Manas Mehrotra

Privacy policy

Last updated

This is a personal site. There are no accounts and no ads. A few things are still collected so the chat assistant works and so I can see which answers go wrong. This page lists all of them.

What the chat assistant collects

When you ask the assistant on the home page a question, the server logs:

  • the question you typed or spoke, and the answer it gave
  • your IP address
  • your browser, operating system and device type, read from the user agent
  • a random session ID that ties the questions in one conversation together
  • which links showed under the answer

If you rate an answer with the thumbs up or down, the rating is logged with the question and answer it belongs to.

The logs are stored in Amazon CloudWatch, in AWS. I read them to fix answers the assistant got wrong. Your IP address is also used to limit how many questions one visitor can send a minute.

Don't put anything in the chat you wouldn't want stored. It is a portfolio, not a support line.

OpenAI

Questions are sent to OpenAI to write the answer, along with the earlier messages in the same conversation. Requests are made with storage turned off, so the conversation is not kept as an OpenAI response. OpenAI may still hold API traffic for a limited time under its own API data policy, and does not use it to train models.

Voice mode

Voice mode uses your browser's built-in speech recognition. Some browsers, Chrome among them, send the audio to their own servers to turn it into text. That happens between you and your browser vendor. Only the resulting text reaches this site, and it is handled like a typed question.

Analytics

The home page uses Google Analytics to count visits and which links get clicked. It sets cookies and sends Google your IP address and basic device details. Google's own privacy policy covers what it does with them. The blog pages don't load Google Analytics.

You can block it with any common content blocker, or with Google's opt-out add-on, and the site works the same.

What stays in your browser

Some preferences are saved on your device and never sent to the server on their own:

  • your light or dark theme choice and whether motion is turned off, in local storage
  • the current conversation, in session storage, so a reload doesn't lose it. It is cleared when you close the tab
  • a note that you have already seen the intro animation in this tab

The site also installs a service worker so pages load faster and work offline. It caches the site's own files, not your conversations.

Hosting

The site runs on AWS Amplify. Like any web host, AWS sees the requests your browser makes and may keep standard access logs.

Keeping and deleting your data

Chat logs are kept only as long as they are useful for improving the assistant. Nothing is sold or shared with anyone beyond the services named above.

To ask what is held about you, or to have it deleted, email manasmehrotra3@gmail.com. Send the rough time you used the chat and what you asked, since nothing in the logs is tied to your name.

Changes

If what the site collects changes, this page changes with it. The date at the top says when that last happened.