Privacy Policy

1.1This Policy applies to visitors to the Services, whether or not an account is created. It does not apply to research participants in the Global Flourishing Study itself. Data concerning study participants is governed by the applicable study protocols and by the consent obtained by the researchers who collected it, and not by this Policy.

1.2This Policy likewise does not apply to publishers, institutions, or other third-party websites to which the Services link. Such websites operate under their own respective policies.

1.3Responsible party.Baylor University, of Waco, Texas, United States, operates the Services and is the controller of the personal information described in this Policy. It holds that role with respect to this website only. The Global Flourishing Study is a collaboration of researchers and institutions, and Baylor's operation of the website does not confer upon it ownership of the study or of the research the study produces. Data collected from study participants is governed separately, as set forth in Section 1.1. Inquiries concerning this Policy may be directed to research@globalflourishingstudy.com.

1.4Reporting to the collaboration.The study's funders and collaborating institutions receive reporting on use of the research corpus. Such reporting is provided in aggregated form, as described in Section 5.4. These parties do not receive your account details, your conversations, or any other personal information concerning you, and they are not joint controllers of such information.

2.1If you create an account, we store your email address. Authentication is performed by our infrastructure provider, which stores your password in hashed form only. At no time do we access or store your password in readable form.

2.2If you elect to sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile photograph from Google. We do not receive your Google password, and we obtain no access to any other Google service.

2.3We store an access role associated with your account, together with any interface preferences you configure. The majority of accounts carry no elevated role.

3.1Signed-in conversations are retained. If you use the research chat while signed in, we retain a record of your conversations, comprising the questions you submit, the responses returned to you, the passages on which each response relied and which it cited, any conversation titles or notes, and any material you expressly save. This record is associated with your account and is retained until you delete your account or request its removal. No automatic expiration applies.

3.2Signed-out conversations are not retained as history. If you use the research chat without signing in, your conversation is not stored under any account and cannot be revisited. Such conversations are not, however, exempt from all recordkeeping. The records described in Sections 3.3 and 3.4 are generated for every exchange, whether or not you are signed in.

3.3Monitoring records. For the purposes of diagnosing failures and evaluating response quality, an abbreviated copy of each exchange is transmitted to our application monitoring provider. Each such record comprises approximately the first five hundred characters of the question and of the response, together with the model used and a conversation identifier. Your name and email address are not appended to these records.

3.4Usage and cost records.We maintain an operational ledger of each request, recording the model used, the number of tokens processed, and the resulting cost. The ledger does not contain the text of the question or of the response. For signed-in users, ledger entries are keyed to the user's account.

3.5Metering of the free allowance.For visitors who are not signed in, ledger entries are keyed to a one-way cryptographic hash of the visitor's network address combined with a secret value held on our servers. The network address itself is not stored in this ledger. It is held transiently in memory to apply rate limits and to perform the bot verification described in Section 4.3, and it is not written to our records. The hash cannot be reversed to recover the address, and, by reason of the secret value, it cannot be matched by enumerating candidate addresses. Rotation of the secret value renders every key of this kind unusable, which resets all free allowances simultaneously. We use this key solely to administer the free usage allowance, which consists of a fixed number of questions within a rolling twenty-four hour period, and to protect against automated abuse. Only questions we actually answered are counted against the allowance. A question is treated as answered once we begin transmitting the answer to you. Requests that we decline to answer, requests answered only by a request for clarification, and requests that fail before an answer is sent are not counted.

3.6The free allowance may be shared. Because multiple individuals may access the internet through a single network address, the allowance is administered per network rather than per person. If you share a household or organizational network, a portion of the allowance may have been consumed by other users of that network. Creating an account provides you with an allowance of your own.

3.7Usage and cost records are deleted automatically after thirteen months, as set forth in Section 7.3.

3.8Do not submit sensitive personal information to the chat. The research chat is a tool for reading published research. Do not enter health information, information identifying other individuals, credentials, or other confidential material. The Services do not constitute a clinical, diagnostic, or counseling service, and they are neither designed nor authorized to receive protected health information.

4.1Session cookies. If you sign in, we set cookies to maintain and secure your session. These cookies are strictly necessary for the operation of the Services.

4.2Local storage. The Services store one value in your browser: a record of whether you have dismissed the chat walkthrough. It is an interface preference. It contains no identifier, it is not read by our servers, and it is removed when you clear your browsing data. The count of free questions remaining is not held in your browser. It is reported to you by our servers, as described in Section 3.5.

4.3Bot protection. Sign-in, password reset, and chat requests may be protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which inspects browser and device signals in order to distinguish human users from automated clients. When we verify the result of that test, we transmit your network address to Cloudflare together with the verification request. Cloudflare processes those signals and that address in accordance with its own privacy policy.

4.4Administrative logs. When an administrator performs an action affecting an account, we record the action taken, the identity of the administrator, the network address, and the browser user agent, as a security audit trail.

4.5Audience measurement.We use a third-party analytics service to count visits and to record which pages of the Services are read. It sets no cookies and it stores nothing on your device. For each page view, the service records the time of the request, the page requested, the site or link that referred you, the approximate location from which the request originated, and technical characteristics of your browser, operating system, and device. Your network address is processed in order to derive that approximate location and is not retained in the resulting records. In order to distinguish a returning reader from a new one, the service derives a short-lived value from the request itself and discards that value within twenty-four hours. That value is not written to your browser. We use the resulting measurement in aggregate form. We do not seek to identify individual visitors from it, and we do not receive from the service any record of an individual visitor's navigation across the Services.

4.6Practices in which we do not engage. We do not use advertising cookies, advertising networks, or cross-site tracking pixels. We do not employ fingerprinting or other device-recognition techniques in order to build a persistent profile of you or to recognize you on other websites. Apart from the bot protection described in Section 4.3 and the audience measurement described in Section 4.5, we do not derive identifiers from the technical characteristics of your device. We do not construct marketing profiles, and we do not sell or rent personal information to any party. Apart from the interface preference described in Section 4.2 and the session cookies described in Section 4.1, we store nothing on your device.

5.1To operate and secure the Services, to authenticate you, and to display to you your own conversation history and saved material.

5.2To administer and enforce usage allowances, to monitor the cost of the underlying computation, and to detect abuse and automated scraping.

5.3To diagnose problems and to improve the quality of retrieval and of generated responses. Authorized personnel may review stored questions and responses for this purpose.

5.4To assess, in the aggregate, which research topics readers find useful and which pages of the Services are read, and to report on use of the corpus internally and to the study's funders and collaborating institutions. Such reporting employs aggregated figures and does not include identifiable individual conversations.

5.5To send you transactional email required for the operation of the Services, such as sign-in confirmations and password resets.

5.6We do not use your conversations to train general-purpose AI models, whether our own or those of any third party.

5.7Legal bases for persons in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. Where the General Data Protection Regulation applies, we rely on the following legal bases. Performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)): to create and maintain your account and to provide the conversation history and saved material that an account exists to provide. Our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): to secure the Services, to administer usage allowances, to detect abuse and automated scraping, to diagnose problems and improve the quality of retrieval and of generated responses, and to measure in the aggregate how the corpus and the Services are used. The interests pursued are the sustainable operation of a free research resource and its protection from misuse, and we have weighed those interests against your interests and rights. Your consent (Article 6(1)(a)): for the newsletter and for any storage of, or access to, information on your device that is not strictly necessary to deliver the Services. You may withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out prior to withdrawal. Compliance with a legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)): where applicable law requires us to retain or disclose information.

5.8No automated decision-making. The AI Features generate text. They do not render decisions producing legal effects concerning you, or similarly significantly affecting you, within the meaning of Article 22, and we do not use your information for profiling of that character.

6.1Infrastructure and hosting. Supabase provides authentication, database storage, and file storage. Vercel hosts the website and provides the audience measurement described in Section 4.5. Elestio hosts the service on which the research chat runs. Cloudflare provides the bot protection described in Section 4.3. These providers process data on our instructions.

6.2Language model and search providers.When you use the chat, the text you submit is transmitted to OpenRouter, which routes it to the underlying model provider we have configured, currently including Google and Z.ai. The text is also transmitted to OpenAI, for conversion into a numerical representation used for search, and to Cohere, for the reordering of candidate passages by relevance. These providers process the text in order to return a result. We do not submit your text to any provider for the purpose of training that provider's models.

6.3Retention by the model providers. We have configured our OpenRouter account so that requests are routed only to model providers operating under a zero data retention policy, meaning that the provider does not retain the text of your question after a response has been returned. This configuration governs the providers to which OpenRouter routes requests. OpenRouter itself, and the search providers identified in Section 6.2, are separate companies, and their own terms govern what information they hold and for what period.

6.4Monitoring. Langfuse receives the abbreviated records described in Section 3.3.

6.5Authentication and email. Google processes sign-in where you elect that method. Resend delivers our transactional email and accordingly handles your email address and the contents of those messages.

6.6Newsletter. If you submit the newsletter signup form, your email address is transmitted directly to Mailchimp, which administers the mailing list. You may unsubscribe from any newsletter we send.

6.7Embedded video. Video content on the Services is embedded from YouTube. When a video loads or plays, Google may set cookies and collect information concerning that playback in accordance with its own policies.

6.8Legal process and safety. We may disclose information where required by law, in response to lawful requests, to enforce our Terms of Service, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of any person.

7.1Account information is retained for so long as your account exists.

7.2Conversation history and saved material are retained until you delete your account or request their removal. Deletion of your account effects their deletion.

7.3Usage and cost records are deleted automatically after thirteen months.

7.4Monitoring records are retained by our monitoring provider in accordance with that service's retention settings and terms.

7.5The audience measurement described in Section 4.5 is retained by our analytics provider in accordance with that service's retention settings and terms.

7.6We may retain information for longer periods where required by law, or in backups until such backups expire in the ordinary course.

8.1Browsing without an account. All published research on the Services may be read without signing in.

8.2Management of your material. You may sign out at any time, delete individual saved papers and passages, and archive or rename conversations from within the Services. Signing out does not delete any data.

8.3Access, correction, and deletion. You may request a copy of the personal information we hold concerning you, request its correction, or request the deletion of your account and its associated data, including your conversation history, by writing to the address set forth in Section 12. We will verify that any such request originates from the account holder before acting upon it.

8.4Depending on your jurisdiction of residence, you may have additional rights under laws such as the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act, including rights to object to or restrict certain processing, rights to data portability, and the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we will not discriminate against you for the exercise of any of these rights.

9.1We operate from the United States, and our providers may process information in the United States and in other countries whose data protection laws may differ from those of the jurisdiction in which you reside.

9.2Where we transfer personal information out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on an appropriate safeguard for that transfer. Depending on the provider, this is either the provider's certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the UK extension thereto, or the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission together with the United Kingdom addendum, as set forth in our agreement with that provider. You may request details of the safeguard applicable to a particular transfer by writing to us at the address set forth in Section 12.

10.1We employ industry-standard measures to protect information, including encryption in transit, hashed passwords, row-level access rules that restrict conversations and saved material to the account that created them, and role-based restrictions on administrative functions.

10.2No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You are encouraged to use a strong, unique password and to notify us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorization.

11.1The Services are not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from any person under 16 years of age. If you believe that a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

12.1We may amend this Policy from time to time. Material changes will be noted on this page, and the date appearing at the top of this Policy indicates when it was last revised. Continued use of the Services after an amendment takes effect constitutes acceptance of the Policy as amended.

12.2Questions, requests, and complaints concerning privacy may be directed to research@globalflourishingstudy.com.