What Polya stores
- Your account. Your name and email address from the Google account you sign in with.
- Your Canvas connection, if you add one. Your school’s Canvas address and your Canvas access token, stored encrypted. Polya also keeps a security log of when the connection was used.
- Your course materials. The files, pages, and transcripts you bring in for the courses you choose, plus the search index Polya builds from them.
- Your study settings and work. Each course’s study mode and note to the tutor, your conversations, your Check yourself results, and your exams, topics, and practice answers on the Study tab.
- A record of what you do in Polya, such as importing a course, asking a question, or opening a citation. It’s linked to your account and never includes what you asked or read. It shows whether Polya is working.
- A count of visits. A random number your browser creates, plus the date and time. It tells Polya how many people use it.
- Daily usage counts, so Polya can apply fair-use limits.
How Polya uses your data
Polya uses your data only to run Polya: bringing in the courses you pick, tutoring you from them, and keeping the service working and fair for everyone.- Polya doesn’t sell your information or your course materials.
- Polya doesn’t show ads and has no third-party advertising trackers.
- Your course materials stay yours and their authors’. Polya only uses them to answer your questions with citations.
Who helps run Polya
Polya works with a small number of service providers. They write the tutor’s replies, read your course files (including text in scanned pages), store Polya’s data and files, and host the website. To write a reply, the tutor service receives your question, the relevant passages from your course, your recent conversation, and any board text you add with Lecture. These providers process your data only on Polya’s behalf. Polya doesn’t let them use your materials or conversations to train their AI models. The privacy policy names each provider.Your Canvas access token
- Polya never shows your token again after you enter it.
- Polya uses it only to read the courses you choose. Nothing is ever posted back to Canvas.
- To remove the token from Polya, email hello@askpolya.com from the address you sign in with.
- Removing the token from Polya doesn’t turn it off in Canvas. To turn it off, delete it in Canvas under Account > Settings > Approved Integrations.
ChatGPT and Claude
If you connect Polya to ChatGPT or Claude, that assistant can see the following:- The names of the courses you added to Polya.
- The study mode for each course.
- Passages from your materials, when you ask about a course.