Introduction
This Privacy Policy explains how Hemle (“Hemle,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, shares and protects information when you use the Hemle website, app and related services (the “Service”). Hemle is offered only to adults 18 and older who live in the United States. This Policy is part of our Terms of Service, which use some of the same defined terms.
The short version
- We don’t sell your information, and we don’t use it for advertising.
- We don’t use your documents, chats or study materials to train AI models, and the AI providers we use aren’t allowed to train on them.
- To teach you, we send your documents and messages to the AI providers named in Section 6.
- We learn how you study, such as your pace and the topics you find hard, so we can adapt Hemle to you.
- You can delete a document at any time, and you can delete your account in Settings. Section 8 explains what happens next.
Information we collect
Information you give us
- Account details. Your name, email address and how you sign in (email and password, or Google). Our sign-in provider, Supabase, stores your password in a form we can’t read. If you turn on two-factor authentication, the provider stores that too.
- Age and residence confirmation. When you sign up, you confirm your age and that you live in the United States. We record that you’re 18 or older and live in the United States. We don’t keep your date of birth.
- Your agreement to our Terms. Which version of the Terms and this Policy you accepted, when, and how.
- Onboarding answers. What describes you (for example undergraduate, graduate student, teacher or professional), your goal, your deadline and, if you tell us, how you heard about Hemle.
- Your content. The files you upload (such as PDFs, Word and PowerPoint files), their text and page images, their names, and anything you type into Hemle, including questions, answers and messages to Malet and Chat.
- Voice recordings. When you use the microphone to dictate a message or an answer, your browser records what you say and sends it to us to turn into text. The text goes into the field for you to read and send. We don’t keep the recording, only a count of how many you made that day, which is deleted within two days.
- Support messages. What you write to us, and our replies.
Information we collect as you use Hemle
- Study activity. Your quiz and flashcard answers and whether they were right, how long you took, how confident you said you were, your reviews, lessons and progress, your streaks, how long you actively study, and what you tell Hemle about a suggestion, an answer or a lesson (for example “not on my exam”, or a thumbs-down and its reason). We measure active study time from activity in the app, such as clicks, key presses and scrolling, not from what you type elsewhere.
- Device and usage information. Your IP address, browser, operating system, time zone, the pages and features you use, when you use them, and error reports.
- How you first found Hemle. The first page you opened, the website that sent you (its domain only), any campaign tags in that link, the date, and the page where you signed up. Your browser keeps this until you sign up, and we ignore it once it’s more than 90 days old. When you create an account, we save it with your account and remove it from your browser.
- Security information. Sign-in events and signals from Cloudflare’s bot check (Turnstile), used to tell people from bots when you sign in or sign up.
Information we create
- Study materials. The study path, flashcards, quizzes, explanations, page citations and summaries Hemle makes from your documents.
- Your study profile and the tutor’s notes. Described in Section 5.
Payments. When you subscribe to Pro, Stripe collects your payment details directly. We receive your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, its status and billing dates. We don’t receive or store your card number.
How we use information
We use information to:
- provide the Service: process your documents, make your study materials, answer your questions, run lessons, schedule reviews and measure your progress;
- personalize Hemle for you, using your onboarding answers, your study profile and the tutor’s notes (Section 5);
- improve Hemle’s own study methods, such as when reviews are scheduled and which step to suggest next, using records of how people study (answers, timing, confidence and progress), not the text of your documents or chats;
- find and fix problems, using error reports and records of the steps the tutor took, with the content of your messages hidden (Section 6);
- keep people safe: if a message you send suggests you may hurt yourself, Hemle checks it with a safety tool and replies with crisis resources;
- secure the Service and prevent fraud and abuse;
- bill you and manage your subscription;
- contact you about your account, security, billing and changes to our terms. We don’t send marketing emails at the moment. If we start, you’ll be able to opt out;
- learn which pages and websites bring people to Hemle, using how you first found us; and
- comply with the law and enforce our Terms.
We don’t sell your content, and we don’t use your documents, chats or study materials to train AI models. We don’t use your information for advertising.
Your study profile and the tutor’s notes
To adapt Hemle to you, we build a study profile from your activity: how fast you work, how well you remember compared with what we predicted, how accurate you are by type of question, topic and difficulty, how well your confidence matches your answers, and your study habits, such as the days you study and the tools you use. We build it, together with your onboarding answers, so we can adapt your reviews, time estimates, what Hemle suggests you do next, the mix of questions in your quizzes and Malet’s explanations to you.
Malet also keeps short notes from your conversations, such as what you found hard or how you like things explained, so it can pick up where you left off.
The profile and notes are used only to run Hemle for you. We don’t sell them, share them with advertisers, or use them to make decisions about you with legal or similarly significant effects, such as admission, grades or employment. To see, correct or reset them, email support@hemle.app. They’re deleted with your account.
What our AI providers do with your information
Our AI providers process your information to give us results and don’t use it to train their models. Under their current terms, some keep it for a short time:
- OpenAI may keep requests for up to 30 days to detect abuse, then deletes them.
- Google may keep requests for up to 55 days to detect abuse. Files we send it are deleted within 48 hours.
- Voyage AI doesn’t keep your content after processing it.
- LangSmith keeps its records for 14 days.
A provider may keep content longer if its systems flag it for abuse review or if the law requires it. We choose providers and settings that don’t allow training on your content.
How long we keep information
- Your account. When you delete your account in Settings, it closes right away and your subscription is canceled. You can reopen it by signing in within 30 days. After that, we delete your account, documents, study materials, chats, the tutor’s notes, your study profile and your study activity.
- A document. When you delete a document, we delete its file, text, search index, study materials and your chats about it.
- Backups. Copies in our backups are deleted within 30 days.
- Server logs. Usually about 15 days, then deleted or overwritten.
- Records of account and payment events (such as a subscription starting or an account being deleted) are kept until your account is deleted. After deletion, we keep a record that an account was deleted, with its ID and dates, so we can finish and prove the deletion.
- Billing records. Stripe keeps them for as long as tax and accounting laws require.
- Support messages. Up to 24 months.
- Copyright notices and counter-notices, for as long as we may need them to handle legal claims.
Our AI providers keep information for the shorter periods in Section 7.
Security
We protect information with encryption in transit (TLS); encryption of your files and of sensitive fields in our databases; access limited to the people who run Hemle, when they need it to operate, support or secure the Service; optional two-factor authentication; checks on uploaded files (file type, scripts in PDFs, and oversized compressed files); rate limits; and bot checks at sign-in. No system is perfectly secure. Keep your password private, turn on two-factor authentication, and tell us at support@hemle.app if you think your account was accessed without your permission. If a breach affects your information, we’ll notify you as the law requires.
Your choices and rights
Wherever you live in the United States, you can ask us to:
- tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy;
- correct it;
- delete it; and
- not sell it, not share it for targeted advertising, and not use it for profiling that leads to decisions with legal or similarly significant effects. We don’t do any of these, and we treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a request not to.
We honor these requests from everyone in the United States, including where your state’s law doesn’t require us to. We don’t charge you or treat you differently for using them.
How to ask. Email support@hemle.app from the address on your account, or delete your account in Settings. We may ask you to confirm your identity. Someone acting for you needs your signed permission. We confirm your request within 10 business days and answer within 45 days; if we need more time, we tell you why and take up to 45 more.
If we say no. You can appeal by emailing support@hemle.app with the subject “Appeal.” We answer within 45 days. If you’re still not satisfied, you can contact your state’s attorney general.
Sensitive information. Please don’t upload health information, government ID numbers or other sensitive information about yourself or anyone else. We don’t use sensitive information to infer things about you.
Cookies and storage on your device
Hemle uses no advertising or third-party analytics cookies, and doesn’t track you across other websites. It keeps these items in your browser:
- Sign-in session (Supabase), to keep you signed in.
- Settings and where you left off, such as your theme, sidebar, reader zoom and last page, and open lessons and chats.
- Work in progress, such as a chat you’re in the middle of, or a file you dropped on the home page before signing up. Hemle ignores these after a day and clears them when you sign out.
- The app’s own files, stored by the installed app for speed. It doesn’t store your account data.
- Bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile), when you sign in or sign up.
- How you first found Hemle, until you sign up; we ignore it after 90 days (Section 3). Only Hemle reads it.
Blocking or clearing these may sign you out or reset your settings. There’s no single standard for “Do Not Track” signals, so we treat Global Privacy Control as your choice instead; we don’t track you across other websites either way.
Adults only
Hemle is only for adults 18 and older. It isn’t directed to children, and we don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that someone under 18 has an account, we close it and delete their information. If you believe someone under 18 is using Hemle, email support@hemle.app.
Educators and schools
Teachers and tutors may use Hemle for their own study and to prepare their teaching. Hemle isn’t yet offered to schools, colleges or universities, and we don’t act as a school official under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Unless we’ve signed a written agreement with your institution, don’t upload students’ education records, grades, assignments or other personal information. If you upload another person’s information, you must have every right and consent needed.
If you’re outside the United States
Hemle is offered only in the United States, and your information is processed in the United States and in the other countries where our providers operate. If you used Hemle from outside the United States, you can still ask us to see, correct or delete your information, or object to how we use it, by emailing support@hemle.app. Your local data-protection law may give you further rights, including the right to complain to your data-protection authority.
Changes to this Policy
We may update this Policy. If a change is material, we tell you by email or in the app before it applies and, where the law or our Terms require it, ask you to accept it. The date at the top of this page shows the current version.
Contact
Questions or requests about this Policy? Email support@hemle.app.