Privacy policy

Studybase is an independent project run by Shidhartha Sen, an individual based in Saskatchewan, Canada. There is no company behind it. I am the person accountable for the personal information described here, and you can reach me at shidharthasen [at] gmail [dot] com.

Because Studybase is operated from Canada, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) applies to it.

Account information, by way of Clerk, which handles sign-in:

• Your display name, and your profile picture and short bio if you add one.
• An identifier that links your Studybase account to your Clerk account.
• Your email address and any login credentials stay with Clerk. Studybase itself never stores them.

Everything you create in the app:

• Files you upload, including earlier versions of them, and any assignment title or due date you attach.
• Notes and their revision history, notebooks, and folders.
• Chat messages, attachments and reactions in your teams.
• Flashcard decks, flashcards, quizzes, quiz questions, and your quiz attempts and scores.
• Teams you create or join, invitations you send, and a record of team activity such as joining, leaving, and changes to shared material.

Your preferences, which are just your theme, time zone and whether unread badges show on chats.

Technical records. The services that run Studybase keep standard server logs, which can include your IP address and the time of a request, so that the app can be kept secure and working.

There is no analytics service, no tracking pixel, no advertising network and no session recording in Studybase. Nobody is profiling you here.

I do not sell your information, and I do not use your notes, files or any other content to train machine learning models.

To give you an account, keep it secure, store and display the material you put into Studybase, share it with the teams you choose, and keep the service running and free of abuse. That is the whole list.

Studybase uses cookies set by Clerk to keep you signed in. These are strictly necessary, and the app cannot work without them. Your theme preference is stored in your own browser and never sent anywhere.

There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

Two services are needed to run Studybase, and both act on my instructions:

• Clerk, for sign-in, accounts and the authorisation step when you connect an AI assistant.
• Convex, for the database that holds your content and for storing the files you upload.

Both are based in the United States, so your information is stored and processed outside Canada and can be accessible to foreign courts and authorities under the laws that apply there. By using Studybase you are consenting to that transfer.

Studybase does not send your material to any AI provider on its own. There is no model running behind the app.

You can choose to connect an outside assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT. When you do, you sign in and approve the connection, and from that point the assistant can read and write your notes, flashcards and quizzes. Your uploaded files are not available to it.

Anything the assistant reads leaves Studybase and becomes subject to that provider's own terms and privacy policy, including whatever they do about retention and about training their models. I have no control or visibility over what happens to it once it is there, so read their terms before you connect, and do not connect an assistant to material you are not comfortable sending them.

You can revoke the connection at any time, from your account settings or from within the assistant.

If in-app AI features are ever added to Studybase, this policy will be updated to describe them before they are switched on.

Work you keep to yourself stays private to your account. Anything you put into a team is visible to the members of that team, and they can open, edit and download it depending on their role.

If you leave a team, the material you contributed stays with the team, because removing it would break the shared workbench for everyone else. Take that into account before you share something.

Files, folders and teams that you move to the trash are kept for about thirty days and are then removed. Until that point you can restore them.

If you delete your account through Clerk, your Studybase profile is deactivated and you lose access immediately. Content you created, particularly anything shared into a team, may remain in the database after that.

If you want your content fully erased rather than just deactivated, email me and I will do it within thirty days, apart from anything I am required to keep or that cannot be removed without destroying other people's material. I will tell you if that applies to anything of yours.

Under PIPEDA you can:

• Ask what personal information I hold about you and get a copy of it.
• Ask me to correct anything inaccurate.
• Withdraw your consent and close your account, subject to the retention limits above.
• Complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada if you are not satisfied with how I have handled a request.

Email me to make a request. I may need to confirm you control the account before acting on it.

Traffic is encrypted in transit, every request is checked against your account before any data is returned, and access to shared material is checked against your team membership. Files are stored through Convex rather than on a server I run by hand.

That said, Studybase is a side project maintained by one person, and no service can promise perfect security. Please do not upload anything that would be damaging to you if it were exposed.

Studybase is for people aged 13 and over. I do not knowingly collect information from children under 13, and if I find out that an account belongs to one I will delete it and its contents.

Studybase is not offered to schools or districts for assigned classroom use, and I do not act as a school official or service provider for any institution.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, I will update the date at the top and give notice in the app before the change takes effect. Small corrections will just be made.

Shidhartha Sen, Saskatchewan, Canada. Email: shidharthasen [at] gmail [dot] com.

See also the terms of service.