Your questions, and your privacy

Anonymous means you do not need an account. It does not mean your messages cannot identify you. Please do not share your name, email, student ID, birth date, passwords, or unnecessary sensitive details. If you attach a transcript or resume, remove identifiers you do not want processed.

What happens when you send a message

We use OpenAI’s Decisions API to understand how your question relates to the conversation and choose whether to help with planning, ask a clarifying question, or steer back to education. Before sending messages, we try to remove common email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and labeled student IDs and birth dates. This automated filter is imperfect and does not reliably remove names or sensitive information written in ordinary sentences.

Messages and saved conversation context—including questions that turn out to be unrelated—are sent to OpenAI for routing and to generate a response. The assistant also queries Fast Schedule’s public college catalog and schedule tools. Cloudflare hosts this service and its database. These services process information to operate the chat.

Documents you attach

When document attachments are enabled, files selected or dropped into the composer stay in browser memory until you press Send. Removing a queued badge prevents that file from being uploaded. Send transmits the full document to our server and OpenAI to identify its type and create an education-planning summary. Original files are not automatically redacted before provider processing; remove unnecessary identifiers first. We do not persist original files or create public download URLs. Originals are discarded after analysis; queued browser copies are cleared when you leave or clear the chat.

We save encrypted filenames, document metadata and filtered AI summaries with the conversation, including summaries from an upload whose subsequent chat response did not finish. Summaries may omit or misread information. They are used as context for follow-up questions and can be opened from document badges. Access requires the owning browser credential and chat session; another chat cannot use those documents. These records expire with the conversation, seven days after the chat started, with hourly cleanup. Clear chat removes them from the live database. Provider processing and retention are separate.

What we log and why

We save filtered messages and replies, encrypted in our database, for troubleshooting, quality review, and improving education-planning assistance. Authorized operators with database and encryption-key access can read them. We do not use these logs for advertising or sell them. Clarifying and redirected exchanges are saved too, so later questions can use their context. Requests rejected for invalid format or rate limits are not sent to OpenAI.

We also count broad question categories and outcomes, such as “transfer question answered.” These counts do not include conversation text, names, session IDs, or network identifiers. They help us understand where the service works and where students need better information.

How long data stays

• Your chat gets a private browser URL after your first message. Reloading that URL restores saved messages; Back returns to the empty start page. Forward can reopen the chat within 10 minutes of leaving. Leaving the page or hiding its tab starts this timeout; returning after 10 minutes clears browser access and returns to the start page. Active chats have a maximum lifetime of 24 hours. A secure essential cookie authenticates this browser; the URL alone does not grant access. Browser session storage holds only chat IDs and activity timestamps, not chat text. Local storage holds clearing markers so other tabs cannot restore a cleared chat. Each chat also has a random server-side prompt cache key, independent of your cookie, that is shared with OpenAI to enable prompt-prefix reuse. It expires with the conversation record. The key is not a substitute for sending context.
• Conversation records expire 7 days after the chat starts. An hourly cleanup removes expired records from the live database, normally within an additional hour.
• Burst and sustained-use limits use session identifiers and daily rotating keyed network identifiers to discourage automation. We do not save raw IP addresses in our application database. Usage counters expire within 48 hours after their last update, plus the hourly cleanup window.
• The live connection uses short-lived connection records to enforce limits. They are deleted on close or expire within one hour, plus the cleanup window. Stopping or losing a connection can leave a partial answer on screen; partial turns are not saved as completed conversations. Provider charges or processing may already have occurred.
• Coarse daily topic and outcome counts expire after 90 days, plus the hourly cleanup window.

Cloudflare may keep infrastructure data and database recovery copies under its own retention settings. Deleted database records may remain in recovery copies for up to 30 additional days. OpenAI may retain abuse-monitoring data for up to 30 days, subject to its policies and applicable exceptions. We request no stored chat completions or document-analysis responses. Decisions prompt caching uses the default 30-minute minimum cache lifetime; provider cache entries may last longer. These settings are not a promise of zero provider retention, and clearing a chat does not purge provider caches. OpenAI says API data is not used to train its models by default. See OpenAI’s data controls and Cloudflare’s database recovery policy.

Clearing your chat

“Clear chat” immediately blanks the screen, stops the live connection, removes this tab’s chat metadata, and returns to the empty start page. It also requests deletion of all conversations associated with this browser cookie from our live database and clears other open chat tabs. If offline, deletion waits until a connection is available; the screen remains cleared and old chats cannot be resumed through this interface. Leaving for 10 minutes revokes browser access but does not shorten the separate 7-day server retention period. Old URLs may remain in browser history but cannot reopen a cleared chat. It does not reset abuse-prevention limits or remove previously aggregated counts or provider records. If you lose the cookie, we cannot reliably locate your anonymous chat; it expires automatically. Recovery copies age out separately.

Your plan stays yours to verify

This is planning assistance, not official academic advising. Do not rely on an AI response alone for registration or graduation decisions. Document attachments are available when full-experience access is enabled. Accounts, payments and saved personal plans are not available.

Privacy notice version: October 28, 2026.