Privacy

What this covers

This policy covers aialignmentillinois.org, the members' dashboard at dashboard.aialignmentillinois.org, and the pages the site links to for the mailing list, event RSVPs, event tickets and live polls. Student officers of AI Alignment @ Illinois run all of them.

What is collected

• Visiting the site. Vercel, the site's host, counts page views: the page, the site that sent you, your country and city, and your browser, operating system and device type. It uses no cookies, and tells visits apart with a hash of the request that is thrown away after 24 hours.
• Scanning a club QR code. The time, which code, your browser, and the rough location your network address maps to (country, region, city, postal code and network name). The address itself is never stored.
• Joining the mailing list. Your email, the time, the page or printed code that brought you, and the country, city and browser of the request. The sign-up page may also ask your browser for your location. If you allow it, that location is saved against the page or code you came from, with no email attached.
• RSVPing to an event. Your name, your email, and how many friends you might bring, with the same time, country, city and browser details. An RSVP also adds you to the mailing list. Each RSVP gets a ticket code, and checking in at the event records that code or your name, with the time.
• Voting in a live poll. Your answer, and a random ID kept in a cookie so each phone votes once.
• Applying. Applications run on Google Forms, and officers read them to make decisions and place people into tracks. Your name, email, year, major, LinkedIn, personal site, Discord username, which form you used, when you applied, and up to 420 characters of your written answers are copied into the member database.
• Making a dashboard account. Your name, your Illinois email, and your password, stored only as a salted scrypt hash. Then whatever you add to your profile: year, major, tracks, a short bio, LinkedIn, personal site, Discord username, a Cal.com or Calendly link, and a photo your browser shrinks to 480 pixels before it uploads. If an officer emails you a link to set your password, the club keeps only a hash of it, and it stops working once used or after seven days.
• Meeting an officer one on one. Officers keep notes on the dashboard: the date, who you met, what you said you are looking for, what they suggest you do next, and anything else worth keeping. If the call was recorded with everyone's agreement, its transcript can be kept with the notes. A note an officer deletes can be brought back for 30 days, and is erased after that the next time an officer opens the notes.
• Messaging another member on the dashboard. Messages are end-to-end encrypted: your browser seals each one before it is sent, and only you and the member you wrote to can open it. The club stores the sealed text, who wrote to whom, when each message was sent and read, and, for each browser you use the dashboard on, a public key with when that browser was first and last seen. The key that opens your messages never leaves your browser.
• Working on a bounty. Starting a task records that you are on it, the group you open or join, and what you say you are taking on. Handing work in records its link, what was done, the contribution statement, the split of points your group agreed, and whether you ticked to show your names. Officers add a review note and the points awarded, and the board keeps your points by category. The optional feedback form keeps your answers under your name.
• Suggesting a bounty or applying to review. Anyone can do either. The club keeps what you wrote, your name, your website if you give one, and your email if you are signed out. Each send also records your network address and a random browser ID so the forms cannot be flooded, and that record is erased after a day, the next time either form is used.
• Signing in. Each attempt records the email tried, your network address and a random browser ID, so repeated guessing slows down. A successful sign-in clears those records.
• Using the club's Discord bot. Safety Bot reads messages in the club server to file action items for the officers, to keep the club's facts and links, to write a private summary for a member who asks for one, and to answer when someone mentions it or replies to it. For an answer it reads that channel's last 12 messages from the past 8 hours, and up to three pictures: ones posted with the question, on the message it replies to, or by the same person in the five messages before it. If you ask, it also reads up to 14 days of another channel, only one you can read yourself, and only answers where everyone in the channel could read it too. The messages and pictures it reads are sent to Anthropic to do that and are not kept by the bot. What it files stays. Action items come only from the officers' channels: a to-do's title, the person named on it and a link back to the message. To file and close them it also looks at the pictures posted in those channels, which go to Anthropic and are not kept. From any channel it keeps short notes of facts, decisions and links (a meeting room, a deadline, a form), each with a link back to the message, until the date it stops mattering or an officer removes it, and it repeats one only where everyone could read the channel it came from. A reminder you ask for keeps its text, its time, the channel, your Discord ID and display name, and the IDs of anyone it pings, until 30 days after it is posted. When someone asks a question about the club in a channel without mentioning the bot, it keeps the question's text, the channel, and the asker's Discord ID and display name for up to 6 hours. If nobody has answered after 20 minutes and its notes answer it, it replies with the answer, sending the question, the messages after it and those notes to Anthropic. Once a day it posts the officers' to-dos that are due or late in an officers' channel, pinging the people named on them. A note you put on the board with /board post keeps its text, your Discord display name and your Discord ID until it expires, 14 days by default, or until you or an officer take it down. A motion you put up for debate, with /debate or by asking the bot, is sent to Anthropic with your Discord display name, and the debate it starts is posted in the channel. When an officer asks it for a newsletter draft, it reads the messages and pictures posted since the last issue in the channels the officers have listed, sends them to Anthropic, and posts the draft to the newsletter editors, who edit and publish it themselves. For the calendar section it keeps a list of the server's scheduled events, with nothing about a person on it. Each use of /catchup or /debate and each chat with the bot is counted against a daily limit under your Discord ID.

Who sees your profile

• The dashboard is for signed-in members. The bounty board is the one part anyone can read.
• The public bounty board shows each task and how many people are on it. Accepted work shows the names, personal sites and link of the people who did it only when the submission ticked to show names. A task shows who suggested it only when they ticked that.
• Members see the names of people in a bounty group that is open to join. Officers see every submission, every member's points, feedback answers, and the email of anyone who suggested a task or applied to review.
• A member's profile shows only to signed-in members, and only while Open to one on ones is on.
• An officer's booking link also shows on the public team page, while Open to one on ones is on.
• Your email never shows to other members. Your Discord username shows only to signed-in members.
• A profile photo loads only for signed-in members who can see that profile.
• Notes and transcripts from one on ones show only to officers, never to other members. Officers see the name and join date of every account so they can keep them, and nothing more of a profile that is hidden.
• A message can be read only by the two members in the conversation. Officers cannot read messages, including from the database. When you sign in on a new browser, your other browsers pass it your conversations, still encrypted.

Cookies

The club's pages set three cookies, and none of them follows you to other sites.

• aia_session, set by the dashboard, keeps you signed in for 30 days.
• aia_caller, set by the dashboard, is a random ID that paces sign-in attempts and the bounty board's open forms there. It lasts a year.
• aia_voter lets each phone vote once in a live poll. It lasts a year.

The dashboard also keeps the key that opens your messages in your browser's own storage. If that storage is cleared, the browser makes a new key and your conversations come back from your other browsers or the other member's.

There are no advertising cookies. The Google Calendar on the events page and the Cal.com and Calendly booking pages are embedded from those services, which can set cookies of their own.

How it is used

To run the club: sending the mailing list and event tickets, checking people in, reviewing applications and placing people into tracks, running the members' dashboard, keeping accounts safe, and learning which flyers and pages bring people in.

The club does not sell or rent any of it, and uses none of it for advertising.

Services that handle it

Officers see what they need to run the club. These services store or process it on the club's behalf:

• Vercel hosts the site and counts page views.
• Turso stores dashboard accounts, profiles, encrypted messages, officers' one on one notes, bounty board work and imported application answers.
• Cloudflare runs the mailing list, RSVP, ticket and poll pages, and stores what they collect. It also serves the videos on this site and the dashboard, which record nothing about you.
• Resend sends event ticket emails, and some go out through an officer's Illinois mailbox on Microsoft.
• Anthropic reads the Discord messages and pictures the club's bot is asked to summarize, answer, debate, sweep for action items and notes or draft the newsletter from, and writes the summary, the answer, the debate, the to-do, the note or the draft. The club uses its API, and Anthropic's own privacy policy covers what it does with them.
• Google runs the application forms and the club calendar.
• Cal.com and Calendly run one on one bookings. What you enter there goes to that service and to the person you book, and the club's site receives none of it.
• Substack runs the newsletter for anyone who subscribes there.

Outside these services, the club shares personal information only when the law requires it or someone's safety depends on it.

How long it is kept

A sign-in lasts 30 days. Everything else stays until you ask for it to be removed, or until the club no longer needs it.

Your choices

• Edit or clear your profile details and photo at any time from Profile in the dashboard.
• Turn off Open to one on ones to hide your profile from other members.
• Delete your account and everything on it from Settings in the dashboard. That includes every message you sent or received, the officers' notes from your one on ones, and your bounty work, points and feedback. Work you handed in with a group stays with the rest of the group, without you. A name or website you typed on a task you suggested stays on that task until you ask for it to be removed.
• To change your name or email, leave the mailing list, or get a copy of what the club holds about you, write to aialignment.ill@gmail.com.

Security

Passwords are stored as salted scrypt hashes, the sign-in cookie cannot be read by scripts on the page, and every page loads over HTTPS. Messages are end-to-end encrypted, so a copy of the database does not reveal what they say. Use a password here that you use nowhere else.

Children

The site is meant for university students and is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it.

Contact

Privacy questions and removal requests go to Mithil Salunkhe, Operations Lead, at aialignment.ill@gmail.com.