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Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 6, 2026

Data We Collect

Account data: email address, display name, and hashed password (stored by Supabase Auth).

Conversation data: the AI conversation text you submit for analysis. This is stored to generate your engagement report and track your progress over time.

Survey data: if you complete an AI Modes survey, your responses are stored and linked to your account to provide your profile and related insights.

Usage data: if, and only if, you turn on the analytics category described under “Cookies and tracking” below, we record page views, clicks, scroll depth, time on page, file downloads, and form activity — including when you begin filling in a form and leave without sending it. For a click we also store the visible text of the link or button, up to 100 characters, so we can tell which wording people act on. Alongside each event we record your browser, operating system, device type, screen size, language, and referring page. We derive an approximate location (country, region, city) from your IP address: that location is stored as ordinary text, while the IP address itself is stored only as a one-way hash, never in plain text, and the hash is also used for rate limiting. If you do not turn analytics on, none of this is collected.

Short Theory Walkthrough and Tutor Data

If you turn on analytics and use the short AIEM theory walkthrough, AI Modes stores your walkthrough session, content-check answers, section activity, paragraph highlight toggles, and submitted tutor exchanges. A tutor exchange includes your question, the lesson or paragraph you attached, the AI reply, timing, model and provider details, token use, and processing cost. Unsubmitted tutor drafts and continuous mouse movements are not recorded.

The tutor sends the recorded question and relevant lesson context through OpenRouter to an eligible AI provider under the data policy described below. These records are used to provide the explanation, identify concepts people struggle with, control costs, diagnose failures, and improve the product. Do not include names, student records, employer information, client information, or other private material in a tutor question.

Choosing “Start over” creates a new walkthrough session and clears the answers and progress shown in your browser. It does not delete the earlier product record. The old and new sessions are linked as a user-requested restart so later analysis does not treat them as unrelated visitors.

Certificate Tutorial Data

The AIEM certificate assignment stores your survey answers, content-check answers and revisions, two practice conversations, conversation-specific reflections, written explanations, scores, feedback, completion record, and versioned report. It also stores bounded interaction events such as which tutorial control was selected, paragraph highlight toggles, card hover episodes, page activity, and low-frequency active-time heartbeats. It does not store continuous mouse paths or raw pointer coordinates. Click records use bounded control identifiers rather than copied link text, form values, URLs, or DOM paths.

These records let the assignment save and resume, produce your report and scoresheet, maintain answer history, enforce the shared AI budget, diagnose failures, and improve the product. Interaction events and time estimates never determine whether you qualify for a certificate.

While you are working, the site also keeps an essential recovery copy of answers and drafts in this browser's local storage. This prevents a reload or temporary connection loss from erasing work that has not reached AI Modes yet. Each recovery item is removed after the server confirms it, or when the related form is submitted. Recovery copies stay on this device and are not shared with analytics services.

Your certificate report is private to your account. AI Modes does not automatically send the standalone report to an instructor. You decide whether to share the printable scoresheet or report. A course-integrated assignment may separately give an authorized instructor the scores or completion information described by that assignment; instructors do not receive raw conversation text through the standard course report.

How We Use Your Data

  • To analyze your AI conversations and generate engagement reports
  • To provide personalized feedback, benchmarks, and growth predictions
  • To operate, secure, evaluate, and improve AI Modes and the AI Engagement Model
  • To enforce rate limits and prevent abuse
  • To process payments (via Stripe)

Research Use

Operating and improving AI Modes is product activity. Using the service does not by itself enroll you in an academic research study or provide blanket consent for publication research.

If AI Modes data is later included in an academic study or publication, that use will follow the applicable institutional review determination and the consent or data-use terms for that study. A study may invite you separately and will explain any additional collection, linkage, sharing, withdrawal, and retention rules that apply to it.

Data Sharing

We have never sold your data, and we never will. Nothing here is sold, rented, or handed to advertisers, data brokers, aggregators, or any other business that trades in personal information. There is no advertising technology anywhere on this site — no ad network, no tracking pixel, no third-party analytics tag — and none will be added. We do not “share” personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising as California law defines that term, because we do not do behavioural advertising at all.

What we do have is a short list of service providers who process data on our instructions in order to run the site. They may only use it to provide their service to us, and may not sell it or use it for their own purposes. The complete list:

  • Vercel — hosting. Serves every request and resolves the approximate location described above.
  • Supabase — the database and authentication behind the site. Account and application data lives here.
  • Anthropic (Claude API) — conversation text you submit is sent to Claude for classification. Anthropic’s privacy policy applies.
  • OpenRouter and routed AI providers — certificate conversations and written work may be sent through OpenRouter to an eligible model provider for replies and scoring. The certificate workflow requests providers that do not use the request for training and do not retain it beyond what is needed to provide the response.
  • Stripe — payments. We never see or store card numbers.
  • Resend — transactional email. Receives the address a message is being sent to.
  • Upstash — rate limiting. Receives the one-way hash of your IP address as a counter key, and nothing else.
  • Qualtrics — hosts the research surveys, where those are used. Only survey responses, and only if you take one.
  • Your instructor — if you are enrolled in a course-integrated assignment, an authorized instructor may see the scores, completion information, and mode distributions described by that assignment, but not your raw conversation text through the standard course report. The standalone certificate report is not sent automatically; you choose whether to share its scoresheet or report.

Data Retention

AI Modes does not apply a scheduled deletion date to account records, submission history, certificate attempts, scores, reports, or de-identified product records. We retain them to provide longitudinal results, operate and secure the service, investigate failures, and improve the product. You may request deletion of your account and associated personal data by contacting us. We may retain limited records when required for security, fraud prevention, payment, legal obligations, or the integrity of an issued certificate receipt.

Cookies and tracking

We group everything this site stores on your device into three categories. Nothing outside the essential category is stored or read until you make a choice, and you can change that choice at any time.

Essential (always on)

These cannot be switched off, because the site cannot do what you asked of it without them. They are: a Supabase authentication cookie that keeps you signed in; a record of your cookie choice, so we do not have to ask again; short-lived certificate recovery drafts that prevent connection loss from erasing your work; and an anonymous device token in localStorage, together with a browser fingerprint derived from your screen, timezone and graphics rendering, used solely to rate limit free submissions so that one person cannot exhaust the free tier. The fingerprint is stored as a hash. None of these are used to build a profile of you or shared with anyone.

Analytics (off unless you turn it on)

Records how the site is used, as described under “Usage data” above, so we can tell which explanations work. This covers the main site and the interactive theory explainer, which also assigns you to a version of the page so we can compare how well different explanations land. The approximate location is worked out by our hosting provider, Vercel, and handed to us along with the request; your IP address is not sent to any third-party lookup service.

Preferences (off unless you turn it on)

Remembers optional interface choices between visits. Switching this off simply means the site forgets them.

Changing your mind, and Global Privacy Control

Withdrawing is as easy as consenting: use the control here or in the footer of any page. Withdrawing stops collection immediately and clears the analytics identifiers we had stored. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat it as a standing refusal of everything non-essential: you will not see a cookie banner, and nothing optional runs. You can still opt in deliberately through the preferences panel if you want to.

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law. Nothing collected here reaches a data broker, an aggregator, or an advertiser.

Research studies are separate

If you enroll in one of our research studies, that study follows its applicable institutional review determination and the consent or data-use terms presented for the study. That is separate from the cookie choice above. The cookie preferences panel does not govern study participation, and rejecting cookies does not withdraw you from a study — to withdraw, follow the instructions provided by that study or contact us.

Browser Extension

The AI Modes browser extension captures conversations on supported AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and sends them to aimodes.ai for scoring. The extension is optional — the site works without it.

What the extension collects: the text of AI conversations on supported platforms only, and only when you explicitly start a study session from the floating pill. The conversation is sent to aimodes.ai over HTTPS, associated with your aimodes account, and scored by the same engagement pipeline used for pasted conversations.

What the extension does NOT collect: browsing history, cookies, text from unsupported sites, keystrokes, passwords, or any data when a study session is not active. The extension makes no network requests to domains other than aimodes.ai. No third-party analytics are loaded.

How to revoke access: uninstall the extension, or revoke the device token from Account Settings. Revoked device tokens stop working immediately.

Retention: conversation text captured by the extension is stored in the same place as other submissions. You can opt to have the raw transcript deleted automatically after scoring; aggregate scores and mode tags remain so your progress view stays intact.

Your Rights

You have the right to: access your data, correct inaccurate data, request deletion of your data, and withdraw from a research study when the study’s terms provide that right. Contact mark_keith@byu.edu to exercise these rights.

Contact

For privacy-related questions, contact us at mark_keith@byu.edu.