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Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 2026  ·  Operated by the Universitas Scholarium.

What we collect

We collect as little as possible and use no tracking, analytics, or advertising of any kind.

• Your email address — for sign-in and account management only.
• A session identifier (us_user_id) — strictly necessary to keep you signed in. Not used for tracking.
• An exchange count — the number of exchanges you have used, to enforce your tier allowance.
• Compressed session summaries — when a conversation has at least three exchanges, a compressed summary (under 200 bytes) is stored. Up to five summaries per simulacrum are retained. These are not transcripts — they are extremely compressed notations of intellectual territory covered. Raw conversation text is not stored, with two strictly limited exceptions described below.
• A 48-hour resume window (paying tiers only) — so that an interrupted conversation can be resumed, the last 20 messages you exchanged with a simulacrum are kept on our servers for a maximum of 48 hours, then automatically and permanently deleted by an hourly sweep. Free-tier conversations are never stored. In open tutorials and symposia, longer-term continuity comes only from the compressed summaries and cognitive core, never from transcripts.
• Course transcripts (structured courses only) — if you are enrolled in a course, your conversation with the tutor inside each module is kept in full, so that the tutor can resume a module you left part-way and hold the thread of the teaching across sessions weeks apart. A 200-byte summary cannot carry a course: the argument developed with the tutor is the teaching state. This is the only place where conversation text is kept beyond 48 hours, and it applies only within courses — never to open tutorials or symposia. Where a module conversation grows very long, older turns are dropped and only the most recent are retained. Course transcripts are private, visible to no one but you, and are permanently deleted when you close your account or on request.
• A cognitive core — every three sessions, summaries are distilled into a single profile (up to 1,024 bytes) that captures your intellectual style across conversations, enabling a simulacrum to remember you across sessions.

On the web platform only: your last 20 messages with each simulacrum are stored locally in your browser (localStorage) for visual continuity. On paying tiers, the same recent messages are also held server-side within the 48-hour resume window described above.

What we do not collect

There are no analytics scripts on this platform. No Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no Hotjar, no Mixpanel, no tracking of any kind. We do not know which pages you visit, how long you stay, or where you came from. We know your email and your exchange count. That is all.

Outside structured courses, raw conversation text is not stored on our servers beyond the strictly limited 48-hour resume window (paying tiers only, last 20 messages, physically deleted by an automatic hourly sweep). The tutorial chatroom is ephemeral by design. Inside a course, module conversations are retained privately so that teaching can be resumed, as described above.

Third-party services

• Stripe — processes payments. Stripe sets its own fraud-prevention cookies for payment processing.
• Supabase — stores your account data and exchange count.
• Google Fonts — font files loaded from Google servers. No cookies, but your IP address is transmitted to Google.
• Anthropic — powers the simulacra. Your messages are processed by Anthropic’s API. Anthropic does not retain API inputs for training by default.

We do not share your data with any other third parties, and we do not sell it.

Cookies

We set one cookie: a session identifier (us_user_id) strictly necessary to keep you signed in. Because all cookies are strictly necessary, EU law does not require consent. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing optional to consent to.

Your rights (GDPR)

If you are in the EEA or United Kingdom, you have the following rights under the GDPR:

• Right of access — request a copy of all data we hold about you.
• Right to erasure — request deletion of all your data, including session summaries, cognitive core, and course transcripts. You may ask us to delete everything, or only a specified part.
• Right to rectification — request correction of inaccurate data.
• Right to restriction — request that we restrict processing of your data.
• Right to portability — request your data in a portable format.

To exercise any of these rights, write to porters_lodge@universitas-scholarium.org. No account with any other service is required. We will respond within 30 days.

Lawful basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) — the interest in providing an educational service that genuinely remembers users, balanced against the privacy interest in not retaining raw conversational content.

Data retention

Your account, exchange count, session summaries, cognitive core, and any course transcripts are retained for as long as your account exists. Verbatim conversation text outside courses (the 48-hour resume window, paying tiers only) is physically deleted within 48 hours of your last message with that simulacrum. If you request account deletion, all data — including session summaries, cognitive core, course transcripts, any live resume windows, and sign-in tokens — is permanently removed within 30 days. You may also ask us to delete a particular course transcript, or all of them, without closing your account.

iOS app

The Universitas Scholarium iOS app collects the same data as the web platform. Your email address is stored in the iOS Keychain to keep you signed in between sessions. Conversation history is held in memory during the session only and is not persisted to disk.

The app does not use advertising identifiers, does not track across other apps or websites, and does not share data with data brokers.