Privacy

Three kinds of thing, and nothing else:

• Your account. Your name and email address, held by our sign-in provider. We never see or store your password.
• Your coursework. The classes, tasks, deadlines, grades, notes and syllabus files you put into Marathon, plus your timezone and term dates.
• How the product is used.Which features get opened, and crashes when they happen — only if you allowed analytics. If you allow it, your account id, email address and name go to our analytics provider along with that activity, so we can tell one student’s sessions apart from another’s. We never send the contents of your work: no task titles, no syllabus text, no notes. See below.

We do not collect biometrics, we do not ask for your date of birth, and we do not buy data about you from anyone.

Marathon is a small product built on other people’s infrastructure. These companies process data on our behalf, under their own security programmes:

• Clerk — sign-in and account records.
• Convex — the database and the file storage your syllabus uploads live in.
• Anthropic— the AI features. The relevant text is sent to Anthropic’s API to produce the answer when you import a syllabus, ask Pacer a question, break a task into steps, plan your week, re-sort a class’s work, or use any of the notebook tools (summary, key concepts, flashcards). Two of these send a whole file rather than an excerpt: a syllabus upload, and a transcript or degree audit. A transcript normally carries your name, your student id, every course grade and your GPA, and it is sent as it is — we do not strip it first. If you would rather that never happen, type your completed credits in by hand instead; the upload exists only to save you the typing.
• PostHog — product analytics, only with your consent.
• Vercel — hosting, plus page-level traffic and page-speed measurement. This one is cookie-free and records no identifier for you, which is why it runs without asking; what it receives is the page address, the referring address, and your browser and device type.
• Instructure (Canvas) — only if you choose to link your Canvas account, and only to read your courses and assignments.
• Google — only if you choose to connect Google Calendar, and only to read when you are busy. Detailed below.
• Apple, Google and Mozilla — only if you turn on phone reminders. Whichever browser you installed Marathon in hands the notification to its own push service. The contents are encrypted so that service cannot read the reminder; what it does hold is a long-lived address for your device, which is deleted when you turn reminders off.

Your coursework is never used to train AI models, never sold, and never handed to anyone as “anonymised insights.”

Connecting Google Calendar is optional, off by default, and read-only. If you never connect it, none of this applies to you and nothing else in Marathon changes.

What Marathon asks for, and what it does with it:

• The scope. One only — calendar.readonly. Marathon never writes to, changes, or deletes anything in any calendar of yours.
• Which calendars. The ones you pick, and no others. Google tells us the names of the calendars your account can read so that Settings can offer you the list — including calendars other people shared with you. Only the ones you tick are ever read. Your primary calendar is the default, and the reason the choice exists at all is that most universities publish the class timetable as a separate calendar you subscribe to, which is the one thing a study planner most needs to see.
• What it reads. Events in the next three weeks, on the calendars you picked: their title, start and end time, and whether they are all-day. Events you have marked as free, cancelled events, and invitations you declined are all skipped.
• Why. So the planner schedules around your life instead of over it. Without this it will happily put a thesis draft on the evening of your concert.
• Where it goes.Into your own plan, with one exception worth stating plainly: to sort your commitments and suggest where each belongs, Marathon sends the event title, how often it repeats, how long it lasts, and the names of the projects you already have to its AI provider (Anthropic). Nothing else goes with them — no attendees, no locations, no descriptions, no times, and nothing that identifies you. They are never used to train any model. Calendar data is not sold, not shared, and not shown to other students.
• How to end it. Disconnect in Settings. The imported commitments are deleted at the same moment — disconnecting means the data is gone, not merely unreachable.

Marathon’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Marathon sets no analytics cookie until you say yes. Decline, or simply ignore the banner, and the product-analytics tool is never loaded at all — not loaded-but-silent, not loaded.

One thing does run either way, and it would be dishonest to bury it: Vercel’s page-traffic and page-speed measurement. It sets no cookie and records no identifier for you, which is why it is not part of the choice — but it is measurement, so it is named here and in the list above rather than filed under “hosting.”

Sign-in requires a session cookie. That one is strictly necessary: without it there is no way to stay logged in, so it is not part of the choice above.

Changed your mind? Settings → Privacy shows what you chose and lets you change it. Withdrawing stops collection on the spot and clears the identifier stored on that device, so nothing further is recorded and nothing new is tied to you. You do not have to clear your browser and you do not have to ask us. What was already collected before you withdrew is not deleted by that switch — email us and we will remove it.

Your classes and tasks are private to your account by default. Three things can change that, and all three are your decision:

• Making your profile public. This lets other students find your class plans on Discover — and it also publishes a page for each class, outside the app, that search engines can index. That page carries the class name, the assignment titles and your instructor’s name. It never carries your grades, your scores, your notes or your files. Turn the profile back to private and the pages stop being served.
• Sharing a group assignment, which shows that assignment to people you invite.
• Turning on the calendar feed, which creates a secret link. Anyone holding that link can read your task titles and due dates, so treat it like a password. You can regenerate it at any time, which immediately breaks the old one.

Deleting a class removes its tasks, subtasks and files with it. Deleting your account removes your profile, classes, tasks, notes, grades, uploaded files, and your place in any shared group. There is no soft-delete purgatory and no need to email support to be forgotten.

Two things outlive the account, and we would rather name them than let you find out:

• A signed agreement. If you accepted the beta NDA, the record that you accepted it — your name, the date, and the version — is kept. Deleting the evidence of an agreement is not the same as deleting your data.
• The waitlist.If you joined the waitlist, that entry is a separate opt-in keyed to your email rather than to an account. Ask us and we’ll remove it.

Work you contributed to a shared group assignment stays with the group — other students are relying on it — but your name comes off it.

If you want a copy of your data, or you want it deleted and cannot reach the app, email hojin@marathonstudent.com and we will do it by hand.

Marathon is built for university students and is not directed at children. You need to be 18 or older to use it, as set out in the Terms— the closed beta asks testers to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and that is a contract. We do not ask for your date of birth, so this is a condition rather than a check. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will remove it.

Questions, corrections, or a request about your data: hojin@marathonstudent.com.