to anyone.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the date above changes with it. Given that the app collects nothing, changes are only likely if the app itself gains something that does.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@halqa.education