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.

What we collect

Your email and sign-in method; the profile you write (name, headline, skills, city); the jobs, 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. If you set up payouts, your bank and identity details go to Stripe directly — we never see or store them.

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 (new offer, booking, payment), 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 connected through our integration see only what’s already public on your profile.

Who else touches data

Supabase hosts the database, Vercel serves the site and counts page views, Stripe handles payments, Resend delivers email, Google powers optional sign-in. 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 APIto 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.

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

You can edit your profile and delete skills, jobs or your listing at any time. To close your account for good — profile, skills, conversations and booking history — use Settings → Account → Close your account. It deletes everything immediately and cannot be undone.

Last updated: 1 August 2026