Privacy Policy

Luminate ("Luminate," "we," "us") is a course Q&A platform with an AI teaching assistant, currently offered as a free pilot to a small number of university courses. This policy explains what information we collect from students, TAs, and instructors who use Luminate, how we use it, and who we share it with. It works alongside our Terms & Conditions, which govern your use of Luminate. We'll update this page as the product and pilot evolve, and we'll note the date above whenever we do.

We collect the following categories of information:

• Account information. Your email address, display name, and (optionally) a profile photo, managed through our authentication and database provider.
• Course and role information. Which courses you're enrolled in, your role in each (student, TA, or instructor), and which organization/institution that course belongs to.
• Content you create. Questions, replies, tags, and image attachments you post to a course board, and messages you send to the AI Tutor.
• Files. Images you attach to a question or reply, and course materials (assignments, notes, syllabi) that an instructor uploads to a course.
• Demo request information. If you fill out the "Book a demo" form on our landing page, we collect your name, email, institution, course, term, and any notes you provide.
• Limited usage data. Where analytics are enabled, we collect aggregated, non-identifying interaction data (e.g. which button was clicked) — never your name, email, institution, or the content of your posts. See "Cookies & Analytics" below.

We use the information above to:

• Provide the core product: course boards, question threads, and the AI Tutor.
• Authenticate you and enforce course/role permissions (e.g. only staff can endorse an answer).
• Generate Auto TA drafts and Socratic Tutor responses relevant to your question.
• Operate rate limiting and abuse prevention so the product stays usable and affordable for every pilot course.
• Follow up on demo requests from prospective pilot courses.
• Diagnose bugs, understand feature usage, and improve the product.

The Auto TA and Socratic Tutor are powered by Anthropic's Claude models. When you post a question or message the Tutor, the relevant text (and, for the Auto TA, any attached images) is sent to Anthropic's API to generate a response. If an instructor has uploaded course materials, a short manifest of what's available is included so the AI can pull in a specific file's content only when it's relevant to your question.

Anthropic processes this content to generate the response and does not use it to train its models under our commercial terms with them. We do not control Anthropic's infrastructure directly; you can read more about their practices at anthropic.com/legal/privacy.

Luminate uses a small number of cookies and browser storage entries needed to keep you signed in. Where we've enabled Google Analytics on the public marketing site, it is configured to record only the shape of behavior — which call-to-action was clicked, which section was viewed — and is explicitly never given names, emails, institutions, or free-text content. Analytics is skipped entirely in local development and preview environments.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the service providers needed to run Luminate, under agreements that limit their use of it to providing that service:

• Our authentication and database provider, which stores account, course, and content data.
• Anthropic, to generate Auto TA and Tutor responses (see above).
• Our hosting provider, which serves the application.
• Our analytics provider, for the non-identifying usage data described above.

We may also disclose information if required by law, or to a successor organization if Luminate is acquired or merges with another company — in which case we'll notify you before your information is transferred.

We retain your account and course content for as long as your account and course are active, so course boards remain useful to future students. An instructor can remove a student from a course, and course staff can remove individual posts. To request deletion of your account or personal data, email us at the address below — we'll action the request within a reasonable time, except where we're required to retain something (e.g. for legal or security reasons).

We use industry-standard safeguards to protect your information, including encrypted connections between your browser and our servers, and access controls that restrict who can read course data. No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security, but we work to keep these protections current as the product grows.

Luminate is intended for university-level students and staff who are 18 or older. We do not knowingly collect information from children, and the service is not directed at them.

As Luminate moves through its pilot and beyond, this policy may change. If we make a material change, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, let pilot courses know directly.

Questions about this policy, or requests to access or delete your data, can be sent to useluminate@gmail.com.