Privacy Policy

Your account. When you sign in with a supported identity provider, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture. That is the whole sign-up form. If you connect a calendar, we read your calendar events for two things only: to find the classes that repeat each week so you can confirm them as your timetable, and to plan study time around what is already booked. We write only the study blocks and class times we create, into a calendar of ours named Availa, and never edit or delete your own events. Calendar data is used for those features and nothing else: it is not used for advertising, not sold, not shared with anyone outside the providers listed below, and not read by a person except to fix a problem you ask us about or for security. We handle calendar data only to provide the features you requested and meet applicable privacy requirements. You can disconnect the calendar connection at any time from the Calendar page; we then stop reading it and delete what we had copied from it. You can also revoke Availa’s access from your identity account’s security page.

Your course material. Lecture recordings you make, the transcripts and notes we generate from them, documents you upload (syllabi, slides, assignments, your own writing), photos of your handwritten notes and notes you type, questions you ask, and your answers during study sessions. A lecture recording necessarily contains other people’s voices, usually your professor’s and sometimes classmates’; see “Other people in your recordings” below.

Your recording acknowledgment. Before your first recording we ask you to confirm that you have permission to record the class. We keep the time you confirmed and the version of the Terms you accepted, so that we can show, if we are ever asked, what you were told and agreed to before you pressed record.

Payment details. Handled entirely by our payment processor. We never see or store your card number; we store only your subscription status.

Usage basics. Ordinary technical logs (when things ran, whether they failed, what it cost us to run), your device’s push token if you turn on reminders, and, if you arrived through a friend’s or creator’s link, which link it was so the reward or commission goes to the right person. We do not run advertising trackers. We also record how you use Availa, such as the pages you open, what you click, how far you scroll and what you type, so we can see what works and make it better. Some visits are also replayed as a video of the screen so we can watch where people get stuck; in those replays everything you type is blanked out. We never record passwords or card numbers.

Availa records how you study in the app: which questions you are shown and why, which you answer, skip, or leave partway, how long you take, what you ask about, and when you study. We use this to pick better questions for you and to learn which help actually works. This stream can include the text you type into app fields, as described under Usage basics. It never records passwords or card numbers. It is deleted along with the rest of your data when you delete your account.

We use your content to run Availa for you: turning lectures into transcripts and notes, making practice questions, scheduling reviews, and helping with work you ask for. Your material is used to help you, not anyone else.

We use trusted service providers to run Availa. They handle things like transcription, AI processing, file storage, payments, email, notifications, sign-in, and calendar access if you connect it. Each one is bound by contract to use your data only to provide its service to us. None of our AI providers train their models on your data. You can ask us for the current list of providers at any time.

Class sections. When you and classmates in the same section both leave sharing on, they can see your generated notes and practice questions for lectures they missed. We never share audio or transcripts, and you can turn sharing off for each class at any time.

When we disclose anything else. Apart from the providers above and the class-section feature, we disclose your information only (a) with your direction or permission; (b) to act on a complaint from an instructor, classmate or school that a recording was made without required permission, in which case we may confirm to them whether a recording of the class exists and whether it has been removed, but we do not hand over the recording; (c) when a subpoena, court order or other valid legal process requires it, in which case we will tell you unless the law prohibits it; (d) to protect the rights, safety or property of Availa, our users or others; or (e) to a successor if Availa is acquired or merges, under this same policy.

Legal basis. Where the law asks us to name one: we process your account and course material to perform our contract with you; technical logs, cost tracking, referral attribution and fraud prevention under our legitimate interest in running a working, honest service; and anything else only with your consent, which you can withdraw.

We do not sell your data, and we do not “share” it for cross-context behavioural advertising as those words are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act. To anyone, for anything.

We do not use your recordings, documents, or writing to train AI models, and we do not let our providers do so.

We do not build voiceprints or any other biometric identifier. Audio is processed for one purpose, turning speech into text. When a transcript separates speakers, the labels are temporary and anonymous; no voice signature of you, your professor, or your classmates is ever created, stored, or matched across recordings.

We do not receive education records from your school, and we do not give your school access to your account. Availa is a tool you choose and control, not a service your school has contracted; we have no relationship with your institution unless we say so in the app. Because of that, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs your school’s handling of your records, not ours; your material with us is protected by this policy, the Terms, and consumer privacy law instead. If a school ever engages Availa on behalf of its students, we will do so under a written agreement that meets FERPA’s school-official requirements and we will say so here.

We do not show ads and we do not share your data with advertisers.

Recordings and everything made from them are kept until you delete them, so the product can keep working for you across the semester and beyond; that accumulation is the point of Availa. Delete a recording and its audio, transcript and generated material are removed from our systems; delete a document and the same happens to it, with copies in routine backups expiring on their own short schedule. Dropping a class hides it from your schedule but keeps its lectures, so that you can pick it back up.

Nothing is deleted automatically. Every lecture, on the web and in the app, has a Delete control; using it removes that lecture’s recording, transcript, notes and practice questions from our systems. If your school or instructor requires class recordings to be erased at the end of the semester, or the permission you were given was on that condition, it is your responsibility to delete those lectures when the time comes. Email us if you want a whole class’s lectures removed at once and we will do it for you.

Delete your account and we delete your content, including audio and files in storage. We may keep the minimal records the law requires us to keep, like payment records, and the record of your recording acknowledgment for as long as a claim about a recording could be made.

We use cookies only to keep you signed in. No advertising cookies, no third-party tracking cookies.

You can see your content any time by signing in; it is the product. You can delete recordings, documents, courses, or your whole account yourself. Depending on where you live, you may also have legal rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, to object to or restrict certain processing, to withdraw consent, and to not be discriminated against for exercising any of these. This includes rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the CPRA), other US state privacy laws, and the GDPR and UK GDPR where they apply. To exercise any of them, or to ask anything at all, email matthew@availalabs.com and we will handle it directly, within the time the law requires and usually much faster. We may ask you to confirm the request from the email on your account. If you are in the EU or UK you may also complain to your local data protection authority.

Our servers and providers are in the United States. If you use Availa from elsewhere, your data is transferred to and processed there.

A lecture recording usually contains other voices, mostly your professor’s. Availa never records anything on its own: the student presses record, and the student is responsible for having every permission the law, their school and their instructor require before doing so (see section 3 of the Terms). Massachusetts and a number of other states require that everyone being recorded know about it; Boston College and many other schools additionally require the instructor’s express permission. We tell students this before their first recording and ask them to confirm they have it.

Recordings are private to the student who made them; we do not publish them, they are not indexed by search engines, and we never share audio or transcripts with anyone, classmates included. We treat the voices in them with the same care as yours: never sold, never used for training, never voiceprinted. We do not attempt to identify speakers, and we do not build profiles of instructors.

Instructors can read what Availa does and does not do at availalearn.com/for-professors. If you are an instructor, classmate or school official and you believe a student has recorded you or your class without the permission required, email matthew@availalabs.com with the course and approximate date. We will disable access to the recording and everything generated from it while we investigate, remove it if the student cannot show they had permission, and confirm the outcome to you. If you are in someone’s recording and want your part removed, the same address works.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest with our storage providers, access to production systems is limited to the people who run the Service, and sign-in tokens are stored encrypted. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach ever affects your data we will tell you, and any regulator the law requires, promptly.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. The date at the top always tells you the current version.