Privacy Policy

StudyO is an AI-powered study assistant that helps learners capture YouTube videos, PDFs, and webpages into a single workspace, then turn that material into flashcards, quizzes, summaries, and study notes.

We built StudyO around the belief that your study material, and the data that comes from how you learn, belongs to you. This Privacy Policy explains, in plain language, what we collect, why we collect it, and the choices you have. It applies to studystudio.us, the StudyO web application, and the StudyO Chrome Extension.

We collect only what we need to make StudyO work for you:

• Account information, your email address and authentication identifiers from our auth provider (Clerk) when you sign up or sign in.
• User-generated study content, flashcards, quizzes, summaries, notes, concept maps, and chat history that you create inside StudyO.
• Captured webpage content, text, metadata, and URLs from pages you explicitly capture into your workspace.
• YouTube URLs, PDFs, and webpage text that you add as study sources.
• Usage analytics and extension settings, coarse product events (e.g. “flashcards generated”) and your preferences, used to improve the product.
• Device and browser information, browser type, operating system, and approximate locale, collected via standard request headers.
• Buds (on-screen assistant) questions, when you ask Buds something, we send your question plus a snapshot of what is visible on the page (button and heading labels, visible text and their positions, never what you have typed into fields) to our AI provider to answer it. A screenshot is included only if you started screen sharing in Buds, or when you ask Buds from the extension (a capture of the visible tab). Voice questions are transcribed by your browser or our speech provider; the optional “Hey Buds” wake word only listens while you have switched it on. To personalise answers Buds also reads the titles of your recent study sessions and sources, any text you have highlighted, and, if the extension is installed, the titles and addresses of your open tabs (not their content), so it can offer to open one beside StudyO. When you use “Open with Buds”, the extension opens that page in a window next to StudyO and reads that page the same way. These snapshots and screenshots are used for that single answer and are not stored. Buds keeps a short text log of your recent conversation with it (your questions and its answers, deleted after 90 days) so the conversation continues between StudyO and the extension, and it searches your own sources by meaning to connect new questions to things you studied before.
• Learning progress, when you grade a flashcard, answer a quiz question or check an answer in the Practice Lab, we save the concept and whether you got it right. This powers your Daily Review schedule, mastery scores, review streak and exam readiness. Exams you add (name, date and topics) are saved so we can build your study plan.
• Profile, your school level (middle school, high school or college), so explanations are written for you, and your age group, so we can ask a parent for consent when needed.
• Reminder emails, only if you turn them on: at most one email a day when flashcards are due or an exam is close. You can turn them off in Settings at any time.

We do not monitor your browsing history or read page content in the background. Page text is only read when you choose to capture, a single page, or all of your open study tabs at once, or when you ask Buds about the page you are on.

We use the information above to:

• Generate AI-powered flashcards, quizzes, summaries, and notes from your sources.
• Sync your workspace and study history across your devices.
• Authenticate you and keep your account secure.
• Improve product functionality, reliability, and performance.
• Provide customer support when you contact us.

The StudyO Chrome Extension requests the minimum permissions needed to capture study content after you click. Each permission has a specific, narrow purpose:

• activeTab, lets the extension read the page you are currently viewing, only after you click the StudyO icon or a StudyO action.
• tabs, lets us identify which tab you are capturing so the right URL and title are saved to your workspace.
• scripting, lets us inject a small script into the active tab to extract the article text, transcript, or PDF reference you asked to capture.
• storage, saves your preferences and the ID of the StudyO chat your captures should go to. Sign-in uses your normal StudyO browser session; the extension stores no passwords or tokens.
• contextMenus, adds “Buds” options to the right-click menu (explain a selection, an image or the page).
• offscreen & tts, plays Buds’ spoken answers (or uses your computer’s voice as a backup) from the extension, so websites can’t block the audio. Nothing is recorded by these.
• Microphone, only when you talk to Buds (hold Ctrl+Alt, the Talk button or shortcut); Chrome asks for permission per site and transcribes speech with its speech service. Buds never listens in the background.
• host permissions (all sites), study material can live on any website (course portals, journals, documentation), so the extension can read a page you choose to capture on any site, and talks to the StudyO API. Email, social, shopping, streaming, payment and AI-chat sites are always skipped by “capture all”.

Page content is only read after a user action, clicking “Capture this page”, “Capture all tabs”, or Analyze in the app. Opening the extension popup lists the titles of your open study tabs so you can see what would be captured; it does not read their content. The extension does not track your browsing.

When you generate flashcards, quizzes, summaries, or chat responses, the relevant captured content is sent over encrypted connections to AI service providers (e.g. Google Gemini, OpenAI) strictly to generate educational output for you.

We instruct these providers, under their enterprise terms, not to use your content to train their public models. We do not use your study content to train our own models or any third party’s models.

• We do not sell your personal data.
• We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not share it with advertisers.
• We only share data with trusted infrastructure and service providers strictly required to operate StudyO, including authentication (Clerk), database hosting (MongoDB Atlas), file storage (Cloudinary), AI inference providers, and analytics, and only under data-processing agreements consistent with this policy.
• We may disclose information when required by law, valid legal process, or to protect the safety of our users.

We apply reasonable, industry-standard security measures to protect your data, including:

• TLS-encrypted connections for all traffic between your device, the extension, and our servers.
• Encrypted storage of user content at rest with our hosting providers.
• Authentication handled by Clerk with secure session tokens.
• Principle-of-least-privilege access controls for internal systems.

No system can be guaranteed 100% secure, but we work to detect, prevent, and respond to incidents promptly.

You are in control of your data. At any time you can:

• Delete individual sources, sessions, or generations from your StudyO workspace.
• Request deletion of your account and all associated data by emailing support@studystudio.us.
• Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Contact us with any privacy questions or concerns.

We honor verified deletion and access requests within a reasonable timeframe, and in line with applicable law.

StudyO is built for students from middle school through early college. When a student tells us they are under 13, we follow the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA):

• We ask for a parent or guardian’s email and send them a link to approve. Until a parent approves, voice input, screen sharing and Buds’ long-term conversation memory are turned off; the student can still study with their own notes, flashcards and quizzes.
• We collect only what the service needs, never sell personal information, never show ads and never use a child’s data to train AI models.
• A parent can decline (which also deletes Buds’ saved conversations), withdraw consent, review what we hold, or ask us to delete the account at any time by contacting us.

Schools: student work stays private to the student’s account and is used only to provide StudyO to that student (consistent with FERPA’s “school official” expectations). We don’t share it with other users unless the student joins a study group.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes to our product, technology, or applicable law. When we do, we will update the “Last Updated” date at the top of this page and, for material changes, notify you in the product or by email.

Questions, requests, or feedback about privacy? We’d love to hear from you.

• Email: support@studystudio.us
• Web: https://www.studystudio.us