Free Learning Apps and Child Data Privacy

Education software for Indian school children splits into two markets that rarely look at each other. The first is paid, runs on a school's licence, and is bought by institutions. The second is free, runs in a browser, and is found by a parent at eleven o'clock at night searching for something that matches the textbook their child came home with.

The second market is where the interesting engineering is. NCERT publishes the syllabus openly, so a free app that covers it chapter by chapter is genuinely possible, and a few exist. What is usually missing is the boring part: the child's data. Most free education apps monetise attention or collect personal data, and the privacy policy is where that shows up rather than the app store listing.

The work here covers both sides. Which free apps actually map to the NCERT syllabus, what "aligned to the textbook" means in practice, and how to read an education app's data practices before letting a child use it. We built one of them, Hooty, so we have opinions and a bias to disclose.