Privacy Policy

The Acceleration Newsroom is an internal tool for Acceleration staff. It is not a public service and has no public sign-up. This page describes what the system records about the people who use it, what it records about people who do not, and where that information goes. It describes the system as built; where the system does not do something, this page says so rather than describing an intention.

Who this covers

Everyone who signs in. Access is granted by invitation from an existing administrator; there is no self-registration. Your account exists because someone at Acceleration created it for you, and it can be removed the same way.

It also covers two groups who never sign in: people named in news coverage that the system processes, and people who receive newsletters sent from it. Both are described below, because the system holds information about them.

What is recorded about you when you sign in

Sign-in is handled by Clerk, a third-party identity provider. Clerk holds your name, your email address, your password or other sign-in method, and your session. This application does not store your password and never receives it.

Your access tier is stored on your Clerk account, and this application reads it to decide what to show you. The application’s own database stores your Clerk user ID, and in some records your display name, attached to specific actions:

• Invitations you send. When you invite someone, the system records who invited them, the invited email address, the tier granted, and the time.
• Archive tracking you start or stop. The system records your user ID and name, which client it applied to, the action, and the time.
• Feedback you submit on an article or a client, recorded with an author field.
• HR documents and calendar entries you create, recorded with a creator field.

These are operational records: they exist so that an action can be attributed to a person later. There is no general activity log, no page-view tracking, and no analytics product embedded in this application.

Your location, if you allow it

The header shows local time and conditions. To do that, the application asks your browser for your location using the standard browser permission prompt. If you decline, or your browser has already denied the permission, nothing is requested and the feature simply does not appear.

If you allow it, your coordinates are rounded to two decimal places — roughly a kilometre — before they leave your browser. The rounded pair is sent to the United States National Weather Service API to look up conditions and your time zone, and is held in a short-lived in-memory cache on the server. It is not written to the database and is not associated with your account.

Cookies and browser storage

Clerk sets a session cookie so that you stay signed in. That cookie is what authenticates you; clearing it signs you out.

The application itself stores one value in your browser’s local storage, recording whether you have hidden the news strip. It is a display preference, it stays on that browser, and it is never sent to the server or to anyone else.

There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics cookies, and no cross-site tracking in this application.

People named in news coverage

The system reads news articles from a commercial news provider and, for some articles, uses a language model to extract recruitment signals — a person’s name, their role or title, the company involved, and a short summary of why the article suggested a change. These records are stored in the application’s database and synchronised to Airtable.

The people described in those records are not users of this system and have not been asked. The source material is published news coverage. This is the most sensitive category of information the application holds, and it should be treated accordingly — see the Acceptable Use page.

Newsletter recipients

The system stores the email address of each newsletter recipient, which audience they belong to, whether they are active or unsubscribed, and a unique unsubscribe token. It also records, per newsletter, whether delivery to each recipient succeeded or failed and any error returned. Newsletters are sent through Resend, which receives the recipient address and the message.

Who else receives information

Each of these is a separate company with its own terms:

• Clerk — identity and sessions. Holds your name, email and credentials.
• Neon — the Postgres database. Holds everything described above that is stored.
• Vercel — hosting and request logging for the application.
• Anthropic — receives article text and client profiles for relevance judging. It also receives the content of messages you type into the in-app assistant; the most recent twenty messages of a conversation are sent with each request.
• Perplexity — receives topic prompts used to assemble cultural calendar entries. No staff information is included.
• Perigon — the news provider. Receives search terms describing clients and topics. No staff information is included.
• Airtable — receives extracted recruitment-signal records, including names and titles of people mentioned in coverage.
• Resend — receives newsletter recipient addresses and message content.
• The US National Weather Service — receives rounded coordinates, only if you allow location access, together with a user-agent string identifying this application and a contact address as that service requires.
• The Movie Database (TMDB) — receives release-calendar queries. No user information is included.

How long information is kept

No retention policy is currently defined. Records described on this page are kept indefinitely unless someone deletes them by hand. The status page reads only the last fourteen days of job history, but that is a display window and not a deletion rule: older rows remain in the database.

This is a gap, stated plainly rather than papered over. Setting retention periods is an open decision.

Asking for information to be removed

To ask what is held about you, or to have it removed, use the support form.

Two practical notes. Removing your Clerk account ends your access but does not by itself remove the operational records described above, which reference your user ID. And newsletter recipients can unsubscribe using the link in any newsletter, which marks the record unsubscribed rather than deleting it.

Security

Access is controlled by tier, and the tiers are enforced in the application code on each request rather than only in what the interface displays. Sensitive values such as database credentials and API keys are held as environment variables and are not committed to the source repository.

Beyond that, this page makes no security claims. The application relies on the protections provided by Clerk, Neon and Vercel, and those are described by those companies rather than here.

Changes, and what this page is not

This page describes the system as it currently works, and will need updating when that changes. It makes no statement about compliance with any particular privacy law; that is a legal determination and has not been made.