Privacy Policy

Last updated: 9 August 2026

1. Who we are

Answr ("we", "us") provides a browser extension and related website that help students read and work through questions displayed on their own screens.

Legal entity: askanswr
Registered address: 227 Commodore Dr., Verdi, NV 89439, United States
Data controller contact: support.answr@gmail.com

2. The short version

Screenshots never leave your device, on any plan. Text recognition runs inside your own browser using a WebAssembly OCR engine bundled with the extension. There is no image upload endpoint in this product, so there is nothing for us to receive, store, or lose.

The recognised text is transmitted. Once the extension has extracted text from the screenshot on your machine, that text is sent to our server and forwarded to our AI provider so it can be answered. This applies to every scan, on every plan. The image is not sent — only the characters read from it.

3. What the extension processes locally

Screen captures. When you press the hotkey, the extension captures the visible area of the current tab. The image is held in memory in your browser, cropped if you select a region, passed to the local OCR engine, and discarded. It is never transmitted.
Recognised text. Extracted in your browser and displayed in the popup. Not transmitted by the extension as shipped.

3a. Question text sent for AI answering

For every scan, the extension sends the recognised text to our /solve endpoint, which forwards it to an AI provider to be answered. Which provider depends on your plan. Where the pricing page says "advanced AI" that means OpenAI, and where it says "basic AI" that means Groq — named here rather than only described, so you can look up whose terms apply to your questions. Paid plans go to OpenAI (privacy policy, API data usage), and the free plan goes to Groq. What this means in practice:

The screenshot is not sent. Only the text extracted from it.
Your licence key accompanies the request so we can confirm your plan.
This applies to every scan, on every plan — Free, Pro, Premium and Lifetime alike.

Your questions are not used to train AI models

On the paid plans we reach OpenAI through their API, not the consumer ChatGPT product. OpenAI does not use data submitted through the API to train its models by default. This is a different arrangement from ChatGPT, where conversations may be used for training unless you opt out.

On the free plan your questions are answered by Groq instead, using an open-weights model on their free service. We have Zero Data Retention enabled on our Groq account, which means Groq does not store the inputs or outputs of our requests at all — not even the temporary logs they would otherwise keep for up to 30 days to investigate abuse. Groq's data documentation is at console.groq.com/docs/your-data.

That makes the free plan the more private of the two, not the less. OpenAI's 30-day abuse-monitoring window on the paid plans is not something we can switch off; Groq's is, and we have.

In short: neither plan's provider trains on your questions. On the paid plans OpenAI holds them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring; on the free plan Groq holds them for no time at all. The difference between the plans is which company answers and how capable the model is — not whether your work feeds a training set.

OpenAI's own developer documentation states that "data sent to the OpenAI API is not used to train or improve OpenAI models (unless you explicitly opt in to share data with us)". We have not opted in.

They do hold requests briefly for abuse monitoring. OpenAI retains API logs for up to 30 days, longer only where the law requires it or where it is necessary to protect their service or a third party from harm. So while we keep nothing, your question does sit with OpenAI for a short period before being deleted. We would rather tell you that than imply it evaporates the moment it is answered.

We do not keep your questions

Question text and page text are held only for as long as it takes to answer you. They are sent to the AI provider, the answer is returned to your browser, and nothing is written down at our end. There is no field anywhere in our database that can hold the content of a question — the only records we keep about a licence are the key itself, its plan, its status, and counters for how many scans have been used.

They are not written to our application logs either. Our logs record that a scan happened — the licence key, the plan, and whether a limit was reached — never what was asked. Where the AI provider returns an error, we log the error's type and code and deliberately discard the provider's full response, because that response can quote the submitted text back at us.

Our hosting provider retains ordinary web-server request logs (IP address, timestamp, requested path, user agent) under its own policy. Question text is sent in the body of a request rather than in its address, so it does not appear in those logs. Those logs are kept for seven days and then deleted automatically — see section 8.

Summarising a page

When you press Summarise this whole page, the extension reads the text of the page you are looking at and sends it to our server, which passes it to the same AI provider described above. This is more information than a scan sends: a scan transmits only the words inside the box you selected, whereas a summary transmits the readable text of the entire page, including parts you have not scrolled to.

It happens only when you press that button, and only for the tab you are looking at at that moment. The extension does not read pages in the background, does not read other tabs, and does not read pages you have not asked it to summarise. Before sending, it removes scripts, styles, navigation, headers, footers, sidebars and forms, and sends at most the first 12,000 characters of what remains. Images and screenshots are never sent on this path either.

Do not summarise pages containing information you would not want transmitted — webmail, online banking, medical portals, or anything behind a login that holds personal records about you or anyone else.

4. What we receive on our servers

Your license key, sent to our /verify endpoint when you open the extension popup and once daily in the background, so we can confirm your subscription is active.
A device identifier — a random value the extension generates the first time it runs and stores on your own device. It is sent with your license key so we can enforce our one-device-per-license rule. It is not derived from your hardware, your browser, or anything about you: it is a random number that means nothing outside your license, cannot identify you, and is not used for tracking, analytics, or advertising. Signing out of the extension erases it from our records.
Standard server request data — IP address, timestamp, and user agent — logged when your browser contacts us. We use IP addresses for basic rate limiting.
Purchase records — the tier you bought, your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, the email address you gave at checkout, and the license key we issued.
Feedback you choose to send — if you rate an answer, we receive the score you gave it (one to five stars), which feature you were using, and any comment you typed, stored against your license key. We do not receive the question or the answer you were rating: the extension does not send them and our server does not accept them. Sending feedback is entirely optional.

We do not receive or store your card details at any point. Server logs are kept for seven days; see section 8 for what we retain and for how long.

5. Payment processing

Payments are handled by Stripe, Inc., which acts as an independent controller of the payment data you give it. Their handling is governed by Stripe's own privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy.

6. Legal basis and purposes

If you are in the UK or the EEA, the UK GDPR and EU GDPR require us to have a lawful basis for each thing we do with your data. We rely on the following. Each row covers one purpose, and we do not reuse data collected for one purpose for another without telling you first.

Providing the service you paid for — verifying your licence key, issuing it at checkout, and generating an answer to a question you submit. Basis: performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)). Without this data we cannot tell whether you have a subscription, and cannot answer anything.
Sending you your licence key and essential service notices — for example the email containing the key you just bought. Basis: performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)). These are transactional, not marketing; we do not send marketing email, and if we ever do it will be on consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) that you can withdraw at any time.
Enforcing one device per licence — comparing the random device identifier against the one on record. Basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)), namely preventing a single paid licence being shared indefinitely, which is what makes the price sustainable for everyone paying honestly. The identifier is random and identifies no one outside your licence, so the impact on you is minimal.
Rate limiting, abuse prevention and security — short-lived request logs including IP address. Basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)), namely keeping the service available and not paying for automated abuse. Logs are deleted after seven days.
Improving the service from feedback you choose to send — the rating and any comment you submit through the feedback form. Basis: consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), given by choosing to send it. Sending feedback is entirely optional and nothing about the product changes if you never do.
Keeping accounting and tax records — purchase records we are required to retain. Basis: legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)).

Where we rely on legitimate interests we have weighed those interests against your rights, and you have the right to object to that processing at any time — see section 10. Where we rely on consent you may withdraw it at any time, which will not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it.

7. Sharing

We do not sell personal data. We share it only with processors needed to run the service:

Stripe — payments and subscription management.
OpenAI — generates the answers on the paid plans (Pro, Premium, Lifetime). Receives the recognised question text; receives no image and no payment data. API submissions are not used for model training — see section 3a.
Groq (United States) — generates the answers on the free plan, using an open-weights model on Groq's free service. Receives the recognised question text; receives no image and no payment data. If you are on the free plan your questions go to Groq rather than to OpenAI. We have Zero Data Retention enabled on our Groq account, so Groq stores neither the inputs nor the outputs of our requests — see section 3a.
Render (application hosting, United States) and Neon (database, US East)
Resend (email delivery, United States) — receives your email address and the licence key, so we can send you the key you bought. It is used for transactional email only. Free-plan keys are not emailed, so if you are on the free plan your address is never passed to Resend at all.
No analytics provider. We use no analytics, no advertising and no tracking cookies, which is why this policy has no cookie-consent section.

8. Retention

Licence records — the key, its plan, its status and its scan counters — are kept for as long as the licence exists, and for seven years after it ends. That period is not our choice: tax and accounting rules require records of sales to be retained, and seven years is the longest commonly required.

Server logs are kept for seven days, then deleted automatically. We do not operate any log storage of our own — logs exist only in our hosting provider's console, on a seven-day rolling window at our current plan, and once they age out they are gone even to us. They are used for diagnosing faults and investigating abuse, nothing else.

Question and page text is not retained at all, in logs or anywhere else. See section 3. This is also true of feedback: a rating you send is stored without the question or answer it was about.

Feedback is kept for as long as your licence exists and is deleted with it. If you ask us to erase your data, your ratings and comments go with everything else — they are linked to your licence key, so there is no separate copy left behind.

Stripe keeps its own records of payments under its own retention rules, which we do not control. If you ask us to delete your data, we delete what we hold; we cannot delete what Stripe is separately required to keep for financial-record purposes.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your personal data, and to object to it. To exercise them, contact us at support.answr@gmail.com. We respond within 30 days. That is the limit set by the GDPR and the UK GDPR, and it is comfortably inside the 45 days the CCPA allows, so one deadline covers everyone.

10. Children

Answr is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. You must be at least 13 to use it. If you are under 18, you may use it only with the permission of a parent or guardian, and the licence must be bought by an adult.

Purchases are handled by Stripe, which requires the cardholder to be an adult, so the billing relationship is always with an adult even when the person doing the homework is not.

What a person using the extension actually gives us

This matters more than the age limit itself, so it is worth being specific. Using the extension — as opposed to buying a licence — hands us remarkably little:

No name, no email, no account. There is no sign-up. The extension is unlocked with a licence key, and the key is not tied to the person holding it.
A random installation identifier, generated on the device. It is not derived from hardware, from the browser, or from anything about the person. It identifies an installation, not a human, and exists only to enforce the one-device-per-licence rule.
The text of the question being asked, which is answered and discarded. It is never stored: there is no field anywhere in our database that can hold it.
No screenshots. Text recognition runs on the device. Images never leave it.
No tracking. No analytics, no advertising, no profiling, no behavioural cookies, and nothing sold or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

If a child under 13 has used it

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, write to support.answr@gmail.com and we will delete it. In practice the only personal information we are likely to hold is the email address given at checkout, which belongs to whoever paid. You may also ask us to deactivate the licence entirely.

Schools

Answr is sold to individuals, not to schools, and we do not offer it as a school-administered service. A school cannot consent on a pupil's behalf here, because we have no relationship with the school. If you are a teacher or administrator considering it for classroom use, contact us first.

Our lawful basis for the little we do hold is the performance of the contract you entered into when you bought a licence, and our legitimate interest in preventing fraud and abuse — see section 6 for the full list. The one thing we rely on consent for is feedback, which is optional, is never requested from anyone, and can be withdrawn by asking us to delete it.

11. International transfers

All processing takes place in the United States: application hosting in Ohio, the licence database in US East, email delivery by Resend, and AI answering by OpenAI, all in the United States.

We do not restrict purchases by country, so if you are in the United Kingdom or the EEA your personal data is transferred to the United States. We rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission for those transfers, and on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to those clauses for customers in the United Kingdom. Each processor named in section 7 offers a data processing agreement incorporating those clauses, and it is those agreements we rely on.

You can ask us for more detail about the safeguards applying to your data using the contact details in section 1.

12. Changes

We will post any changes on this page and update the date above. Material changes — anything that widens what we collect, or what we do with it — are announced by email to the address on your Stripe receipt, at least 14 days before they take effect, so you can cancel first if you disagree.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy: support.answr@gmail.com. For product help, see the support page.

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