Privacy Policy
This page explains what information Flow collects about you, why, who processes it, how long it is kept, and how you can see, export or delete it.
Effective 2026-09-08 · version 2026-09-10
- Your courses, materials, notes, transcripts and grades are visible only to you. They are not used to train models and are never shown to other users — see §4
- We do not sell your personal information, or “share” it for advertising. No ad cookies, no cross-site tracking — see §9
- You can export or delete all of your data at any time, from Settings — see §11
1. Scope of this Policy
This Privacy Policy explains what personal information Flow (“Flow”, “we”, “us”) collects when you use the Flow website and application (the “Service”), why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what rights you can exercise.
This Policy is incorporated into the Terms of Service by Section 15 and, together with the Disclaimer, forms the entire agreement. Where this Policy and the Terms conflict on the handling of personal information, this Policy controls.
Flow is currently operated by an individual as a beta, with servers located in the United States. The Service is not an official product of any school and is not affiliated with UCLA, the University of California, the California State University, any community college, or ASSIST.org.
2. Information we collect
(a) Account information you give us. Your email address, your password (stored as a hash — we cannot read the original), display name, avatar, the school you attend, and the invitation code used at sign-up. If you enable two-factor authentication, your authenticator enrolment as well.
(b) Study content you create or upload. Courses and term schedules, tasks and deadlines, course materials you upload or paste, class notes, transcripts of class recordings, grades and weightings, writing drafts and writing-style samples, transfer plans and course-mapping records, and counselor check-in records.
(c) Content you choose to make public. Course and instructor reviews you post, plus votes and reports. When you post anonymously, your display name and avatar are not written onto that review; a back-end link between the review and your account remains so that abuse reports can be handled. Do not put personal information into a review that you would not want others to see.
(d) Technical information collected automatically. IP address, browser and device type, time of access and pages requested, and stack traces when an error occurs. These are generated by our hosting and monitoring providers in the course of delivering the Service.
(e) Usage and quota records. Which AI features you used, how many times, and the token counts and estimated cost of each call. This is necessary to enforce usage limits and control operating cost.
(f) External services you choose to connect. If you use Canvas calendar sync, we store the calendar feed link you provide, plus the assignment titles, due times and course associations read from it. That link is sensitive — anyone holding it can read your Canvas calendar — so it is used only server-side and is never displayed back to you in full. You can disconnect at any time, which deletes both the link and the tasks imported through it. The link grants read access to a calendar and nothing else: it cannot see grades and cannot act on your Canvas account.
(f2) The Flow browser extension (optional). If you install Flow's Chrome extension and press sync, it reads the one Canvas course you have open, inside your own already-signed-in browser tab, and sends its content to Flow: the syllabus, announcements, course pages, assignment text and due dates, and course files (the original file and the text extracted from it). The extension never creates, requests or stores a Canvas password or access token, and no credential capable of acting on your Canvas account ever exists on Flow's servers. It reads only at the moment you press sync — it does not run in the background, does not crawl across courses, does not read your transcript or your Canvas messages, and cannot write anything to Canvas. It talks to Flow using a token held only inside the extension, which you can revoke at any time in Settings; revoking stops that browser immediately. The extension is optional: everything in Flow works without it, with content pasted or uploaded by you instead. For a reading fetched through a link, only the extracted text and the original link are kept — the file itself is not.
(g) What we do not collect. We do not collect payment card numbers (when paid plans launch these will be handled directly by the payment processor and will not be stored on Flow's servers), we do not collect precise geolocation, we do not read your contacts or data from other applications, and we do not purchase third-party data to enrich a profile of you.
3. How we use this information
To provide the Service itself: showing your courses and calendar, running the AI features, computing grades and transfer progress, and sending the emails you ask for.
To keep accounts secure and prevent abuse: authenticating logins, enforcing the invitation-only model, enforcing usage limits, handling review reports, and investigating anomalous usage.
To improve the product: understanding which features are used, where people drop off, and which actions error. Analytics events contain none of your course content, materials, transcripts or grades (see the PostHog entry in Section 8).
To meet legal obligations: responding to lawful legal process, and retaining records the law requires us to retain (for example, once paid plans launch, the subscription consent records California law requires).
We do not use your personal information for advertising, we do not perform cross-site behavioural tracking, and we do not make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you based on your content.
4. How the AI features handle your content
When you use an AI feature, only the content that specific action needs is sent to our model provider, Anthropic, for processing. Asking a question about one material sends that material and your question, not your entire course; generating a weekly summary sends that week. Your email address and account identifier are not sent with the request.
Flow uses Anthropic's commercial API under its Commercial Terms of Service, which state: “Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services.” Content you submit through Flow is therefore not used to train AI models.
Flow itself does not train any model on your content, does not use your content to generate results shown to other users, and does not allow any other user to read your courses, materials, notes, transcripts or grades. The only exception is content you deliberately publish to the reviews area.
AI output can be inaccurate. See the Disclaimer for the specific limits of AI-generated content, automatically extracted deadlines, grade projections and transfer mapping.
5. Class recordings and transcripts
Class transcripts are stored as your own private material and are visible only to you, by default and always. Flow does not publish transcripts to other users, does not use them for training, and does not use them to generate anything anyone else sees.
Whether a recording is lawful is your responsibility. California is a two-party consent state (Penal Code §632): recording a confidential communication without the consent of all parties can be a crime. Most schools have their own rules on recording class, usually requiring the instructor's prior permission. Confirm you have the permission you need before using the recording feature.
A transcript can contain the voices and names of instructors and classmates — other people's personal information. You should judge before uploading whether that is appropriate. Deleting a transcript deletes that content with it.
7. Reviews and content other users can see
Reviews you post are visible to other users of the Service. If you post under your name, the display name and avatar as they were at the moment of posting are fixed onto that review; if you post anonymously, they are not recorded at all. This design means changing your display name or avatar later never changes the attribution of an existing review — anonymous stays anonymous.
A back-end link between a review and the posting account is retained so that reports, abuse and legal process can be handled. An administrator can see that link when acting on a report.
When you invite someone to Flow, the person invited can see that the invitation came from you.
9. We do not sell or “share” personal information
As those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA, as amended by the CPRA), Flow does not sell personal information and does not “share” personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not sold or shared any category of personal information in the twelve months preceding your use of the Service, and we do not sell the personal information of minors.
The providers above are “service providers” or “contractors” under the CCPA: they are contractually permitted to process the data only to provide their service to Flow, and not to use or disclose it for their own purposes. That is not a sale.
10. How long we keep information
Account and study content: kept while your account exists. When you delete an item (a course, material, note, task, transcript or transfer record) it is deleted from the database.
Deleting your account is immediate and irreversible. We keep no grace-period copy: the moment you confirm, the account and everything in it is removed from the database. Copies in backup media expire on the backup rotation cycle; until then they remain subject to this Policy and are not used for any purpose. Export your data first if you want a copy.
Reviews you have published: when you delete your account we sever the link to your account and remove attribution, but the review text may remain — other students rely on it when choosing courses, and removing it would break the integrity of votes and replies. If you want the text removed too, delete your reviews before deleting the account, or say so in your request.
The Canvas calendar feed link: kept until you disconnect or delete your account, and deleted the moment you disconnect.
Usage and cost records: kept for up to 24 months for capacity planning and abuse investigation; they contain none of your study content. Security and abuse logs: kept for up to 12 months. Records the law requires us to keep (for example future subscription consent records): kept for the period the law requires.
11. Your rights and how to use them
Wherever you live, you may: access the information we hold about you, correct what is inaccurate, export a copy of your data, delete your account and content, and withdraw consent you previously gave (for example for the recording feature).
The fastest route is self-service in the app: Settings offers “Export my data” and “Delete my account”. You may also write to the contact address at the end of this Policy.
We answer requests within 30 days. To protect your account we may need to verify that the request really comes from you — normally, making it from the email address on the account is enough. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights: no denial of service, no degraded service, no different price.
You may use an authorised agent to make a request; we may ask for written authorisation and confirm the request with you directly.
12. Rights of California residents
CCPA / CPRA. California residents have rights to know, access, correct, delete, and port their personal information, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. The categories collected, their sources, the purposes and the recipients are set out in Sections 2, 3 and 8. Because we neither sell nor “share” personal information, no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” opt-out link is required (see Section 9).
Sensitive personal information. Of what we collect, your account credentials are sensitive personal information under the CCPA. We use them only to provide the Service and secure your account, never to infer characteristics about you.
CalOPPA. This Policy is posted under the California Online Privacy Protection Act (B&P §22575 et seq.) and is linked from the site footer, the sign-up page and Settings. Section 20 describes how material changes are handled.
Minors' “eraser law”. Under California B&P §22581, a registered user under 18 who is a California resident may request removal of content they posted publicly. You can delete it yourself, or contact us for help.
Shine the Light (Civil Code §1798.83). We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes, so there is nothing to disclose under this section.
California consumer notice (Civil Code §1789.3). You may file a written complaint about the Service with the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, telephone 800-952-5210.
13. Users in the EU, UK and elsewhere
Flow's servers are in the United States. If you use the Service from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States.
Legal bases for processing (GDPR Article 6): performance of our contract with you (providing the Service); our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention, product improvement) where not overridden by your rights; your consent where you give it (for example the class recording feature); and compliance with legal obligations.
You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection under GDPR Articles 15-22; exercise them as described in Section 11. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your country.
14. Children and minors
The Service is built for students in higher education and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If we learn that we have, we delete it promptly.
Users aged 13 to 17 must have a parent's or guardian's permission to use the Service. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has given us information without your consent, contact us.
15. FERPA and education records
Flow is not an official product of any school and is not a “school official” within the meaning of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We do not process education records on behalf of any institution.
Transcripts, grades and course records you upload to Flow are your own information, voluntarily given by you to a third-party service — not education records disclosed to us by a school. FERPA protections attaching to those records at your school do not extend to Flow; your rights here are the ones set out in this Policy.
Be deliberate about what you upload, especially any document containing other students' information.
16. Security
Technical measures we take include: TLS in transit; encryption at rest; row-level security on every user table in the database, so that one account is technically unable to read another's data rather than merely being prevented by application code; passwords stored as hashes; TOTP two-factor authentication available; and separate permission controls on administrative functions.
No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise. Use a strong password unique to Flow and turn on two-factor authentication. If you suspect your account has been compromised, contact us immediately.
Breach notification. If a security incident involves your unencrypted personal information, we will notify you in the most expedient time reasonably possible, as required by California Civil Code §1798.82 and other applicable law, describing the nature of the incident, the categories of information involved, and the steps we recommend.
17. Controls in your hands
A feature you do not use produces no data. No uploads means no materials; no recording means no transcripts; no target school means no transfer target record. Every feature in Flow is optional and skipping one does not affect the others.
Reviews can be posted anonymously. Your avatar and display name can be changed or left empty at any time. Today Flow sends only essential account email — sign-up verification, password resets and security notices — and no marketing email. If optional notification email is added later, Settings will carry a switch to turn it off.
18. Third-party links and content
The Service contains links to third-party websites (ASSIST.org, university admissions pages, links to course material you saved yourself). Those sites have their own privacy policies and this Policy does not apply to them; we are not responsible for their content or practices.
19. Business transfers
If Flow is merged, acquired, financed, reorganised, becomes insolvent, or sells all or part of its assets, your personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We tell you this plainly and in advance so that you know it when you decide what to give us.
In any such transfer: (a) we will require the recipient to continue to be bound by this Policy, or to provide protection that is substantially no less protective; (b) if the recipient intends to handle your information in a way that differs materially from this Policy, you will be notified before that takes effect and given the opportunity to delete your account first; and (c) this section does not widen what we share in ordinary operations.
This section corresponds to Sections 15 and 20 of the Terms of Service.
20. Changes to this Policy
We may update this Policy from time to time. Every update raises the version number and effective date shown at the top of this page.
For material changes — a new purpose for using personal information, a new category of recipient, or a change in how data is retained — we will notify you by email or a prominent in-app notice at least 14 days before the change takes effect. If you do not accept the change, you may delete your account before then.
We will not use “continued use means consent” to retroactively authorise ourselves to use information already collected in a way we did not disclose when we collected it.
21. Contact us
For anything about this Policy, your personal information, or exercising any of the rights above, write to us at the address below. Say what you are asking for, and write from the email address on your account so we can verify it is you.
Flow is currently operated by an individual as a beta. It is not an official product of any school and is not affiliated with or endorsed by UCLA, the University of California, the California State University, any community college, ASSIST.org, or Instructure (Canvas). School and product names are used for identification only.