Privacy policy

This website

The website is a set of static pages. It has no sign-up, no forms, no comment system, and no analytics or advertising scripts. It does not set cookies.

If you use the theme switch in the header, your choice (light, dark, or system) is stored in your own browser's local storage so the page remembers it next time. That value never leaves your browser, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Like any website, the service that hosts these pages may keep standard access logs (your IP address, browser type, and the time of each request) to serve and protect the site. We do not add anything to those logs and do not use them to identify you.

Download links point to GitHub, which hosts the app's releases and source code. Once you follow one of those links, GitHub's own privacy statement applies. Fonts are bundled with the site and are not loaded from a third-party font service.

The Academic OS app

Academic OS runs on your computer and serves its interface to your own browser at 127.0.0.1:7878. There is no account to create and no server of ours for the app to talk to. We do not operate any backend, and we have no way to see, receive, or recover your data.

What the app stores, and where

Everything you enter lives in a folder on your machine, ~/.academic-os by default (or the folder you set with ACADEMIC_OS_DATA). That includes your profile, applications, courses, grades, study tasks, essays and attached documents, assistant memory, and connection settings. The files are plain JSONL, markdown, and your own attachments. Deleting that folder deletes all of it.

What the app does not do

• No telemetry, usage statistics, or crash reports are sent anywhere.
• No advertising, tracking, or identifiers.
• No cloud sync. The app has no hosted copy of your data, and no opt-in that would add one.
• The packaged app never sends your essays, grades, or chats to a hosted AI service. The assistant uses a model file you download once, or an Ollama instance running on your own machine.

When the app does use the network

Each of these happens only when you turn the feature on or use it, and each connects to the third party directly from your computer. None of them pass through us.

• Canvas sync. If you connect Canvas, the app calls your school's Canvas server with the personal access token you paste in. The token is stored locally in data/connectors/, is masked in the interface, and is excluded from the app's own backups.
• Calendar feeds. If you add a school calendar link (ICS), the app fetches that URL to read courses and due dates.
• Local AI model download. The first time you set up local AI, the app downloads a model file from huggingface.co and verifies its checksum. After that the model runs offline.
• Scholarship scout and assistant web tools. When you run the scholarship scout, or an assistant uses its web search tool, your search query is sent to DuckDuckGo and the app fetches the result pages it reads. Nothing from your profile is sent other than the search terms the scout builds from the criteria you chose.
• Update check. On the packaged macOS build, the update button in Settings asks GitHub's public API for the latest release.
• Ollama. If you already run Ollama, the app talks to it on localhost.

Running the app from source adds optional, off-by-default integrations configured through a .env file (for example an iCloud calendar login or a hosted AI provider key). They are inactive unless you fill those values in yourself, and the packaged downloads ship without them.

Notifications and memory

On a Mac, deadline reminders are shown as native notifications from your machine. Other platforms show the same digest on the dashboard. The assistant keeps a local memory of things you tell it so it can recall them later; Settings lists every entry and lets you delete any of them or forget everything.

Backups

The in-app backup copies your data folder to a location you choose. If you choose a folder that a cloud service syncs, that service's privacy terms apply to the copy. Connection credentials are never included in a backup.

Children

Neither the website nor the app collects personal information from anyone, so there is nothing collected from children. Students under 13 should use the app with a parent or guardian.

Your rights

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to access, correct, export, or delete on your behalf: you already have all of it, in your own folder, in plain files. If you believe this page is wrong about anything, open an issue and we will correct it.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the history is visible in the site's source repository.

Contact

Questions and corrections: open an issue on GitHub.