Privacy Policy

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 the research survey, your responses are stored and linked to your account for personalized 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.

How We Use Your Data

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

Research Use

AI Modes™ is part of an ongoing academic research program at Brigham Young University. Your engagement data may be used in published research in anonymized, aggregate form. No personally identifiable information (name, email, conversation content) is included in publications.

If you are a student enrolled in a course that uses AI Modes, contact your instructor for details about how your participation fits into their course research protocol.

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.
• 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, they can see your engagement scores and mode distributions, but never your raw conversation text.

Data Retention

Account data and submission history are retained as long as your account is active. You may request deletion of your account and all associated data by contacting us. Anonymous submission data (from users without accounts) is retained for research purposes but cannot be linked to an individual.

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; 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 Cookie preferences 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 collects data under the research consent you give inside the study itself, reviewed under our human-subjects protocol. That is a different legal basis 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 in the study’s consent form 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 opt out of research participation. Contact mark_keith@byu.edu to exercise these rights.

Contact

For privacy-related questions, contact Dr. Mark Keith at mark_keith@byu.edu.