Privacy Policy

When you sign up:

• Your university email address (used to verify you're affiliated with a supported university, and to log in)
• A username, display name, and the university you're associated with

Your profile (which you control):

• Bio, avatar image, banner image, major, and study year, if you choose to add them

Content you create:

• Files, posts, and comments you upload or write, including any images attached to them
• Your votes, bookmarks, and reports you file
• Messages you send to UniBin's AI assistant

Automatically, in the background:

• We briefly process your IP address and browser information during signup and when logging errors, but we don't store them in raw form. They're immediately converted into a one-way cryptographic fingerprint used only to detect abuse (e.g., spam signups) and automatically deleted within 24 hours.
• Our hosting and infrastructure provider, which serves UniBin, inherently sees your IP address as part of normal internet traffic — this is true of any website and isn't something UniBin separately stores or accesses.

What's public to other users: Your username, display name, bio, avatar, major, and study year are visible to anyone using the platform (including people not logged in), similar to a public profile on most community platforms.

• To run the platform: authenticate you, show you content relevant to your university, and let you interact with other students
• To moderate content: uploaded files and their extracted text are automatically screened using AI-based content moderation (see "Third Parties" below) to catch spam, scams, and policy violations
• To power search and the AI assistant: file content is used to generate search results and AI-generated summaries; your questions to the chatbot are processed to return relevant answers
• To prevent abuse: rate-limiting checks (using the anonymized fingerprints described above) to prevent spam and automated attacks
• To send you email: account verification, password resets, and — if you opt in — announcements from moderators or admins

UniBin runs on top of several third-party services, each with a specific role:

• Our database, authentication, and file-storage provider — your account credentials, profile, and uploaded files are stored here.
• Our hosting and infrastructure provider — hosts the platform and provides the AI models used for search and the chatbot assistant. As our host, its infrastructure handles all traffic to and from UniBin.
• Our content-moderation provider(s) — automated content moderation may involve more than one provider. They receive uploaded images and extracted text from documents (up to roughly 20,000 characters) to detect content that violates our policies. This content is transmitted to them only for that screening, and they do not use it to train their models.
• Our email service provider — sends transactional emails (verification, password reset) and any announcements you're opted into. It also reports back delivery status (delivered, bounced, etc.) so we can troubleshoot email issues.

We don't sell your data to anyone, and we don't share it with third parties beyond what's needed to run the features described above.

• Your content and profile remain as long as your account is active.
• If you request account deletion, there's a 7-day grace period — if you log back in during that window, the deletion is automatically canceled and nothing is lost. After 7 days, your profile, uploaded files, posts, comments, votes, bookmarks, and other personal content are permanently deleted, including the underlying files in storage.
• Some records are kept in an anonymized form after deletion — for example, moderation/audit history and flagged-content logs may retain the content involved (e.g., the text of a message that triggered a moderation flag) but have your personal identity removed from them. This is standard practice for trust-and-safety recordkeeping and doesn't let us re-identify you from that data.
• Our email delivery logs (used to check whether emails to you were successfully delivered) are purged when your account is permanently deleted — the addresses tied to your account are removed from those logs as part of the deletion process.

• You can edit or remove your own profile information, files, and posts at any time from within the app.
• You can request full account deletion from within the app (Settings). See our Account Deletion page for details.
• You can opt out of non-essential announcement emails in your account settings; you'll still receive essential account emails (verification, password reset).

We use industry-standard practices to protect your data, including encrypted storage of credentials and role-based access controls limiting who can see what within our own team. No system is 100% secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information.

UniBin is intended for university students and isn't directed at children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone not affiliated with a supported university.

We may update this policy as UniBin changes. If we make a significant change to how we collect or use your data, we'll do our best to make that clear, including updating the date at the top of this page.

Questions about this policy or how your data is handled? Email support@unibin.app.