Privacy policy

What we collect

• Your account. Your name, email address, and profile photo. If you sign in with Google, these come from your Google account. If you sign up with an email address, Google Firebase stores your password; we never see it.
• Your profile. Your real name, company, industries, interests, and social links, if you choose to add them.
• What you contribute. Your votes, comments, posts, CBS Corner questions, the tools you suggest, the tools you save to your list, and any error reports you send us (these include your name and email address so we can follow up).
• How you use the site. The pages you visit and what you click, recorded with PostHog. When you are signed in, these events are linked to your account and email address. When you follow a link out to a tool's website, we also log the click: your account ID if you are signed in, a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address, and your browser type.
• Cookies and browser storage. Google Firebase keeps you signed in using your browser's storage, and a short-lived cookie lets our server recognize you. PostHog keeps an identifier in a cookie and in your browser's local storage.

What other members see

• Posts and tool listings are public, including the name shown on them.
• Comments and profiles are visible to signed-in members, and CBS Corner questions to Columbia members.
• Signed-in members can read the details stored on your profile, including your email address and real name. Under Email & privacy in your profile, you choose whether your email and real name are displayed on your public profile page.
• The tools you save to your list are visible only to you.

Email we send

• The newsletter. Every account gets The A(I) List newsletter, about once a week. You can turn it off anytime with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any issue, or by unchecking “Email me the newsletter” under Email & privacy in your profile. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately.
• Apart from the newsletter, we email you only when you ask, such as a password reset or an email-address check, which Google Firebase sends.
• We send the newsletter through Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). We never sell, rent, or share our member list.

Services that handle your data

We use these services only to run the site:

• Google Firebase (Google Cloud) hosts the site, handles sign-in, and stores accounts and content. Google reCAPTCHA, part of Firebase, checks that requests come from a real browser on our site.
• Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon Web Services) delivers the newsletter.
• PostHog records site analytics, as described above.
• OpenAI receives the searches you run with AI overview, with excerpts of related posts, to write the overview; the text of reviews, to write the review summaries on tool pages; and details of suggested tools, to categorize them and spot duplicates.
• Brandfetch serves tool logos. When your browser loads an image from Brandfetch, or a profile photo from Google or Gravatar, that service sees your IP address and browser type, as any image host does.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account anytime from your profile (Delete account). This deletes your sign-in and wipes your profile: your name, email address, photo, and profile details.

What stays after deletion

• Comments, posts, and CBS Corner questions you wrote stay up, shown as “Deleted user”. Tools you suggested stay listed without your name.
• Your votes still count toward totals.
• Error reports you sent us keep your name and email address, and use-case suggestions keep your name.
• Your saved list and the records of how you used the site (PostHog analytics and our click log) are not removed automatically.

Contact us to have any of these removed. If you only want fewer emails, you can turn off the newsletter and keep your account.

Contact

For questions about your data, or to ask us to see or remove it, reply to any newsletter email or reach Malek or Olivier through the faculty pages linked from the About page.