Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

• Account data (through Clerk, our sign-in provider): your email address, and if you sign in with Google, the name and profile picture on your Google account. Clerk stores your password and sign-in details, not Kota.
• Profile and preferences: your work style and what gets in the way (like starting, focusing or switching tasks), the times you focus best, your working hours, how often you want Kota to check in, and standing commitments you set, like recurring appointments.
• Session and task data: the tasks you add, with their titles, estimates, actual times and whether you finished them; your plans, brain dumps and parked items; and your session history. When you’re signed in, finished sessions are saved to your account. If you haven’t signed up, they stay in your browser.
• What you send Kota: your messages to Kota and anything else you type in a session. It’s sent to our AI provider to write Kota’s responses (see section 4).
• Files you share: Google Docs you pick or paste a link to, and PDF or Word files you upload. Uploaded files are read in your browser, and only their text is sent to Kota for the question you asked.
• Google data, only if you connect Google. Section 2 covers it in full.
• Usage analytics (through PostHog): which features you use, how long sessions run and which buttons you tap, as fixed labels and counts tied to your account ID, plus a few short lines Kota wrote for you (like a suggested first step). Never your task titles, notes, messages, email, calendar or documents. Events are sent from our server; there’s no analytics script or cookie in your browser.
• Billing data (through Stripe): your plan, subscription status and billing history. Stripe handles your payment details; Kota never sees or stores your card number.
• Server logs: errors, timings and security events, protected and kept as described in sections 5 and 8.

2. Your Google data

Connecting Google is optional. Kota asks for each permission when you first use something that needs it: your calendar when you connect, Gmail the first time Kota can help with an email, and Drive the first time a task involves a document. Once connected, Kota checks Gmail and Calendar in the background so your digest, plan and reminders stay current.

Google Calendar

Kota reads your events to plan your day around your meetings, flag conflicts and deadlines, and help you prepare for what’s coming up. With your approval, it creates focus blocks and meeting invites, and moves or cancels events. It also reads your calendar’s time zone. Kota keeps an encrypted copy of the next 48 hours of your events so it can notice changes.

Gmail

Kota reads your recent email to find messages waiting on your reply, build your morning digest, and draft replies for you. It reads a few of the emails you’ve sent to someone so a draft sounds like you, and looks at your saved Gmail drafts to remind you about ones you haven’t finished. An email is sent only after you approve it. Kota keeps an encrypted index of your threads (subject, participants, dates and a short preview), never full message bodies. It doesn’t delete, archive or label your email.

Google Drive and Docs

When a task mentions a document, Kota searches your Drive for it by title, then reads its headings and a few of its comments to help you get started. When you pick a document with Google’s file picker or paste a link, Kota reads that document to answer your questions about it. Kota doesn’t change or delete your files, and doesn’t keep their content after answering.

Your Google account

Kota reads the email address of the Google account you connect so Settings can show which account is connected.

How Google data is used and shared

• Only to provide and improve the features described above, which you can see and use in Kota.
• To write drafts, summaries and plans, the parts of your Google data a request needs are sent to Anthropic, our AI provider (see section 4).
• Never sold, never used for advertising, and never used to build or train AI or machine-learning models, ours or anyone else’s.
• Never read by a person at Kota, except when you ask us to look into a problem and give us permission, when it’s needed for security (for example, investigating abuse), or when the law requires it.
• Your Google tokens and synced Google data are encrypted before they’re stored.

Kota’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

3. How we use it

• Run the service: sign you in, save your sessions and tasks, and show your history.
• Power the AI companion: your profile, tasks and session context are sent to Anthropic to write Kota’s responses.
• Personalize Kota: your work style, energy patterns and task history let Kota adapt its timing and suggestions over time.
• Manage your subscription: handle payments, your trial and your plan.
• Improve the product: usage analytics show us which features help. We don’t use your individual task content for this.
• Contact you: sign-in codes (sent by Clerk) and billing receipts (sent by Stripe).

4. How AI works in Kota

Kota uses Anthropic’s Claude model to write its plans, drafts, summaries and replies. Anything Kota says or writes for you is AI-generated.

• When you use Kota, your task titles, session notes, profile, anything you type, and the Google data a request needs are sent to Anthropic’s servers.
• Anthropic processes this data under its own privacy policy. By default, Anthropic does not use API data to train its models, but you should review their policy directly.
• AI responses are kept only where you’ll use them again: plans in your saved sessions, and your chat and drafts on your device. They never go into our logs or analytics.
• AI output can be wrong. Kota is a productivity tool, not a substitute for professional advice of any kind.

5. How we protect what you share

These protections apply to Kota’s own systems. Data sent to the providers in section 7 is also covered by their security practices.

• Your task content stays out of our analytics. Analytics events carry only IDs, counts and feature labels, never what you wrote.
• Server logs remove personal information. Every log line passes through a scrubber that removes email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers before it’s written. Fields that hold passwords, tokens or text you wrote are blocked from logs entirely.
• We don’t log your IP address. For security, we store a hash of it instead, made with a secret that changes every day, so it can’t be linked across days.
• Personal commitment labels stay private. Names you give standing commitments (like a medical appointment) never appear in our logs or analytics.
• Google data is encrypted. Your Google tokens and synced Gmail and Calendar data are encrypted at rest, and everything travels over HTTPS.
• AI responses are checked before you see them. Plans, drafts and summaries must match a strict format. One that doesn’t is dropped, and the failure is logged without its content.

6. What stays on your device

Some of Kota lives only in your browser and is never sent to our servers:

• Your chat history with Kota.
• Your Needs Review queue (drafts waiting for your approval) and your Done log of what Kota handled for you. Done items are kept for at least 30 days.
• If you haven’t signed up, a random ID that lets us count your visit as one person. It’s never based on your IP address or a device fingerprint, and it’s linked to your account when you sign up.

This data is cleared from the device when you sign out or a different account signs in, and you can clear it any time by clearing your browser’s site data.

7. Who we share it with

We don’t sell your personal information. We share data only with these service providers, and only as much as Kota needs to run:

We require these providers to use your data only for the purposes above and as privacy law requires. We may also disclose data when the law requires it. Kota is run from the United States, and these providers may process data in the United States and other countries.

8. How long we keep it

• Account, profile and session data: until you clear your session history or delete your account.
• Google data: calendar events roll off after 48 hours. The Gmail index, your email settings and your Google tokens are kept until you disconnect Google or delete your account.
• Billing records: Kota’s record of your plan is deleted with your account. Stripe keeps invoices and payment records for as long as tax and financial law requires.
• Usage analytics: deleted, with your analytics profile, when you delete your account.
• Server logs: kept for our hosting provider’s standard period. A short record of account actions (exports, clearing history, account deletion) is kept after you delete your account, to handle abuse and support requests.

After your account is deleted, totals with no link to you (like how many sessions ran in a month) may be kept for product research.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have these rights:

• Access and portability: download your saved sessions with Export my data in Settings → Data & privacy, or email us for a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Correction: update your profile and preferences in Settings.
• Deletion: clear your session history or delete your account in Settings → Data & privacy. Deleting your account removes your saved sessions, your Google connection and its data, your analytics profile and your sign-in, and cancels any Kota Plus subscription.
• Withdraw Google access: disconnect Google in Settings → Integrations. Kota revokes its access and deletes your synced Gmail and Calendar data. You can also remove Kota from your Google account’s connections.
• Opt out of analytics: email us and we’ll exclude your account.

EU and UK residents (GDPR). We process your data to provide the service you signed up for (contract), to understand how Kota is used (legitimate interest), and for the Google integration you choose to turn on (consent). You can complain to your national data protection authority.

California residents (CCPA). We don’t sell or share your personal information for advertising. You have the right to know what we collect, to ask us to delete it, and not to be treated differently for using these rights.

To use any of these rights, email daphneejeune.dev@gmail.com. If you can’t get into your account, write from the address you signed up with and we’ll delete your data and confirm in writing.

10. Children

Kota isn’t meant for children under 13 (or under 16 in the EU or UK), and we don’t knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we’ll delete it promptly.

11. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we’ll update the date at the top. For material changes, we’ll tell you by email or in Kota before they take effect. If you keep using Kota after a change, you accept the updated policy.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy, or requests about your data: daphneejeune.dev@gmail.com.