Privacy Policy

Last Updated: June 3, 2026

Research Platform Notice

ThePhilosopher.AI is an experimental philosophical research platform. This Policy explains how we collect, use, retain, and disclose information when you use the platform, including Private Library and AI-assisted research features.

Information We Collect

Information You Provide

  • Account information, such as email, username, profile details, signup timestamps, and Terms acceptance records.
  • Philosophical evaluations, arguments, claims, theories, notes, debates, papers, and other contributions you create.
  • Private Library uploads, Vault content, bibliographic metadata, extracted passages, and rights attestations when you use those features.
  • Settings, consent choices, feature flags, model preferences, and training-data opt-in or opt-out choices.
  • Feedback, support messages, and communications with the platform team.

Information Collected Automatically

  • Usage data related to platform features, requests, errors, and performance.
  • Session information, authentication tokens, device/browser information, IP address, approximate region, and timestamps.
  • Security, abuse-prevention, rate-limit, and audit logs.
  • Provider request metadata needed to operate, debug, bill, and secure AI-assisted features.

How We Use Information

We use information to:

  • Operate, maintain, secure, debug, and improve the platform.
  • Provide philosophical reading, retrieval, extraction, debate, writing, and AI-assisted research features.
  • Enforce per-user isolation, access controls, regional availability, rights attestations, and takedown decisions.
  • Process support requests, investigate abuse, and respond to legal obligations.
  • Develop aggregated or anonymized research insights about philosophical learning and reasoning workflows.

Private Library and Vault Privacy

Private Library and Vault content is stored in a per-user-isolated library and is not shown to other users. It is not added to the public corpus and is not used to train models that serve other users.

Private author/persona doppelgangers use prompt orchestration and retrieval over works available in your own Private Library. They are private reading companion features, not model fine-tuning, pretraining, or model-weight training.

Private Library retrieval is scoped to the uploading user. Cross-user source resolution may use bibliographic metadata to say that no full text is available in the current user's library, but it must not reveal who uploaded a work or whether a bibliographic match came from another user's private library.

AI Providers and Service Providers

Some features may send prompts, excerpts, embeddings, metadata, or generated outputs to AI or infrastructure providers so the feature can work. We will not knowingly route Private Library or Vault content to a provider whose then-current terms allow that provider to use submitted content to train or improve general models without our explicit opt-in.

If we later offer a separate user-owned-work model-training feature, that feature will use only materials the user separately submits or marks as eligible for that purpose after a separate opt-in and rights attestation. Private Library and Vault materials are not automatically training data.

Providers may retain limited data for security, abuse monitoring, legal compliance, support, reliability, or other operational purposes under their API or enterprise terms. We review providers for training use, retention, deletion, confidentiality, and security posture before routing private uploaded content through them.

Data Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell your personal information or private uploaded content.

We may disclose information only in limited circumstances:

  • With your explicit consent.
  • To service providers and AI providers needed to operate requested features, under appropriate confidentiality, security, and data-use restrictions.
  • For aggregated or anonymized academic research or reporting, without identifying you or disclosing private uploaded full text.
  • To comply with legal obligations, copyright notices, subpoenas, court orders, or government requests.
  • To protect rights, safety, platform integrity, per-user isolation, and security.

Regional Availability and IP Region Data

We may use signup IP region, active/session IP region, declared country, billing country if available, user role, and account status to determine whether a feature is available in your jurisdiction. We retain region and attestation audit data where needed to demonstrate rights, access, compliance, and security decisions.

Data Retention

We retain information for as long as needed to provide the platform, maintain security, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce Terms, preserve audit trails, and support research operations.

If you revoke a Private Library or Vault attestation, affected content is immediately disabled from retrieval and AI processing, retained in inaccessible soft-delete for 7-14 days for correction or reconnection, then deleted from active systems. Backup copies expire on normal backup rotation. Legal, security, abuse-prevention, billing, and audit records may be retained as required or permitted by law.

If content is disabled because of a copyright notice, restoration or deletion follows the applicable notice, counter-notice, claimant-withdrawal, or legal-resolution process.

Your Rights and Choices

Depending on your jurisdiction and account status, you may request to:

  • Access personal information associated with your account.
  • Correct inaccurate account or profile data.
  • Export supported philosophical contributions and private-library metadata.
  • Delete your account or eligible associated data.
  • Withdraw from optional research or training-data features.
  • Revoke Private Library or Vault attestations for affected content.

Data Security

We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect information, including access controls, per-user data isolation, audit logs, and encryption where appropriate. No electronic system is perfectly secure, and the platform remains experimental.

Children's Privacy

The platform is not intended for children. You must be at least 18 years old or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher, to use ThePhilosopher.AI.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy as the platform evolves. Material changes may be communicated through platform notices or renewed consent flows.

Contact Information

For questions about this Policy or your data, contact the platform team through the contact page. Copyright notices should use the Copyright/DMCA page at /legal/copyright.