Legal
What we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have. Effective September 2, 2026 (v1.1).
In plain terms
This summary doesn’t replace the full Policy below — read it if anything here matters to you. See also the Data Privacy overview for a friendlier walkthrough aimed at institutions.
This Privacy Policy describes how Acumen (“Acumen,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, and protects information when you use the Service — whether you’re a student, professor, teaching assistant, or administrator. It’s incorporated into the Terms of Service. If you want the shorter, plain-language version aimed at institutions evaluating Acumen, see the Data Privacy overview; this page is the complete policy.
Account and roster information — name, institutional or personal email, role (student, professor, TA), and class enrollment, collected when you create an account or are enrolled in a class.
Submitted coursework — memos, case analyses, uploads, Discovery Case interview transcripts, and Judgment Coach conversation content.
Grading and feedback data — AI-generated and instructor-reviewed scores, comments, and rubric evaluations tied to your submissions.
Payment information — for classes with an access fee, Stripe collects and processes your payment details directly; Acumen receives confirmation that payment succeeded, not your card number.
Usage data — login timestamps, submission timestamps, and basic technical logs (browser/device type, IP address) generated automatically as you use the Service.
Error and diagnostic data — technical error reports captured through Sentry when something breaks, scoped to the error itself rather than your submitted content.
We don’t collect more than this. In particular, case work is designed to be answerable on its own facts, and students are instructed not to add their name or other identifying detail into a submission, upload, or Judgment Coach conversation beyond what’s already in their roster record.
To operate the Service: authenticate you, enroll you in classes, generate AI grading and feedback, power Judgment Coach conversations, and show professors and TAs the submissions and analytics for their own classes.
To communicate with you: account, assignment, and grading notifications, and responses to support requests.
To process payments for classes that require them, through Stripe.
To maintain and improve the Service: monitoring for errors and abuse, and — only using de-identified, aggregated data that can’t be traced back to an individual — analyzing grading accuracy and coaching quality to improve Acumen’s models and rubrics over time.
To comply with legal obligations, including responding to lawful requests from your institution or authorities where applicable.
We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.
When you submit work, the relevant text is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API to generate a grade, feedback, or coaching response, which is returned to Acumen and shown to you and your instructor. By default, Anthropic does not use API inputs or outputs to train its models. As of August 2026, Anthropic retains prompts and responses sent to its most capable models for up to 30 days for safety and abuse-monitoring purposes, with access restricted to a small, logged set of reviewers — an industry-wide practice, not something specific to Acumen. Anthropic’s own Commercial Terms of Service and Data Processing Addendum additionally commit that Anthropic won’t train models on Acumen’s customer content, that Acumen retains rights to what it submits and owns the outputs, and that submitted content is treated as confidential.
Some classes offer an optional voice mode on Conversation Cases (Client Interview, Audit Committee Review, Manager Conversation) — enabled only where your institution or professor has turned it on, and only if you choose to use it instead of typing. When you do, your spoken audio is sent to Deepgram to convert it to text, and the AI’s replies are converted to spoken audio the same way; the resulting text becomes part of your submission transcript exactly as if you’d typed it. We configure every request to opt out of Deepgram’s optional model-improvement program, so your audio is not used to train Deepgram’s models. Voice is never required — typing is always available as a full substitute, on every Conversation Case, whether or not your class has voice enabled.
Where Acumen is used as part of a course, some of the information described above may constitute an “education record” under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Acumen is built to operate within FERPA’s “school official” framework on behalf of participating institutions — data isn’t sold, shared, or repurposed outside providing the Service — and a formal written school-official designation is available through Acumen’s Data Privacy Addendum whenever an institution is ready to execute one. See the Data Privacy overview for more detail, or contact us to request the DPA.
We share information only with the service providers who help us run Acumen, each under contract and restricted to using the data solely to provide their service to us — not for their own purposes.
| Service | What it does | What it sees |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | Powers AI grading, feedback, and Judgment Coach | Submitted work, one request at a time |
| Deepgram | Converts speech to text and text to speech for the optional voice mode | Your spoken audio and the AI’s spoken replies — only when voice mode is enabled for your class and you choose to use it |
| Supabase | Database, authentication, file storage | Everything Acumen stores — accounts, submissions, grades |
| Vercel | Hosts the application | Requests passing through; nothing persisted independently |
| Stripe | Processes class access-fee payments | Payment details for paid classes; Acumen never sees full card numbers |
| Resend | Sends notification emails | Name, email address, notification content |
| Sentry | Alerts us to bugs and errors | Technical error metadata only — not submitted coursework |
We may also disclose information if required by law, to protect the rights and safety of Acumen or its users, or to your institution where that’s part of how the Service is provided to you (for example, a professor seeing their own students’ submissions).
If Acumen is ever involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Policy or a successor policy with materially equivalent protections.
We use encryption in transit and at rest, access controls that scope each student’s data to their own enrollment and each professor’s access to their own class, and rate limiting on the endpoints that call AI models. No system is perfectly secure, but these protections are what’s actually running in production, most recently reviewed internally in August 2026.
We retain information for as long as needed to run your course and preserve grade history, or as required by law. If you’d like your account data deleted, or if your institution ends its use of Acumen, contact us — we’ll export data on request and delete it from production systems within 30 days, aside from routine backup rotation and any short-term retention required by law.
You can request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct inaccurate information, or ask us to delete your account and associated data, by emailing aaron@acumenlabs.app. Where a deletion request would affect grade records your institution is required to retain, we’ll let you know what we can and can’t delete. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act — we’ll honor comparable requests regardless of where you’re located, to the extent we reasonably can.
Acumen uses cookies that are strictly necessary to keep you signed in and to remember short-lived preferences (like a trusted-device flag for two-factor login). We use Sentry for error monitoring, which may set minimal technical identifiers tied to error reports, not to your identity or activity. We don’t use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we don’t run third-party analytics that profile you.
Acumen is intended for college students, university faculty, and working professionals, and isn’t directed at children. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we’ll delete it.
Acumen and its service providers process and store data in the United States.
We may update this Privacy Policy as the Service evolves. If we make a material change, we’ll update the effective date below and, where practical, prompt you to review it at your next login.
Questions about this Policy, or a request under Section 9: aaron@acumenlabs.app.