Privacy

ibelieve.ai is run by Abundance Institute. This page says what we collect, why we have it, who else sees it, and how to make us delete it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

The short version

• We collect what an account needs to work, and what you choose to write. Nothing else.
• We do not set analytics or advertising cookies. Necessary cookies support sign-in, referrals, and resuming a study you choose to take.
• We do not sell your data, and we never will.
• A belief file you mark public is public — readable by anyone, served over our public API, and indexed by search engines.

Beliefs are sensitive, and you decide what happens to yours

A belief file describes what you hold to be true. Under laws such as the GDPR that is a special category of personal data, and we treat it that way. We process it for one reason: you chose to write it here. Every file is private unless you make it public, you can change that at any time, and you can delete a file outright — which deletes its revision history with it.

Making a file public is irreversible in one practical sense: while it is public, others may read, download, or fork it, and a fork is their copy. Deleting your original does not delete copies other people made while it was public. Please decide accordingly.

What we collect

Your account. Name, email address, username, and a hash of your password — never the password itself. Optionally a bio and a profile picture, if you add them. If you sign in with Google or GitHub instead, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from that provider.

Your sessions. When you sign in we store a session record with your IP address and browser user-agent string, so you can stay signed in and so we can spot abuse. Sessions expire, and signing out ends one.

What you write. Your belief files and every revision of them, their titles and descriptions, and whether each is public or private. Also organizations you create or join, invitations, and any claim requests you make.

Activity on files. Stars you give, and per-file counts of forks and downloads.

Belief tests. If you run one, the file’s contents and a fixed set of questions are sent to an AI model, and the answers are stored against that revision. Results are private to you and are never published.

Ordinary server logs. Our host records requests, and we hold IP addresses briefly in memory to rate-limit the public API.

Research survey

If you agree to participate in the research survey, we record your selected tradition, judgments and reasoning, conversations with AI partners, simulated actions, and feedback on proposed belief-file changes. We also retain the case wording, sampling seed, instrument versions, and model information needed to interpret those responses. We collect your name and email before the study for account setup. They are kept out of AI prompts and research exports. If you save your account at the end, we link the study to your account and save your reviewed belief file privately. Please avoid identifying details in your answers.

Submitted responses are saved as you go, including if you leave before finishing. Study responses are available to administrators for research and are not published as belief files. The conversations and responses needed to run the study are sent through Vercel AI Gateway to the selected AI provider. Actions within the study are simulations.

We store a one-way identifier for your study browser and a temporary, keyed hash of your network address to limit repeated requests. The network counters expire daily. Research responses remain stored until removed by the study team or in response to a deletion request. To request a copy or deletion, contact us and include your study reference shown on the survey page.

Cookies

Sign-in cookies keep your account session active. A referral cookie remembers an invitation link. If you begin the research survey, a separate necessary cookie lets you resume it in the same browser for up to 30 days. It contains a random token, not your answers, and cannot be read by page scripts. Clearing it removes this browser's access to the study; it does not delete submitted responses.

Who else handles it

We use a small number of service providers, each doing one job under contract, none of them permitted to use your data for their own purposes:

• Vercel — hosting, image storage, and the gateway that routes belief-test, belief-builder, and research-study requests to an AI model.
• Neon — the Postgres database, hosted in the United States.
• Amazon SES — sending confirmation and invitation emails.
• The AI model provider that answers belief tests, drafts belief files, or runs study conversations, reached through the gateway above. It receives the content needed for the requested generation.
• Google or GitHub — only if you choose to sign in with one of them.

The homepage also embeds the Belief Graph visualizer hosted at belief-visualizer.netlify.app. Loading that embedded page connects your browser to its host, which can receive ordinary request information.

Beyond that, we disclose data only when the law requires it, and we will tell you unless we are forbidden to.

Where it lives

On servers in the United States. If you are writing from elsewhere, your data is transferred there.

How long we keep it

Your files and revisions stay until you delete them or ask us to close your account. Session records expire on their own. Deleting a file deletes its revisions.

What you can ask for

You can see and change your name, username, bio, and picture in Settings, and you can delete any file from its settings page. For anything else — a copy of your data, correcting something you cannot reach, or deleting your account entirely — email team@abundance.institute and we will act within 30 days. Account deletion is by request today; we have not built the self-serve button yet, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to processing, to restrict it, to take your data elsewhere, or to complain to your data protection authority. Ask us and we will help rather than argue.

Children

This site is not for people under 13, and we do not knowingly keep accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

Security

Passwords are hashed, traffic is encrypted in transit, and private files are checked against your session on every request. No service is perfectly secure; if we ever suffer a breach affecting your data we will tell you and the relevant authorities promptly.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and for anything significant we will say so on the site before it takes effect.

Contact

team@abundance.institute. A person reads it.

See also our Terms of Service.