Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

ARETE is a study and performance-analytics application for competitive-exam aspirants, operated by an individual based in India. ARETE is not a registered company. For any privacy, data-deletion or support request, contact support@getarete.in.

ARETE is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the National Testing Agency, the IITs, or any examination authority or coaching institute.

2. Information you provide

When you create an account and use ARETE, you provide:

• Account details — your email address and password. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider (Supabase) and are never stored by ARETE in readable form.
• Profile details — your name, optional profile picture, exam target, target year and exam date, daily study target, target institute, preparation level, coaching mode, self-reported weak subjects, timezone and notification preferences.
• Study inputs — tasks, habits, syllabus and per-chapter progress (including your own confidence and difficulty ratings), mock-test results, and mistake logs.
• Reflective inputs — debrief entries (verdicts, cognitive-state and friction tags, and free-text notes) and journal entries, which may include mood, sleep hours, water intake and energy ratings.
• Uploaded files — result screenshots or PDFs you choose to upload, and any profile picture you set.
• Reviews — if you submit an in-app review, it includes a rating, optional text and a display label.

3. Focus and activity data

ARETE's core function is measuring how you study, so focus sessions record more detail than a typical app. For each session we store the subject and chapter, start and end time, duration, a focus score, target duration, an optional session goal and note, and behavioural counters: tab switches, switches per minute, idle seconds, distracted seconds, productive seconds (split between in-app and external), longest uninterrupted stretch, attention-check totals, session mode, how the session ended, and hardcore-mode figures where used.

We also store a timestamped event log for each session. It records events such as the page becoming hidden or visible, the window losing or gaining focus, idle periods starting and ending, attention prompts and their outcome, entering or leaving fullscreen, and manual breaks.

To be explicit about the limits of this: ARETE records that you switched away from the app or became idle. It does not record which other websites, applications or tabs you visited, and it does not collect your browsing history. ARETE has no browser extension and no access to activity outside its own page.

4. Uploads and text recognition (OCR)

When you upload a result, the text recognition runs in your own browser. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) is loaded at runtime from the jsDelivr public CDN, which will receive your IP address as part of that request, and the image is processed locally on your device.

The file itself is stored in our storage provider under a folder scoped to your user ID, together with a record of the parsed result and its status. You can delete an individual upload at any time, which removes the stored file as well as its record.

5. AI Coach

If you use the AI Coach, a summary of your study and performance data — for example recurring mistake patterns and performance signals — is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate the response. The generated text is stored in your account so you can revisit it.

We do not send your password to any AI provider. Your use of the AI Coach is subject to Google's handling of that request. We do not control, and cannot make commitments about, how Google processes data sent to its API.

AI-generated content and all predictions in ARETE — including rank or percentile estimates — are informational only. They are derived from the data you enter and may be inaccurate. They are not guarantees of exam performance and are not academic, career, medical or professional advice.

6. How we use your information

• To provide the product: recording sessions, tracking syllabus progress, storing results, and generating the analytics, insights and recommendations that are the point of the app.
• To operate your account, authenticate you, and send the notifications you have enabled.
• To keep the service working and secure — for example rate limiting to prevent abuse, and diagnosing errors.
• To produce anonymous community statistics, described in section 8.

We do not sell your personal data. We do not use your data for advertising, and ARETE contains no advertising or analytics tracking SDKs.

7. Service providers

ARETE relies on the following third parties, each of which processes some data in order for the product to function:

• Supabase — authentication, database and file storage. This holds essentially all of your account data.
• Vercel — application hosting. Vercel processes your requests and may log technical information such as IP address as part of serving and protecting the site.
• Google (Gemini API) — only when you use the AI Coach, as described in section 5.
• Upstash (Redis) — rate limiting. This stores a short-lived key derived from your IP address to prevent abuse.
• jsDelivr — public CDN that serves the in-browser OCR engine when you use uploads.
• Web push services — if you enable notifications, your browser's push endpoint, its associated keys and your browser's user-agent string are stored so notifications can be delivered.

We may also forward technical crash reports (an error message, a URL and a stack trace) to an internal error sink to diagnose faults. These reports do not include your name, email or user ID.

8. Community statistics

ARETE's Pulse feature compares your standing against other aspirants. The stored community figures are aggregates only: they contain no user IDs and no individual records, and a metric is published only when at least three people qualify for it. Your activity contributes to those aggregates, and once your data is removed it simply stops being counted.

If you post an in-app review, it may be displayed publicly within ARETE together with the display label attached to it. A published review is treated as historical content: it is retained even if you later delete your account, with your name replaced by a generic label (see section 11). Do not include anything in a review that you would not want other users to read.

9. Cookies and local storage

ARETE sets cookies for one purpose: keeping you signed in. These are session cookies managed by our authentication provider. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not use third-party analytics or tracking cookies.

ARETE also stores small preferences in your browser's local storage — for example whether the sidebar is collapsed, which app version you have seen, OCR preferences and cached OCR results, and an unsaved debrief draft so a refresh does not lose your input. This information stays on your device and you can clear it through your browser at any time.

10. Retention

We keep your data for as long as your account exists, so that your history and long-term analytics remain meaningful. ARETE does not currently apply an automatic expiry to your personal data, and we would rather say that plainly than state a retention period we do not enforce.

The one exception is the anonymous daily community aggregate described in section 8, which is pruned automatically after roughly 45 days.

If you want your data removed sooner, you can delete your account at any time — see section 11.

11. Deleting your account and data

You can permanently delete your account yourself from Settings. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone; there is no recovery window. It removes:

• Your account and profile, including your name, email and preferences.
• All focus sessions and the associated activity event logs.
• Tasks, habits and habit history.
• Syllabus and chapter progress.
• Mock tests, subject scores and mistake analysis.
• Debrief entries and journal entries.
• AI Coach insights generated for you.
• Uploaded result files and your profile picture.
• Push-notification subscriptions and achievements.

Some things are not removed. A review you posted stays on the public Reviews section so the rating history remains accurate, but your display name is replaced with a generic label ("ARETE User"), so the review no longer identifies you; its rating and text are left as you wrote them. The shared exam syllabus is common reference data belonging to no user. The anonymous community aggregates described in section 8 contain no user IDs and cannot be traced back to an individual.

You can also email support@getarete.in to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data. You can export a report of your data at any time from Settings, and you can edit your profile details there directly.

12. Security

Your data is stored with our service providers and is protected at the database level by per-user access rules, so that one account cannot read or modify another account's records. Uploaded files are stored under a folder scoped to your user ID. Traffic to ARETE is served over HTTPS. Administrative credentials are held only on the server and are never exposed to the browser.

No online service can promise perfect security, and we do not. If you believe your account has been compromised, or you find a security issue, please contact us at support@getarete.in.

13. Age requirement

ARETE is intended primarily for users aged 18 and over. If you are under 18, you should use ARETE only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian.

A parent or legal guardian may contact support@getarete.in to request access to, or deletion of, a minor's data.

Please note that ARETE records detailed study and activity information, as described in section 3. We encourage parents and guardians to read this policy with the student.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as ARETE changes. When we do, we will update the date shown at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how your data is handled, we will make a reasonable effort to make that clear within the app.

15. Contact

For any question about this policy, or to make a privacy or deletion request, email support@getarete.in. ARETE is operated from India.