Privacy

A formal privacy policy is being prepared with counsel. Until it is published, these are the commitments Sympos operates under today.

• We do not sell or share your data. Student and instructor data is never sold, rented, or shared with third parties for their own use.
• Conversations stay in the class. A student's conversations are visible to that student and to the instructor of the class they belong to. No one else.
• Data is scoped. Instructors see only their own classes. Students see only their own work.
• AI processing is service-only. Conversations are sent to AI model providers solely to generate responses and evaluations for your class.
• You control your data. Export your data yourself, anytime, from your Account & data settings. Deletion is self-serve there too, once every class you have submitted coursework in has ended. While a class is in session your coursework is part of a live academic record your instructor is accountable for, so the right is deferred to the end of the class — not removed — and export is never restricted. Deletion then removes your personal information and content; de-identified academic records (grades) are retained, unlinked from your identity, so your class's grading and analytics stay intact. To request deletion on a different timeline, contact us.

Cookies and analytics

Two kinds of cookie are set when you use Sympos. Signing in sets a session cookie, which is required for the product to work at all. Separately, we use a product analytics service (PostHog) to see which pages and features get used, and it sets a cookie and browser storage so a returning browser is recognised as the same one.

We would rather be plain about the state of this than imply a choice we do not yet offer: analytics loads on every page, including before you sign in, and we do not show a consent banner. Building one is committed work, tracked on our trust page. In the meantime, your browser's do-not-track and cookie controls are the way to opt out.

What analytics receives is limited on purpose: which pages, features and searches you used, tied to your Sympos account id and whether you are a student or an instructor, along with the standard web metadata any site receives (IP address, browser, referring page). It does not receive your name, your email address, or anything you or your students wrote in a conversation. That last one is enforced rather than intended: PostHog's automatic click and form capture is turned off, and session replay is disabled in our code rather than left to a setting, because both would otherwise pick up text from the page. We run no advertising or cross-site tracking pixels, and we do not sell or share this data. The full list of services that process data for us is on the trust page.

FERPA

Sympos is built to align with FERPA. Student records stay scoped to the class, are accessible to the student and their instructor, and are available for export at any time. Deletion of a student's record is available once the class has ended, so an education record stays intact while the class is in session.

For institutional data processing agreements, contact us.

Last updated August 2026.