Privacy

DSA (Digital Student Assistant) is Prof. Pisan's tutor for CSS 342 and 343 at UW Bothell. Prof. Yusuf Pisan built it and runs it. This page says what it records, who can see it, who stores it for DSA, how long it is kept, and how to have it deleted.

The notice you see at sign-in

Word for word, as the sign-in page shows it:

What is recorded

• Your conversations with the tutor: your questions, the code you send, its replies, and a running summary so it can pick up where you left off.
• Your progress: your answers to exercises, quick checks, mastery checks and Teach-Back, and their scores; find-my-bug scores (never the answer's words); the topics you have worked on; and any sentence you write about a success.
• Notes on what you misunderstood: short notes the tutor writes when it spots a wrong idea in your answers, used to teach you and, without your name, to find the mistakes many students make.
• How you use the site: which pages, slides and lectures you open, for how long, and the buttons you press. These records carry numbers, never your email or what you wrote.
• Your ratings: a thumbs up or down on a reply, and what you say was wrong.
• Signing in: your email address and name, and each sign-in attempt with the browser it came from.
• Each question's cost and timing, to keep within the class's budget and to check the tutor's replies.
• Pages that failed for you, so a broken link gets fixed.
• Your own Anthropic API key, if you add one on the Settings page, stored encrypted.

Who can see it

• You: your own conversations and progress.
• Your class's instructors, if your instructor uses DSA for your class: how you are using it, and your conversations for that class.
• The admin (Prof. Pisan), who runs the site.

Your data is never sold or shared outside the course. These service providers store or carry it so that DSA can run.

Service providers

• Anthropic (the AI model): your question and the recent conversation each time the tutor answers, and your answers when they are graded. Kept under its API terms; no training on them is requested.
• Resend (email): the address, subject and text of each email DSA sends, your sign-in codes and the reports staff receive. Kept in its sending logs.
• ElevenLabs (the voice): the text of a reply you ask to hear with 🔊. Kept under its terms.
• Sentry (error reports): what went wrong in the app, with request bodies, cookies, query strings and database values removed. For now a report can also carry the app's log lines from just before the error, so it can hold what Render's logs hold.
• Render (hosting): runs the site. Its logs list each request and the page address, not your conversations; for now they can also hold your name and email when an alert to staff names you, and the tutor's private notes on code it grades. Kept for Render's log window.
• Supabase (the database): everything listed above.
• GitHub (scheduled jobs): they read the database to send the reports, to make an encrypted nightly backup, kept 21 days, to have the AI model review recent replies, in a report that names students only by number, kept 14 days, and to anonymize old records. Each job's run log is kept for GitHub's log window; for now, the log of the job that anonymizes old records lists the email address of each student it anonymizes.
• Google: if you sign in with Google, your name and email address come to DSA, and Google learns that you signed in. For now, alerts to staff, which can name you or carry a problem you reported, also go to Prof. Pisan's Gmail mailbox.
• The mail forwarder: mail you send to DSA's contact address passes through it on its way to Prof. Pisan's UW mailbox.

How long it is kept

• Records that identify you: up to one year. After that, everything that identifies you is removed, and only anonymized usage data is kept to improve the tutor.
• Sign-in attempts, pages that failed and the record of who opened your pages: 90 days.
• The tutor's private notes on code it grades, and the rest of the host's logs: Render's log window, which a deletion request does not shorten.
• Encrypted backups: 21 days. The AI review report: 14 days.
• A deletion request is done within 30 days.

How to request deletion

To have your data deleted, write to the address the notice above gives; it is done within 30 days.

Public pages

If you are not signed in, reading the public pages (sign-in, help and this one) sets no cookie, loads no activity tracker and writes no record. The one exception is a page that fails, a broken link say: it writes one record of the error (the page address, the page on this site you came from, the kind of browser, and a reference number), kept 90 days, and may send Sentry an error report with bodies, cookies and query strings removed. Render's log keeps every request for its own window.

Questions

About anything else on this page, email [email protected].