● Legal
Privacy Policy
Effective Last updated
The short version
- Your workspace content belongs to your organization. We process it to run Tinu, not for our own purposes.
- We do not sell personal information, and we do not use customer workspace content to train AI models, ours or anyone else’s. The one exception is the public demo, covered in section 05.
- We name every subprocessor we send data to, on a page of its own with a dated change log. No unnamed “trusted partners.”
- You can access, export, correct or delete your data. Section 08 says how, and how long it takes.
This summary is for orientation only. The sections below are the actual policy.
Who we are
Tinu AI is a service operated by Tinu Inc, a Michigan corporation based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States (“Tinu,” “we,” “us”). This policy covers tinuai.com and the Tinu web application.
Our free tools at tools.tinuai.com work very differently. No accounts, and nothing stored. They have their own privacy policy.
Our role: controller and processor
Tinu plays two different roles depending on whose data is involved, and your rights differ accordingly.
- We are a processor for the content inside a customer workspace: the entries, decisions, topics and knowledge your organization creates. Your organization is the controller. It decides what goes in, who can see it, and when it is deleted. If you are an employee of a Tinu customer and want your workspace data changed or removed, ask your organization first; we act on their instruction. We will still honor a direct request from you where the law requires it.
- We are a controller for the data we need to run the business: account records, billing, support conversations, security logs, and product analytics.
What we collect
| Category | What it includes | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Name, work email, hashed password, organization and team membership, role, profile settings, language preference | You, or an admin who invites you |
| Workspace content | Entries, reflections, decisions and rationale, topics, entities, project memory, body of work documents, chat questions and answers, uploaded attachments | You and your colleagues |
| Connected sources | Messages and metadata from integrations your organization enables, such as Slack. Only what the integration’s configured scope covers | The connected service, with your admin’s authorization |
| Usage and device | Pages viewed, features used, approximate location derived from IP, browser and device type, referring page | Automatically, as you use the product |
| Security and audit | Sign-in events, IP address, administrative actions, permission changes, API-key usage, AI usage and cost records | Automatically |
| Support | Anything you send us by email when you ask for help | You |
We do not intentionally collect special-category data (health, biometrics, race, religion, political opinions, union membership) and Tinu is not designed to hold it. Workspace content is free text, so please do not put it there.
How we use it
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR Art. 6) |
|---|---|
| Provide the service | Performance of a contract |
| Generate summaries, suggestions and answers | Performance of a contract |
| Authenticate you and secure the service | Legitimate interests; legal obligation |
| Detect abuse, and meter AI spend against limits | Legitimate interests |
| Diagnose errors and improve the product | Legitimate interests |
| Send service and security notices | Performance of a contract; legal obligation |
| Send marketing email (if you opted in) | Consent, withdrawable at any time |
| Comply with law and defend legal claims | Legal obligation; legitimate interests |
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act. We have never done either.
AI providers and model training
Tinu sends workspace content to third-party AI providers to produce summaries, extract topics, build embeddings for search, check answers, read text in scanned PDF pages, uploaded images and pictures inside documents (Google receives those images), and answer questions in chat and Slack. Today those providers are OpenAI and Google.
We do not train AI models on customer workspace content. We send it to these providers through their paid APIs, not their consumer products.
The one exception: the public demo
The public demo workspaces at tinuai.com are a separate thing. They run against a separate AI provider account on a free tier that does allow the provider to train on submitted content. That is a deliberate trade we make to keep the demo free. The demo is seeded with synthetic data, is read-only, and is not a place to put anything real. Do not enter confidential or personal information into the demo.
Automated decision-making
Tinu’s AI features summarize, organize and retrieve. They do not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you, so GDPR Art. 22 does not apply. AI output can be wrong, and is meant to be reviewed by a person.
Subprocessors
We name every subprocessor that processes your data on our behalf, every other vendor we use as a controller for our own business, and every integration you connect. We do not use unnamed partners. We will update the list before adding a new subprocessor.
The current list lives at tinuai.com/legal/subprocessors, with a dated log of every change to it. It is kept on one page, rather than copied into this document, so the two can never disagree about who processes your data.
Our own commitments to you as a processor are set out in our Data Processing Agreement. We also disclose data where the law genuinely requires it, and would tell you unless legally barred from doing so.
How long we keep it
Tinu exists so institutional knowledge outlives turnover, which pulls against data minimization. We resolve it with a hard line: we retain knowledge, not people.
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Organization knowledge | Kept while the organization’s account is active. Your admin can set a shorter window |
| Personal contributions | Kept while you are an active member; after you leave, governed by your organization’s retention setting |
| Account and identity | Life of the account, then purged after a 30-day grace period |
| Security and audit logs | At least 1 year. The role that serves customer requests can add audit records but cannot read, change or delete them |
| Backups | Deleted data can remain in our database provider’s point-in-time restore history for a limited window before it rolls off |
When someone leaves or asks to be erased, we remove the personal layer of identity and attribution, while the organization may keep the knowledge it owns. The knowledge it keeps is de-identified: the person’s name and identifiers are removed from it.
Where the organization keeps that knowledge, a departed member’s private entries are never shown to anyone as entries, but Tinu’s answers and summaries may draw on what they contained. Members can review and delete their private entries at any time before they leave.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your personal data, to object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to withdraw consent. California residents additionally have the right to know, delete, correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing, though as stated in section 04, we do neither. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any right.
Email privacy@tinuai.com. We respond within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity first, and we will not ask for more information than that verification requires. You may use an authorized agent.
If your data lives in a customer workspace, see section 02: your organization controls it, and we will route your request to them and support them in answering it.
Deletion requests follow a reviewed process with a 30-day reversible grace period before the purge becomes permanent. One limit is worth stating plainly. Security and audit logs are retained for the period in section 07 even after erasure, which GDPR Art. 17(3) permits for legal-obligation and legal-claim purposes.
If you are in the EEA or UK and think we have got this wrong, you can complain to your national supervisory authority. We would rather you told us first.
Security
- Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest.
- Database-level row isolation between organizations, enforced by the database itself rather than only by application code.
- Passwords stored using a slow one-way hash, never in readable form.
- Role-based access control, and session revocation when access is withdrawn.
- Append-only audit logging the application cannot rewrite.
- Rate limiting on authentication and API endpoints.
No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If we discover a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify affected customers and regulators as required, without undue delay. To report a vulnerability, email security@tinuai.com. We will not pursue legal action for good-faith research that respects user privacy and does not degrade the service.
International transfers
Tinu is operated from the United States and our infrastructure and subprocessors are primarily US-based. If you use Tinu from outside the US, your data is transferred to and processed in the US, which may have different data protection laws than your country.
For transfers out of the EEA, UK or Switzerland, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, together with the UK Addendum where applicable. A copy of the clauses we use is available on request.
Cookies and analytics
We keep this deliberately small. Tinu uses cookies and local storage for:
- Authentication, keeping you signed in. Strictly necessary; the product cannot work without it.
- Preferences, storing your language and light or dark theme.
- Product analytics via PostHog, to understand which features are used, including recordings of how pages in Tinu are used, which can show workspace content on screen. Recording is off on pages opened from a share, invite, password-reset or verification link. No advertising cookies, no third-party ad networks, no cross-site tracking.
Children
Tinu is a workplace product for organizations. It is not directed to anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If we learn we have, we will delete it. Contact us if you believe a child has provided us data.
Changes to this policy
We update this policy as the product changes. The dates at the top always reflect the current version. Material changes include a new category of data, a new purpose, or a new subprocessor processing your data. For those we notify admins by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect, so there is time to object. Section 07 of our Data Processing Agreement sets out how that notice works, including the one exception for a subprocessor that has to be replaced urgently, and it is the version that governs.
Contact us
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Privacy: privacy@tinuai.com
Security: security@tinuai.com
General: hello@tinuai.com
See also our Terms of Service, Data Processing Agreement and Subprocessors, or return to the Tinu AI home page.