What we know, and why

The short version: we collect what the product needs to work, we don’t sell any of it, and your conversations are yours.

Waitlist applications

When you apply, we collect your email, name, LinkedIn link, current work, the help you can offer, interests, capability, reason for applying, AI use, mentoring experience and how you heard about AskReal. We also record the application source and submission time. We use these details to review your application, manage invitations, understand interest in AskReal and contact you about your application. Your application is not a public profile.

Applying is voluntary. All application questions are required; without those answers, you cannot submit the form. Please do not include confidential documents or sensitive personal information in your answers. Authorized AskReal administrators can review applications. Our hosting, database and email providers process the information needed to provide their services, as described below.

We retain applications while needed to review them and manage invitations. You can ask to withdraw your application or request deletion using the contact below. We review those requests and any information that must be retained for security or legal reasons. Applying alone does not subscribe you to unrelated promotional emails.

To request access to or correction of your application, withdraw it, or ask a privacy question, email hakest@nexttryhk.com. You do not need an account. We may ask for information needed to verify that the request is yours. The sections below also describe data used by features available after invitation; applying does not activate those features.

What we collect

Your email and sign-in method; the profile you write (name, headline, introduction, skills, fields, education, work history, and the days you’re free); the tasks, offers, messages and bookings you create; and how your profile performs: how often it was shown in a list, how often it was opened, and roughly how long people spent reading it.

Those last numbers are kept as daily totals, so the record says “shown eleven times on Tuesday” and not who did the looking. Reading time is counted only while the page is actually in front of someone, is capped at three minutes, and is counted once per person per profile per day. Only the owner of a profile can see their own totals, and nobody, including them, can see how long any particular person read. We keep the short list that stops the same visit being counted twice for sixty days, then delete it.

What it’s used for

Running AskReal: showing your profile to people browsing, delivering messages, sending the notification emails you’d expect (a new offer, a new booking, a new message), keeping the platform safe, and deciding the order people appear in when somebody searches. That last one is why the performance numbers above exist: a directory that always shows the same person first is a directory that stops working for everyone else.

What we don’t do

No selling data. No advertising profiles. No reading your private messages except when a report requires us to look at a specific conversation.

AI assistants you connect. If you connect an assistant such as ChatGPT to your AskReal account, it can read what you can read on your own dashboard: your profile and what’s still missing from it, the tasks you’ve posted, the offers made on them, and whether your profile is hidden. It can also write, but only what you approve. Before it changes your profile or posts a task in your name, it shows you a card with every field, and nothing is written until you press the button on that card. Disconnect it in your assistant’s settings and it loses all of this at once. An assistant that isn’t connected to your account sees only what’s already public.

Who else touches data

Supabase hosts the database, Vercel serves the site and counts page views, Stripe handles the listing subscription, Resend delivers email, Google powers optional sign-in. If you connect an AI assistant, the company behind it (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI, or whichever you use) receives whatever its requests return, under that company’s own terms; that is the point of connecting it, and it’s why the paragraph above says exactly what it can reach. Each sees only what its job requires. When something breaks we record the error message and the page it happened on — never who you are or what you were writing — and those records are deleted after thirty days.

If you upload a CV

Filling your profile in from a CV is optional, and you can always type it instead. If you do upload one, the file is sent to Google’s Gemini API to be read, and the education and roles it finds are put into your profile for you to check and edit. We never write the file to disk and never keep it — it exists only for the seconds the request takes. What ends up saved is the text you approve, the same as if you had typed it. Google’s handling of that request is covered by their API terms.

If you set your profile up through an assistant before you have an account, what it drafted is held for 24 hours so it’s waiting when you sign in, then deleted whether or not you used it.

If an AI calls AskReal for you

When an assistant connects to AskReal on your behalf, we record the name and version it gives us for itself, what it searched for, how many people came back, and the network address the request arrived from. We keep the address to tell one assistant apart from another and to stop the endpoint being scraped; in practice it belongs to the company running the assistant, not to you, because everyone using that assistant reaches us through the same few addresses. We do not record who you are unless you connected your own AskReal account, and even then the search itself is never shown next to your name.

Cookies

AskReal sets no advertising or tracking cookies. We count page views with Vercel’s analytics, which is cookieless: it records that a page was viewed, not who viewed it, and it cannot follow anyone between sites. Nothing here follows you to other websites. What we do store in your browser is the short list below, and every item of it is either required to sign you in or a preference you set yourself:

Session cookies — issued by Supabase when you sign in, so the site knows it’s you. Deleting them signs you out.
Sign-in handshake (g_state, g_nonce, g_next) — set for ten minutes while you sign in with Google, to make sure the reply comes back to the browser that asked. Deleted the moment you return.
identity — whether you last used AskReal to hire or to help, so the app opens on the right side.
theme and lang — your light/dark and language choice.

Because none of these track you, we don’t interrupt you with a consent banner asking permission to do something we aren’t doing. Clearing your browser’s cookies for this site removes all of them; you’ll simply be signed out and back to the defaults.

Your controls

Action records include their participants, outcome, domain, date and a link to evidence you choose to share. Pending and private records are visible to the participants; public action records require participant confirmation. One-click Trust records its giver, recipient and grant or revocation time; active grants are public, while revoked personal Trust history is visible only to its giver. The public Trust list shows the giver’s public profile and grant date. A platform collaboration label indicates a completed service between that customer and Independent Worker; private task details remain hidden. Contextual Trust also records its giver, context and current revocation state. Reports and appeals are private to their reporter and authorized administrators. Hide records or withdraw confirmation in Actions & Trust. Public evidence links may lead to third-party sites; AskReal does not make a private file public on your behalf. Do not submit confidential or signed download URLs.

Download your action, Trust and profile records from Actions & Trust, including after cancelling a subscription. The export excludes other people’s private messages, private files and billing identifiers. Revoked Trust remains in the participants’ history but is excluded from effective public Trust.

You can edit your profile and delete skills, jobs or your listing at any time. To close your account for good, use Settings → Account → Close your account. It immediately deletes your profile, skills, conversations, unfinished jobs and booking history, and cannot be undone. Reviews you wrote about someone else, finished jobs that carry another person’s review, team projects and referral records stay on the other person’s record, shown without your name.

Last updated: 28 September 2026