Privacy policy

Effective 2026-10-20. This page is version 2026-10-20 — the version Knowlu writes down beside your name on the day you accept it.

Last changed 2026-10-23.

Your tasks and notes live in a plain-text folder on this machine and in your Knowlu account, so every computer you sign in on opens on the same day; our servers keep them encrypted at rest, beside your account, the judgments made for you and what you correct, and none of it is ever sold or shared.

That is the whole policy in one line. The rest of this page is the same promise said slowly, so you can check it.

Who we are, and how to reach us

Knowlu is an independent business in Alabama, run by its founder — one person, who also writes the code. There is no support department and no ticket queue: write to support@knowlu.com and a person reads it. Questions about this policy, a request to see or correct or delete what we hold, and anything you think we got wrong all go to that address. Security problems go to security@knowlu.com. If you would rather write on paper, ask and we will send you a postal address.

What stays on your machine

Knowlu is a desktop app first. These things live on your PC and are yours. Your vault also has a copy in your account, described below, so that every computer you sign in on shows the same day; your coursework logins, the kept sign-ins and your backup folder never leave this machine; app data leaves only in an issue report you choose to send, and a syllabus only as the lines described further down, in the section on what Knowlu does not collect.

• Your vault — the folder Knowlu makes at %USERPROFILE%\Knowlu\. Plain Markdown files with a short header, one per task, plus a record of every change under state\journal\. You can read all of it in any text editor, and you can walk away with it. Two things in it stay on this computer and are never copied to your account: the questions Knowlu asks you about which calendar events are your classes and other commitments, before you answer them, and the list of repeating events it builds those questions from. Only what you confirm or decline is copied.
• App data — %LOCALAPPDATA%\knowlu\: which profiles exist, your settings, when you last looked, and the last sixty run logs.
• Coursework logins — Windows Credential Manager, under knowlu/<profile>/<source>. Never in the vault, never in a backup, never in a log, and never on our servers.
• Kept sign-ins, if you use them. If you connect Blackboard for grades, Knowlu keeps your Blackboard sign-in on this computer, in a browser profile Windows encrypts for your Windows account, so it can read your grades without asking you to sign in every time. Forget Blackboard sign-in in Settings deletes it. If you set up email forwarding, Knowlu keeps a saved sign-in for each mailbox the same way, so it can check that forwarding is still on, turn it back on and, for Gmail, bring in mail it missed. It is on unless you turn it off in Settings → Email, and it is deleted when you turn it off, disconnect that mailbox, sign out of Knowlu or delete your account. Neither keeps a password, and neither ever leaves this computer. A kept sign-in is full access to that account on this computer: Windows encrypts its sign-in cookies for your Windows account, but the pages and mail the site keeps in its own cache sit in the same folder without that encryption, and a program running as you could use either.
• Your backup folder, if you set one — a mirror of the vault and one dated snapshot a day, in a folder you chose and control.
• Your syllabi. Every syllabus file you give Knowlu, and everything read from it that is not in a suggestion or approved: office hours, the course's policies in the syllabus's own words, and the dates not yet suggested. (Knowlu does not read syllabi in this version; the app will say when it does.)

Kept sign-ins at every school, for now. Until Knowlu has 20 paying users, both kept sign-ins are on without waiting for any school's own policy on them to be read first: the saved mail sign-in at every school, and the Blackboard sign-in at every school Knowlu has a Blackboard listing for. A school Knowlu has no listing for still has no grades. When the 20th paying account exists, we decide this again, and a change would be a new version of this page.

What we collect, and why

By category, with the reason it exists. If a category is not on this list, we are not collecting it.

Your account

The email address you sign up with; and, if you choose Continue with Google, the fact that this account signs in with Google, the Google account id that identifies it, your name, and a link to your profile picture — Knowlu never sees your Google password and never asks for one. There is no password on a Knowlu account at all: you sign in with Google, or with a code we email you. We also record that you attested you are 18 or older, as a yes and a timestamp, and which version of these two policies you accepted, and when. Without it there is nobody for a subscription or a judgment to belong to.

Your subscription

Stripe takes the payment and holds the card. We never see a card number. Stripe also asks for your billing address, because whether a state charges sales tax on Knowlu depends on where you are; Stripe holds that too. What we keep is a Stripe customer id, which plan you are on, whether it is active, and when the current period ends. We also keep a record of the agreement itself — the price, the version of the terms, the moment, and the IP address it came from — because California requires a subscription seller to be able to show what the customer agreed to.

Your tasks and notes

A copy of your vault: the text of every task and note, and the journal that records each change — what changed, when, and whether you or Knowlu made it. That includes the classes and other commitments you confirm and, if you connect Blackboard, your grades, kept with your tasks so that every computer you sign in on shows the same ones. It exists so that every computer you sign in on opens on the same day, and so that signing in on a new computer brings your work back. It is encrypted at rest on our servers, but it is not end-to-end encrypted: our servers can read it, because keeping your computers in step is their job. No human at Knowlu reads it without your explicit consent, it is never sold or shared, it is never used to train or improve a model, and deleting your account deletes it. Each change in the journal, and each issue you raise, also carries the name Windows gives the computer it was made on, so that Knowlu can tell your computers apart. Each account holds up to 200 MiB of text.

Your calendar links

The link to your school's assignment feed, and the secret address of your own calendar if you add one. They are what let Knowlu read what is due and what your day already has in it. A calendar link is a password in disguise — anyone holding one can read that calendar — so both are stored encrypted (see Security) and neither is ever written to a log.

Your coursework logins

On your machine only, in Windows Credential Manager, never on our servers. Knowlu signs in to zyBooks and VHL from your PC, with your credentials, and reads the assignment list that comes back; that list — never the password — may be read on our servers so that one parser can serve everyone. The password stays on the machine, and there is no column in our database for one.

Your Google connection, if you make one

The permission Google gave us, stored encrypted and never sent to your computer; the Google account's id and email address, so the app can show which account is connected; which of Calendar and Gmail you allowed; when you connected and when Knowlu last read your mail; and whether the connection still works. It is deleted when you disconnect or delete your account.

Email you forward to Knowlu, if you set it up

Every message that reaches a connected mailbox, whole, held only until Knowlu has read it; then what Knowlu found in it about school. Its own section is below.

Your forwarding addresses

The private Knowlu address each connected mailbox forwards to, stored encrypted, and that mailbox's own address, so mail can be matched to it and the delivery checks below can reach it; and the facts that show forwarding works: when mail and delivery checks last arrived, and, for Microsoft 365, your school's tenant id. All of it goes when you disconnect that mailbox or delete your account.

What you do in Knowlu

Interaction events: which view you opened, what you ticked, snoozed, approved or declined, and how long a card was on screen. There is no free text in an event and never a course name or a title. The named use is a short list of questions — is the ranking agreed with, where do the judgments go wrong, does anyone actually open Knowlu in the morning — and nothing else.

Daily counts

We keep daily counts of your AI calls and cloud requests, never what they were about, to keep the service's cost in bounds. They are in your export and are deleted with your account.

Free tester access, if Knowlu gives it

If Knowlu gives you free tester access, we record it on your account: the dates of that access, a short note on why and, if it ended early, a one-word reason, kept until 30 days after it ends; and a log of when it was given, extended and ended, kept for at most three years. Both are in your export and are deleted with your account. Knowlu pays for a tester's AI calls, so we look at your daily counts and what they cost.

Your corrections

When you change a field a judgment set — how long something will take, how much it matters, which course it belongs to — we keep the old value, the new value, the item's id and what kind of item it was. In this record, a correction to a course keeps the fact that it changed and drops both names, and a correction to a title is not kept at all. The journal described under Your tasks and notes is separate: it records every change, titles included, so that your computers agree. This is the one thing that makes next month's judgments better than this month's, and it is why it is collected under the terms rather than behind a switch.

Diagnostic logs

Only when you send an issue report. It carries the last 200 lines of the app's and the engine's logs, the build versions, your Windows build, the profile id, counts of what is in your vault — never the names of things in it — the name of the view you were looking at, and your last three runs. You see the exact text before it is sent, with email addresses, links and anything shaped like a key already replaced, and you can edit it or cancel.

Gmail, if you connect it

Message metadata and text, held in memory for the length of one judgment and then discarded. What survives is the message id, who it was from, what we decided it was, and the fields that ended up on the card you saw. Its own section is below.

What we do not collect

• No birthdate. The 18+ gate is an attestation — a yes and a timestamp. There is no date-of-birth column in our database and there is not going to be one.
• No card number. Stripe's payment page is Stripe's; the card never touches Knowlu.
• No campus password. Knowlu never asks for your university sign-in, and there is nowhere in the app to type one. When you sign in to your school, it happens on your school's own page, in a window Knowlu opens, and Knowlu never sees what you type there. Once you are signed in it uses that window's own session, on your machine, to fetch your calendar link, your course list and, at schools Knowlu supports, your class schedule, and then throws the session away. It keeps neither the password nor the cookies. The exceptions are the two kept sign-ins described above: the Blackboard sign-in for grades and, if you forward a school mailbox, its saved mail sign-in. Neither keeps the password.
• No more of your text sent to a model than a judgment needs. What travels to the model is the note's title and up to the first 1,200 characters of its text, your stated preferences and grade weights; when a campus event is judged, the event's listing and up to the first 600 characters of the interests you have told Knowlu; for an email read through Gmail's permission, its subject, its sender, its date, up to the first 1,200 characters of the message and the codes of your courses; for email you forward to Knowlu, the same with up to the first 2,000 characters, and your time zone; and, to match what an email says to your coursework, the titles and due dates of the course items it might mean. All of it is sent for the length of that one call, and neither we nor the model's host keep a record of what was sent. For a syllabus, one call sees at most 13,500 characters: the course's code, section and term; the lines that say when and where the class meets and when office hours are, with email addresses, phone numbers and links removed; the lines of the schedule that carry a date; the lines that say how the course is graded; and the paragraphs that state the late-work, makeup and attendance policies. The instructor's contact details are never sent, and the model's host is one already named below.
• What Knowlu never does with a syllabus: share it, pool it across students, or keep a copy on our servers.

Who else touches it

Seven companies, each doing one job, and only two of them ever have any content of yours read by a model.

• Supabase — hosting, the database and the sign-in system. Your account row and every row above live there, including the copy of your vault, and it is what checks the code we email you or the sign-in Google confirms.
• Stripe — payments and the subscription. Stripe sees your card; we do not.
• Cloudflare — this website and the downloads.
• OpenRouter — the router every judgment request goes through on its way to a model. It carries the text but does not itself run a model on it, sends every request under zero data retention — never as a default it could quietly lose — and trains nothing on what passes through. Each request names the one company allowed to answer it and is refused outright, never sent somewhere else, if that company cannot meet every requirement we set.
• CoreWeave — reads the events on your calendar to make those judgments, one item at a time, only while a judgment is being made, on a zero-retention endpoint that trains nothing on what it reads.
• DeepInfra — reads your assignments and your email to make those judgments, one item at a time, only while a judgment is being made, on a zero-retention endpoint that trains nothing on what it reads.
• Amazon Web Services — receives the email you forward to Knowlu and holds it until Knowlu has read it, at most about two days.

CoreWeave and DeepInfra are the only two places your content is ever sent to be read by a model. What they are sent is held for the length of the call and kept by neither of them; what we write down from a judgment is the answer.

One more, doing nothing with your data but delivering it: the provider that sends our account and billing email, and the delivery checks Knowlu sends to a mailbox you forward from, sees the address a message is going to. Nobody else gets anything. There is no advertising network, no data broker and no analytics company anywhere on this list.

We do not sell or share your personal information

We do not sell it, we do not rent it, and we do not share it for anyone's advertising — not for money and not for anything else of value. There is no opt-out link on this site because there is nothing to opt out of, and a Global Privacy Control signal has nothing to switch off. If that ever changed it would be a new version of this policy and a question asked in the app, not a quiet edit to this paragraph.

Gmail

Signing in with Google tells us three things and only three: your email address, your name, and a link to your profile picture. It asks Google for nothing else — not your mail, not your calendar, not your files — and it is a different permission from the Calendar and Gmail connections below, which you grant separately and can refuse.

Connecting Gmail is optional, it is off until you turn it on, and you can disconnect it in Settings at any time. Disconnecting revokes our access at Google and deletes the stored connection, our list of which emails we have already read, and any proposals from your mail that had not reached your computer yet. The record of what Knowlu decided about each email, including its message id and who it was from, stays until you delete your account. Google holds Calendar and Gmail as one permission, so disconnecting one disconnects both. If you also forward that Gmail address to Knowlu, Knowlu reads it through forwarding only.

Knowlu's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In plain words:

• Gmail data is used for one thing: finding the obligations in your own inbox and proposing them as tasks inside Knowlu, where you approve or decline each one.
• It is transferred to the companies named above: Gmail text goes to OpenRouter, which carries the request under zero data retention and reads none of it itself, and to DeepInfra, which reads it on a zero-retention endpoint to make that judgment for you. Google Calendar events go to OpenRouter the same way and to CoreWeave, which reads them on a zero-retention endpoint to make that judgment for you — Google's Limited Use terms bind Calendar data the same way they bind Gmail's. Nowhere else, and never for advertising, credit, lending or resale.
• No human at Knowlu reads your mail without your explicit consent. There is no support tool that opens an inbox. The one path by which a message could reach a person is the issue-report screen, where you choose to include it, see exactly what will be sent, and send it yourself — message by message, one decision at a time.
• It is never used to train or improve a model beyond the rules Knowlu learns for your own account. Rows that came from Gmail are flagged as such and are excluded from anything that would pool them with another person's.
• Attachments are never fetched. Knowlu reads the headers and the text of a message and stops there.
• Message text is discarded when the judgment is done. What is kept is the message id, so the same email is not proposed to you twice, who it was from, the decision, and the fields on the card.

Today the Gmail connection is in Google's testing mode, because the review that opens it to everyone takes weeks and has not finished. That has two consequences, and the app says both of them where you would meet them: it works for at most 100 people, each named in advance as a test user, and each of those connections expires after seven days and has to be made again. When Google's review is done, this paragraph changes.

Email you forward to Knowlu

Email forwarding is optional, and you set it up in Knowlu. Each mailbox you connect forwards everything that reaches it to a private Knowlu address: school mail, personal mail, all of it. It passes through Amazon's mail service; Amazon's notice to us carries the message's headers (sender, recipients, subject), never its text. It waits in Amazon's storage until Knowlu has read it and is deleted then; anything left over is removed by Amazon's one-day expiry, which in practice means up to about two days, plus Amazon's own lag. It is read in our server's memory. While your subscription is not active or in its trial (it has lapsed, been cancelled, or has a payment overdue), mail that arrives is deleted unread.

Before any model reads a message, Knowlu's own rules set aside mail such as bulk and mailing-list mail from senders outside your school and its learning tools, and mail the rules Knowlu has learned for you mark as noise, and mail Knowlu recognises by its shape is read by Knowlu's own rules without a model. Every other message, including personal mail from a friend, a doctor or a bank, has its subject, sender, date and up to the first 2,000 characters of its text, with the codes of your courses and your time zone, read by the model's host, which keeps none of it, so that Knowlu can tell whether it is about school. What Knowlu keeps is what it found about school, not the email. Attachments are never opened, except the messages Knowlu itself forwards as attachments when it brings in older or missed Gmail mail, each of which is read as an email.

What Knowlu does inside your mailbox, with you there at setup or, later, with the saved sign-in you allowed:

• It turns forwarding on, and off again when you disconnect.
• Gmail: it forwards older mail, from up to about four months before you set it up, to your Knowlu address as attachments, and moves the copies those forwards leave in your Sent folder to your Trash, where Gmail removes them as it does anything else there. Then, about once a day, and at every scheduled run once forwarding has stopped or your subscription has lapsed, it forwards the same way any mail from the last three days that did not reach Knowlu. After forwarding was off, or after your subscription lapsed, it looks further back: to when forwarding was last on, at most about four months, or up to 30 days back after a lapse. While it does, it looks in your Inbox for a notice that one of those forwards was not delivered, and stops if it finds one.
• School Microsoft 365: Knowlu does not yet bring in older mail, or mail that arrived while forwarding was off; only mail forwarded after setup reaches Knowlu.
• If it finds forwarding turned off, it turns it back on and then tells you so. It never turns forwarding back on for a mailbox you turned off in Knowlu's Settings, and it never changes forwarding that points somewhere else without asking you.

Nothing else is changed, sent or deleted. Knowlu also sends each mailbox a delivery check now and then, to make sure forwarding still works. None of this sends anything to another person.

Telemetry and training. Nothing from forwarded mail ever enters telemetry. Judgments made from forwarded mail are never used to train or improve a model and never pooled with another person's. Google's Limited Use policy does not bind mail that arrives by forwarding, because it does not come through Google's API; Knowlu holds it to the same rules anyway.

How long we keep it

• Account data — until you delete it. Deleting is immediate, and it is a purge rather than a flag.
• Your tasks and notes — the current text of each and your grades, for as long as the account exists. The journal of changes is kept for 400 days, except the entries that set a value or create a note other than by one of Knowlu's own automatic steps (its imports and its judgments), which stay as long as the account does, because Knowlu needs them to know which decisions were yours. Deleting the account deletes all of it.
• Gmail — our list of the emails we have read, for 30 days, so the same email is not read twice; a proposal waiting to reach your computer, until it does, and then for 7 days. Disconnecting Gmail, or deleting your account, deletes both at once. The record of what we decided about each email, including its message id and who it was from, is kept until you delete your account.
• Email you forward to Knowlu — the message itself, until Knowlu has read it, and at most about two days in Amazon's storage, plus Amazon's lag; the fingerprints that stop a message being read twice, 180 days; your mailbox's own address, its forwarding address and the facts that show forwarding works, until you disconnect it; what was found, 7 days after your computer takes it, or 30 if it never does, and then only in your vault. Disconnecting a mailbox deletes everything our servers hold about it except the decision records.
• A tombstone — after an account is deleted, a hash of the email address and the date stay for 90 days, so that we can tell whether an address has deleted an account recently. It cannot be turned back into an address, and after 90 days it is gone too.
• Issue reports — 90 days, then deleted automatically.
• The subscription consent record — at least three years, because California's subscription law requires a seller to be able to show what the customer agreed to for that long. It is the one record a deletion does not take with it: when you delete your account it loses your account id and the IP address it was taken from, and keeps the hash of your email address, the price, the terms version and the date — enough to answer "what did the seller show that day", and no name, no address and no account to attach it to.
• Events and corrections — deleted with the account. While the account exists they stay, because the corrections are what the judgments learn from.

Your rights, wherever you live

Four rights, built for everyone who uses Knowlu. There is no threshold to meet, no state you have to live in, and nothing to prove.

• Know and access — this page is the list, and the export below is the contents.
• Export — most of what our servers hold that is meaningful to you comes back as one file: the account, the subscription, the consent records, which calendar links exist, your connected mailboxes and what was found in your mail that has not yet reached your computer, your events, your corrections, your issue reports, your daily counts and any free tester access. The record of each decision Knowlu made, your Google connection's details (never the permission itself) and Gmail proposals not yet on your computer are not in this file yet. Ask at support@knowlu.com and we will send the file, and those three with it if you want them. Your tasks and notes come back as the folder they already are: the plain files on your computer are the same text your account holds, and copying that folder is the best export there is.
• Correct — most of what we hold about you is a judgment about your own work, and correcting one is a normal Tuesday: change the field in Knowlu and the correction stands. If something we hold is wrong and you cannot reach it from the app, write to us and we will fix it.
• Delete — Settings → Delete my data. If you forward email to Knowlu, it first tries to turn forwarding off in each mailbox with its saved sign-in, and tells you if it could not, so you can turn it off yourself; that never stops the deletion. It removes the vault, its snapshots in your backup folder, your coursework logins in Credential Manager, both kept sign-ins and the rest of the app's data on this machine, and the account and everything under it on our servers. The subscription stops at the end of the period you have already paid for. What is left afterwards is the 90-day tombstone and the consent record described above — and Stripe's own record of the payments it took: your email address, your billing address, the card and the charges. That is a payment record with its own retention rules, and deleting it is not something this button does; Stripe's privacy policy is where to read what Stripe keeps and for how long.

Knowlu is for people 18 or older

An account requires you to attest that you are 18 or older, because a subscription is a contract and at 17 it is not one that binds. If you tell us you are under 18 the sign-up is declined, we say why, and nothing you typed is kept. We do not ask for a birthdate, we do not estimate your age from your face or your files, and Knowlu is neither built for nor sold to anyone in primary or secondary school. If you are 17 and this is the wrong answer for you, write to us — the honest reason it is the answer is that the alternative is collecting a birthdate from everybody.

Security, and what happens if it fails

Everything between the app and our servers goes over HTTPS. What our database stores is encrypted at rest, and your calendar links are encrypted a second time before they are written, with a key the database does not hold and only the code that fetches your feeds can use. Portal passwords are the clearest case of all: they are never sent to us, so there is no server anywhere holding one. Your Knowlu sign-in lives in Windows Credential Manager, not in a file; the two kept sign-ins described above are the exception, kept in a browser profile on this computer.

One person is responsible for security at Knowlu — its founder, the same person who answers support — and security@knowlu.com reaches them directly. If you find a way in, that is the address, and you will get an answer from a person.

No system is perfectly safe, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. If we determine that a breach has reached information about you, we will tell you as fast as we can and in no case later than 45 days after we determine it, with what happened, what was in it, and what to do about it. Alabama's breach law sets that deadline for people who live in Alabama; we are making the same promise to everyone.

Do Not Track

Knowlu is a desktop app, and this is a static website. Neither one follows you across other websites or over time, and no third party collects anything about you through either of them: there are no advertising pixels, no analytics scripts, and no cookies dropped by anyone else. So there is nothing for a Do Not Track signal to switch off, and Knowlu does not change its behaviour when it sees one — its behaviour is already the one that signal asks for.

Changes to this policy

Every version of this page carries a date, and that date is the version Knowlu records when you accept it. If we change something that matters — a new category collected, a new company on the list, a new use for what we already hold — we will email the address on your account, and Knowlu will show you the change and ask, before the new use begins. Carrying on using Knowlu is not how we take consent for a materially different use of your data; a yes is. Smaller changes, such as a clearer sentence, a corrected address, or a description that names no new category, company or use, get a new "last changed" date on this page and nothing more. Reading a kind of material this page says Knowlu does not read, such as syllabi, is never a smaller change.