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.
• 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. Only if you allow analytics cookies: which pages and buttons are used. 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 notifications.
• Authenticate you and enforce course/role permissions (e.g. only staff can endorse an answer).
• Generate Auto TA drafts 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.

• Questions and replies are visible to everyone enrolled in that course, with your display name and role.
• Anonymous questions hide your name and account from classmates. The course's instructors and TAs can still see who asked, so they can moderate. Images attached to an anonymous question are stored without your account ID in their address.
• Your email address is never shown to classmates. Course instructors see the emails of their TAs and co-instructors to manage the course.
• Image attachments are stored at long, unguessable web addresses. Anyone who has an image's exact address can open it, so avoid attaching anything you would not want shared outside the course.

The Auto TA is powered by Anthropic's Claude models. When you post a question, its text and any attached images are 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 stores a sign-in session in your browser so you stay logged in. This is necessary for the service to work and is not used for tracking.

Google Analytics is off unless you allow it. If you choose "Allow" on the analytics banner, Google Analytics sets cookies to measure which pages and buttons are used, with IP anonymization on. We never send it names, emails, institutions, or anything you post. If you choose "No thanks," no analytics script loads. Change your analytics choice.

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:

• Supabase, our authentication, database, and file storage provider, which stores account, course, and content data.
• Anthropic, to generate Auto TA drafts (see above).
• Google (Firebase Hosting), which serves the application.
• Google Analytics, only if you allow analytics cookies (see 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.