Privacy Policy

CogSeven Companion v0 — last updated at v0 launch; subject to change.

v0 testing scope. CogSeven Companion is currently in closed pre-release testing with a small set of invited power users. This policy describes the v0 data-handling practices honestly. A formal, lawyer-reviewed policy will replace this document before any commercial release.

1. Who we are

CogSeven Companion is an Office add-in built and operated by the CogSeven team. Contact: support@cogsevencompanion.com.

2. What we collect

By design, CogSeven Companion does its workbook analysis locally on your machine. Workbook contents (cell values, formulas, worksheet names, file paths) are never sent to our servers.

The data that does leave your machine:

Your email address — used by Clerk, our authentication provider, to issue magic codes for sign-in.
Your IP address — recorded in standard server access logs (Caddy) when your add-in talks to our backend. Logs are retained for at most 30 days.
PDFs you upload via the "Import PDF" feature — sent to our extraction service to extract text and tables. By default in v0, uploaded PDFs are retained on our server for product improvement. You can disable retention in the add-in Settings, or delete previously-retained PDFs at any time via the "Delete my retained data" button.
Anonymized usage events — event names ("scan completed", "PDF imported") plus bucketed counts (e.g. "10–25 worksheets"). No workbook content, sheet names, or filenames.
Masked error logs — when the add-in encounters an error, the message and stack trace are sent for debugging, with any workbook-derived strings (cell references, quoted values) masked client-side before transmission.

3. PDF retention — what you should know

For the v0 testing phase, PDF retention is on by default so we can build a corpus to improve text and table extraction quality. We store only:

The PDF binary itself.
A SHA-256 hash of the file.
The file size and upload timestamp.
The Clerk user ID of the uploader.

We do not store the original filename or any metadata the user typed into the dialog.

If you don't want a PDF retained: open Settings in the add-in and toggle "Allow PDF retention" off (effective immediately for future uploads), or use the "Delete my retained data" button to remove everything previously stored.

The retention default flips to off before any non-test release of CogSeven Companion.

4. Third-party processors

Clerk (clerk.com/privacy) — handles authentication. They process your email and Clerk session records.
Hetzner Cloud (hetzner.com/legal/privacy-policy) — hosts our servers in Germany (EU).

5. Your rights

You can:

Delete every PDF we've retained from you via the in-app "Delete my retained data" button.
Disable PDF retention for future uploads via the in-app Settings.
Email support@cogsevencompanion.com to request deletion of your account, all telemetry, all error logs, and all PDFs. We process such requests within 7 days.

6. Security

All transit is HTTPS (TLS 1.3 via Caddy + Let's Encrypt). Authentication uses signed JWTs from Clerk validated server-side. Retained PDFs sit on encrypted-at-rest disk storage on the hosting provider.

That said, this is v0 pre-release software — we make no guarantee of the security posture you'd expect from a mature commercial product. If the PDFs you'd upload would cause real harm if leaked, please don't upload them yet.

7. Changes

We may update this policy as v0 evolves. Material changes will be emailed to active testers.