Privacy

Who runs this

Lodestar is run by Argo Academics, Victoria, Australia. Questions and requests: admin@argoacademics.com.au. We handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles.

What we keep

Everything below belongs to your account and is visible only to you, unless you share it or hand it in.

• Account. Your email address and a password hash, if you sign up with one; or a Google sign-in; or, if you use “go in”, an anonymous account with no email at all.
• Your writing. Every text you write or bring in, and every saved version of it, with titles and dates.
• Your connections. The links you draw between passages, with the quoted passages, their history (proposed, confirmed, withdrawn) and your own connective names.
• How a text was made. For each version, counts of characters typed, pasted and dropped in, and what was inserted or removed. These are counts, not keystrokes or timings.
• Projects. Their names, what you said you were beginning with, which texts belong, and when texts joined or left.
• Say. What you ask the natural-language box to do, its reply, the model used, tokens and cost, and which texts were sent. You can switch this log off in settings; the cost row is still kept, without the words.
• Autocorrect habits. Typos you fix, words you protect and corrections you refuse. Never your text.
• Agent tokens. If you make one for an AI agent: its name, a hash of it (never the token), when it was last used, and a count of calls per minute.
• Search index. Sentence-level numeric embeddings of your texts, kept so Lodestar can find passages by meaning.
• Shares. Links or evidence packs you choose to share, and who you share a reading with.
• Institution use. If you join a class or unit: your display name, student number if you give one, which cohort, and the snapshots you hand in (see Schools and universities).
• A short-lived counter. To slow abuse, the public doors (check, provenance, shared links, entry, imports, agent access) count requests under a hash of your network address. The hash is not reversible by us; the counters are forgotten after an hour.

Where it is kept

In a Postgres database hosted by Supabase, region: [to be confirmed by the owner before launch]. The site runs on Vercel. Data is protected by row-level security: your rows are readable only under your own session. We do not read your writing in the ordinary running of the service. The owner can read the database as an administrator, and will do so only to keep it running, to respond to a request from you, or where the law requires.

Who else handles it

• Supabase. Database, accounts and sign-in emails.
• Vercel. Hosting; request logs (address, path, time) for a limited period under Vercel's own terms.
• Google (Gemini). Embeddings: pieces of your texts are sent to turn them into numbers. Say, by default: your instruction and the texts it needs are sent to a Gemini model.
• Anthropic (Claude). Say, when the stronger model is used. Scanned pages, only if reading scans by model is switched on; it is off unless the owner turns it on, and otherwise scans are read on our own server.
• Google sign-in, if you choose it.

We do not sell your information, show advertising or use analytics trackers. We do not use your writing to train models; we have not agreed to let the providers above do so, and each is used through its API.

Cookies and browser storage

• Cookies. Only Supabase's sign-in session cookies, which keep you signed in. Nothing for tracking or advertising.
• Local storage in your browser, never sent to us unless noted: your display and reading preferences, the project you last had open, recent items, unsent drafts, undo history, say settings, and your autocorrect profile (a copy of which is kept on your account so it follows you).

How long we keep it

Until you close your account, and after: closing is recoverable and deletes nothing, so your texts remain stored. We do not delete content as housekeeping. If you want your data erased, ask us at the address below and we will erase it by hand. Rate counters are forgotten after an hour.

Children and under-18s

Lodestar is used in schools. When a school sets it for students, that happens under the school's own arrangements with its students and families, including consent. Lodestar does not collect parental consent itself. If you are under 18 and using Lodestar outside a school, ask a parent or guardian first.

Schools and universities

An institution's staff never see your live writing. They see only the snapshot you submit: the evidence pack, the digest and the journal frozen at hand-in, with the name or student number you gave when you joined. They can add a review note to a submission. A submission can be withdrawn before its due date; it is then marked withdrawn, not removed. The institution holds its own responsibilities for what it does with what you hand in.

Your rights

• Access and export. Settings → export everything gives you a zip of your texts, versions, connections, projects, evidence packs, say history, autocorrect profile, memberships and submissions.
• Correction. Edit your own texts and settings directly, or ask us to correct anything else.
• Closing. Settings → close account. Recoverable, nothing deleted.
• Erasure. Write to us. We will erase your data by hand and confirm.
• Complaints. Tell us first. You may also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).