StudySense Privacy Policy

Last updated 8 October 2026

StudySense is a final-year research project at the University of Salford, submitted under the supervision of Ian Drumm and Noorman Murray. It is designed offline-first: almost everything you do in this app stays on your phone and never leaves it. This agreement explains the narrow exceptions — the optional Study League feature and any AI response you choose to report — and your rights over the small amount of data they involve.

What stays on your phone

Everything you record to track your studies lives locally and is never transmitted anywhere. That includes:

• Every study session (start time, duration, module, activity type, focus and confidence ratings, written reflections, private notes)
• Module details and their names
• Grades and assignment information
• Wellbeing indicators: stress level, sleep quality, exercise frequency
• Weekly analytics and productivity summaries
• Every message you exchange with the Study Coach or Document Q&A chatbots, unless you choose to report a response (see Reporting an AI response below)
• Any documents you import for retrieval-augmented queries

The app ships without analytics or crash-reporting SDKs and we run no server that would receive any of this.

What Study League syncs

If — and only if — you create an account and join a Study League, the app sends a single minimal record to Google Firebase on your behalf. That record contains exactly these eight fields:

1. The display name you enter (e.g. “Luke S”)
2. Your academic level (e.g. “Undergraduate Year 1”)
3. Your current weekly score (one number, 0–1000)
4. Your current study streak in days
5. A tier colour index (0–4) representing the visual tier of your score
6. A timestamp of when your score was last updated
7. A timestamp of when you agreed to this privacy notice
8. The identifier of the single Study League you are currently in (or nothing, if you are in none)

Nothing else. Session details, grades, reflections, module names, stress levels, chatbot conversations, and imported documents do not form part of this record and never reach any server, apart from a response you choose to report.

Who can read the cloud record

Access is controlled by Firestore security rules, not by the app alone. Only two sets of people can read your public profile:

• You
• Other users who are currently members of the same Study League as you

When you leave a league you stop being visible to its members. When you delete your account the record is removed from Firebase entirely.

On-device AI

The Study Coach and Document Q&A chatbots run a large language model directly on your phone via llama.cpp. Your prompts, conversation history, and any documents you query against never leave the device unless you report a response. No AI provider — including Google — sees any of it.

The AI model files are downloaded from Hugging Face when you set up the AI or change the model size in Settings. No personal data is sent with the download, but like any website Hugging Face can see your IP address while the files are downloading.

Reporting an AI response

If a chatbot response is offensive, harmful or inaccurate, you can hold down on it and choose Report. Only when you press Send report does the app send that response, the question you asked before it, the reason you picked, which chatbot you were using, the AI model name, the app version and the time to the developer through Google Firebase. Reports do not include your account or any other identifier, and only the developer can read them.

Your rights under UK GDPR

You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, and portability over the eight cloud fields above. You can exercise erasure at any time from within the app: Settings → Delete my account will remove you from your Study League, remove your Firestore record, delete your Firebase Auth entry, and wipe every piece of StudySense data on this device apart from the downloaded AI model files, which hold nothing about you. If you never created an account, Settings → Delete all my data wipes the device in the same way. The action is permanent.

For access, rectification, or portability requests, or to have your account deleted if you no longer have the app, email the developer at YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS.

Consent audit

When you tick the consent box and create an account, the server records the exact timestamp alongside your profile. This is the lawful basis for processing the eight cloud fields (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)) and provides auditable proof of affirmative consent as required by Article 7(1).