Why ZEROTH runs in your own Google account and never phones home

ZEROTH installs into the buyer's own Google account and runs there. There is no publisher server in the loop, no telemetry, no license heartbeat and no account with us. We cannot read a learner's work, and we could not hand it over if someone asked, because there is no mechanism through which it would ever reach us.

That is a statement about architecture, not about how carefully we would guard data we had collected. The distinction matters, because the second kind of promise is only as good as the company making it.

What actually happens when you install it

You copy a Google Sheet. You run the installer from inside it. It builds the Classroom, the assignments, the readings, the quizzes and the experience ledger in your own Drive, using your own credentials, and then it is finished. The code that did it is sitting in the Sheet where you can read it. There is nothing to log in to afterwards and nothing to renew.

Everything a learner then produces — drafts, quiz results, marks, uploaded work, the ledger that follows them across the Semesters — lives in the adult's Drive and in each learner's own account. It is ordinary Google files. It opens, exports and survives independently of us.

What this costs us, honestly

It is worth being straight about the trade, because the disadvantages are real.

We have no analytics. We do not know which World is hardest, where learners stall, or which quiz question is badly worded, except when someone writes and tells us. Most publishers would consider that unacceptable, and on the product-improvement axis they are right.

We cannot enforce the license. The learner caps on the Family and Classroom tiers are license terms, not locks. Anyone who opens the code can see there is nothing to defeat. We decided that a promise of no callback is worth more than a check that a determined person removes in four minutes.

We cannot rescue you. If a Sheet is deleted, we cannot restore it. The course ships with the means to back itself up and the guides explain how, but the responsibility is genuinely yours, and we would rather say so than imply a safety net that does not exist.

Why we took that trade

Partly it is the compliance position. Several states moved during 2026 to restrict the use of student data for AI training and to require ed-tech vendors to certify what they hold. The simplest way to answer every one of those questions is to hold nothing. We are not managing a data-protection posture; we do not have one to manage.

Partly it is that the subject makes the demand. It would be incoherent to teach a fourteen-year-old to ask where their data goes and who benefits, using a product that quietly collected their work. A course about AI ethics that failed its own test would deserve the obvious response.

And partly it is longevity. A family buying a Semester is buying into a five-year arc. Subscriptions lapse, vendors pivot, companies are acquired and platforms shut down. A course that is just files in your own Drive is still there in 2031 whatever has happened to us.

What it means for you

No sign-up, no email address required for the free World 1, nothing to cancel. An ESA administrator asking what data the vendor holds gets a one-sentence answer. A school asking where student work is stored gets "in your own Google Workspace, as ordinary Docs." And if we vanish tomorrow, every Semester you bought keeps working.

The cost of that is that we are slightly blind and entirely unenforcing. We think that is the right way round.