What happens to what you tell the assistant

This page explains, in plain language, what this site does with what you type or say to the assistant. It exists because part of it leaves for a third party, and that is said upfront rather than afterwards.

What is kept from your questions

The question, the language, the page you asked from and the date. It is used for one thing: to find out what people ask us that we cannot answer, so we can write that answer.

Your IP address is not kept, nor any identifier that follows you between visits, nor what you asked another day. The assistant does not know who you are or whether you had been here before.

The question limit

There is a per-visitor limit to prevent abuse. It is worked out from a short code derived from your IP through an irreversible function that also changes every day. That code is kept for a few minutes and expires on its own. The IP address itself is never stored.

Overload mode, which does leave the site

The normal assistant answers from a table of replies written and approved by us. It calls no outside service.

Overload mode — the lightning switch, which you turn on yourself — works differently: your question is sent to Google, which runs the Gemini model and returns an answer composed from our own replies.

What is sent is the text you wrote plus fragments of our already published answers. Your IP address is not sent, nor any identifier, nor the rest of the conversation.

And this is the part worth knowing: we use the free tier of that API, and on that tier Google may use the text sent to improve its products, including human review of a sample of it. If you would rather what you write did not leave this site, do not turn that mode on: the normal assistant answers just the same.

The terms, on Google’s own pages:

• Gemini API terms
• Google privacy policy

The contact form

If you write to us through the form, we keep your name, your email and your message, and use them to reply. Nothing else.

If you want something deleted

Write to us through the contact form and tell us what. Bear in mind that stored questions do not carry your name, so we will need you to tell us which one it was.