Privacy notice

When you sign in

Signing in is optional. You sign in with your school email address and a password, and you confirm the address once from a link we email you. Your password is stored only as a hash, by our sign-in provider (Supabase).

When you sign in, we keep the following on our servers:

• Your email address, used to sign you in, to confirm your school so posting stays student-only, for any seat alert you set yourself, and for a CourseTrees update about once a month that you can turn off in your settings or with the unsubscribe link in the email. We never sell it and we never give it to an advertiser.
• A small profile: your school, your class year, an optional handle, and whether your school email is verified. You appear to other students by class year, never by your real name.
• Anything you choose to post: reviews, ratings, votes, board posts, and study-group membership. These are tied to your account so you can manage them, and shown to others without your identity.
• Your courses and plan: the courses you mark as taken, the terms in your plan, any plans you save, and the courses, clubs, departments and pages you follow.
• Your Cam conversations, and any thumbs up, thumbs down or note you leave on an answer. See when you use Cam.

If you join through someone's invite link, that person sees your school email address and the date you joined, until October 15, 2026. We tell you before your signup counts for them, and you can join without the link or skip counting it. For every account, we also keep a fingerprint of each email address it has used, to spot duplicate signups. See invites.

This account data lives in our database (hosted on Supabase) behind row-level access controls and is sent only over encrypted connections. You can delete your account and everything personal tied to it at any time, yourself. See deleting your account.

If you buy a paid plan, Stripe processes the payment, so your card details go to Stripe and never reach our servers, and we keep your plan, the price you pay, its status and renewal date, and the Stripe ids that link them to your account.

Stripe uses the email you pay with to send your receipts and, if you pay yearly, a reminder before your plan renews.

If you subscribe in the iPhone app, Apple processes the payment, so your payment details go to Apple and never reach us, and we keep the subscription's App Store transaction id, the product, its status and renewal date, whether it renews, and whether it was a test purchase, linked to your account so Pro works on the website too.

Apple also tells us when that subscription renews, lapses, changes or is refunded, and we keep a record of each notice.

Invites

When someone joins through your invite link, we store who invited whom and when. If you entered the invite contest, you see the school email and join date of each person who counts toward your total on the Invite friends page, until October 15, 2026. The leaderboard shows a made-up name, such as Amber Heron, and a count. It never shows an email. Our analytics record only that an invite step happened. They never record who invited you, any email address, or leaderboard names. Deleting either account removes the record.

To stop one person from counting twice, we keep a fingerprint of each email address an account has used, including addresses it has since changed away from. We do this for every account, not only people in the contest. A fingerprint is a scrambled code made from the address, not the address itself, and no one outside CourseTrees can read it. We delete an account's fingerprints when the account is deleted.

When you use Cam

Cam's answers are written by Claude, a language model from Anthropic, a third-party AI provider. Anthropic runs the model on our behalf. Cam looks things up in CourseTrees and sends the question, with what it found, to Anthropic to write the answer.

On the website, if you are not signed in, you get a small amount of Cam usage each day and each month, and your questions go to Anthropic the same way, with no account details because there are none. In the iPhone app you can also ask without signing in, and those questions go to Anthropic the same way. There the daily and monthly usage is shared by everyone on the same network who uses the app without signing in.

The first time you ask Cam a question in the iPhone app, it tells you this and asks you to allow it. Nothing is sent until you do.

What Anthropic receives with each question:

• Your question and up to the last 12 messages of the conversation you are in.
• Your school, today's date, and, on the website, the page you are on when you ask. The iPhone app sends no page.
• Whether you are signed in, and whether your school email is verified.
• If you are signed in, the courses you marked as taken at that school, the terms and courses in your plan, and the concentration on your profile.
• The catalog and campus information Cam looks up to answer, the same information the site shows you, including grade distributions, ratings, workload and reviews if your school email is verified.
• When you ask about your own plans, schedule or saved items: the names of your saved plans and the courses in them, your saved class schedules, the clubs, departments and courses you follow, the classes you watch for an open seat, and the titles of your saved Create maps, with when each was last changed.
• If you have CourseTrees Pro, the short summary Cam keeps of your plan and goals, described below.

We never send your name, your email address, or your account id. If you never ask Cam a question, nothing you do on the site is sent to any AI provider, and the same is true in the iPhone app.

What Cam looks up can include course reviews other students wrote, shown the way the site shows them, with a class year and no name or account attached. So a review you write can reach the provider when a verified student asks Cam about that course.

Campus facts. Some of what Cam knows about a campus is written by CourseTrees staff: a short set of campus facts and vocabulary, such as what shopping period means at Brown. It goes to Anthropic with each question at that campus. It is about the campus, never about you.

We do not use your questions to train a model. What Anthropic may do with the requests it receives, including how long it keeps them, is set by Anthropic's own commercial terms and privacy policy.

Cam's memory, with CourseTrees Pro. If you have Pro, Cam keeps a short summary of your plan and goals between conversations: your program, the courses you are working toward, the courses it recently discussed with you, and the percent from your last requirement audit. The summary is built from what Cam looked up, never from the text of your questions or its answers. It is stored with your account, goes to Anthropic with each question you ask while you have Pro, and is deleted 180 days after it last changed, or when you delete your account. You can see it, and forget it, on your Profile.

Usage limits. To keep Cam within its usage limits, we record how much work each of your Cam questions took: the tokens the model read and wrote, and what they cost us. We keep a record for each day of how many questions you asked and that work, and running totals for today and for this month (on Pro, your billing period). Cam shows you those totals only as a percentage of your plan's usage. If you are signed in, they are kept against your account, and against a scrambled code made from your email address, so its aliases share one allowance. If you are not, on the website they are kept against a cookie named ct_cam_device that holds a random id and lasts up to 400 days, and against a scrambled code made from your network address, never the address itself. The iPhone app keeps no cookies, so there they are kept against the scrambled network code alone, shared by everyone on that network who uses the app without signing in. A scrambled code cannot be turned back into the address without a key only CourseTrees holds. To keep Cam from being flooded, we also count the questions you have in progress and the ones you started in the last minute, under the same scrambled codes, for up to 15 minutes, and if you are not signed in, how many questions are in progress on your network. Usage records are deleted after 35 days. The running totals are kept under scrambled codes made from your account id, your device or your network, and expire on their own, a day's after 2 days and a month's about 40 days after its last question. A Pro billing period's total is kept with your billing records.

What we keep. If you are signed in, your Cam conversations are saved to your account so you can come back to them. A conversation is deleted 90 days after its last message, so one you keep using is kept, older messages included, until it goes 90 days without a new one. You can also delete a conversation yourself from your list of conversations, and it goes right away. A thumbs up or down, and any note you add to it, is stored with your account and deleted 90 days after you leave it, or with its conversation if that goes first. Our weekly report counts thumbs by school and by kind of question, and only in groups of five or more accounts. A note is never sent to the provider, and people at CourseTrees may read it to fix the answer it is about. Deleting your account deletes all of it from our database.

Our analytics record each question you ask Cam: at which school, which tools Cam used, how it was answered and what it cost. They also record each thumbs up or down, against the answer it is on. If you are signed in, these events are linked to your account id, the same as the rest of our analytics. They do not record the text of your question, the answer, or your note. Deleting your account does not remove analytics events already recorded.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, immediately, from your preferences on the web or from the account screen in the iOS app. No email, no waiting period. It cannot be undone: signing up again with the same address creates a brand-new, empty account.

What is deleted. Your login itself, meaning your email address, your password, and the campus your account is verified against. Everything personal attached to it goes too: the courses you marked as taken and the plans you built, the course maps you saved in Create, saved schedules, calendars and seat alerts, notifications and their per-course settings, advisor history and usage, your Cam conversations and the thumbs and notes you left on its answers, your Cam usage records and Cam's memory of your plan, beta access, referral links, who invited you or who you invited, the fingerprints of the email addresses your account has used, your study group memberships, and your username. It also removes your profile settings, such as your major and career goals, along with the course recommendations made from them and any courses you shared through enrollment sharing. It removes your email settings, your subscription and billing records with us, any campus or staff role you held, and the record of when you were last active. And it removes who you follow and anyone you blocked, your roles and memberships in clubs and organizations along with any claim you filed, every message you posted in a career room with the upvotes you gave there and your place in those rooms, and any identity verification you consented to.

What stays up, with your name removed for good. The community content you wrote: course ratings and reviews, reviews you left on clubs, board threads and replies, board chat messages, study groups you started, upvotes you cast, and reports you filed. None of it was ever shown under your name. Boards show a per-board pseudonym and a class year, and reviews show a class year, so what remains identifies nobody. It stays because deleting it would rewrite conversations other students are part of and skew every course's ratings. In database terms your profile becomes a tombstone: the same anonymous id, with no handle, no referral code, and no sign-in record anywhere.

Career rooms are the one place this works differently, and it is deliberate. Rooms are not anonymous: you post in them under your own identity, with no pseudonym in between. So there is nothing left to de-identify, and those messages are deleted outright rather than kept.

One exception, and the app will tell you if it applies to you: an account referenced by an administrative audit trail cannot be removed automatically. Email contact@coursetrees.com and we will handle it by hand.

If you ever paid for a plan on the website, deleting your account cancels it first. Stripe keeps its own record of what you paid, including the email you paid with and your account's id, and we can't delete that record.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription you bought in the iPhone app, because Apple bills it. Cancel it on your iPhone in Settings, under your name, then Subscriptions. We delete what links it to your account, and Apple keeps its own record of the purchase.