Privacy Notice

[REGISTERED NAME OF THE COMPANY OR SOLE PROPRIETOR], of [registered address], is the data controller for Academic Supervisor — meaning we decide why and how your personal information is used, and we are answerable for it.

For anything about your data, write to privacy@academicsupervisor.com. For anything else, support@academicsupervisor.com.

[If registration as a data controller with Ghana's Data Protection Commission is required, state the registration number here.]

We do not ask for, and you should not upload, special category information — health data, religious or political beliefs, biometric data — about yourself or anyone else, beyond what your research legitimately requires. If your research involves human participants, remove or pseudonymise their identifying details before entering anything here.

• To provide the service you asked for — storing your work, showing it back to you, producing critique, sharing with a supervisor when you choose, keeping your credit balance right. Basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To take payment and keep accounts. Basis: contract, and our legal obligations to keep financial records.
• To keep the service secure and working — detecting abuse, diagnosing faults, preventing fraud. Basis: our legitimate interest in running a safe service.
• To improve the service — using aggregate, non-identifying figures such as how often a feature fails. Basis: our legitimate interest. This never involves reading your research.
• To contact you about your account — confirmations, password resets, and notices about changes. Basis: contract.
• To send you anything else — such as news about the product. We ask first. Basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

We do not use your research content to train AI models, we do not profile you, and we make no automated decisions that produce a legal or similarly significant effect on you.

This is the part worth reading carefully.

When — and only when — you ask for a critique, a sparring position, an alignment check, a literature review or help while stuck, the specific text concerned is sent to our AI provider so that a response can be produced. That is the section you are working on, or the matrix or literature rows in question, together with the approved rubric. It is not your whole project, and it is not sent at any other time.

Our AI provider processes that text to generate the response and does not use it to train its models. The response is returned to us, checked, stored against your project so you can see your history, and shown to you.

Our own usage record keeps a one-way fingerprint of the input rather than the input itself, so that repeated identical requests are not charged twice. That fingerprint cannot be turned back into your text. Where a request fails, we keep a short technical error message, which may contain a fragment of the malformed response.

We use the following providers to run the service. They act on our instructions and are bound to protect your information.

Beyond these, we share your information only: with a supervisor or institution as described below; where you ask us to; or where we are required to by law, a court, or a regulator. We do not sell your information and we do not share it for advertising. If the business is ever sold or transferred, your information may transfer with it, and this notice continues to apply until you are told otherwise.

Your institution can assign a supervisor to you and can see its own roster — who is enrolled, and who supervises whom. That alone does not give anyone access to your research.

A supervisor sees a project only when you share it, and only for as long as you keep it shared. By default they see your writing, your Alignment Matrix and your literature — not your AI Supervisor history, so that you can be honest with the AI Supervisor about being stuck without it becoming part of an assessment. You can grant wider access if you want to. Supervisor access is read-only.

Comments a supervisor has already left remain visible to you after you stop sharing, so that feedback is not lost.

The providers above are outside Ghana, so running the service necessarily involves transferring your information abroad — principally to the European Union and the United States. We rely on contractual protections with each provider requiring them to protect your information to a standard consistent with Ghana’s data protection law. [Counsel to confirm the transfer mechanism relied on and whether any notification is required.]

• Your account and research — for as long as your account is open, and [30/60/90] days after you close it, so that a closure asked for in error can be undone.
• Payment and credit records — for as long as tax and accounting law requires, [period — counsel to confirm under Ghanaian law], even after your account closes.
• Usage and AI records — [period], for billing accuracy and fault diagnosis.
• Server logs — a short period for security, then deleted.
• Administrative audit records — a record of administrator actions is kept and cannot be edited or removed, because its whole purpose is accountability. It records what was done, by whom and when; it does not contain your research.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything inaccurate;
• delete your account and its contents;
• stop or restrict a particular use of your information;
• give you your data in a portable form — you can also export at any time yourself;
• stop sending you optional messages, at any time, with no reason needed.

Write to privacy@academicsupervisor.com. We will respond within [response period — counsel to confirm the statutory maximum]. We may need to confirm who you are first. Exercising a right never costs you anything and we will not treat you differently for it.

Your work is protected at the database level, not just in the interface: access rules are enforced on every row, so one user’s query cannot return another user’s work even if the application has a bug. Passwords are stored as hashes. Traffic is encrypted in transit. The single administrative key that can bypass those rules is used in exactly one place — confirming a completed payment — and nowhere else.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to affect your rights, we will tell you and the relevant authority as the law requires.

We use only what is necessary to run the service: a cookie that keeps you signed in, and a small stored setting remembering whether you chose the light or dark theme. No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no analytics that follow you across other websites. There is nothing here to consent to, because there is nothing optional.

Academic Supervisor is intended for people in higher education. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

When this notice changes we update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you directly before it takes effect.

Please come to us first — privacy@academicsupervisor.com. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission of Ghana, or to the data protection authority where you live if that is elsewhere.