Privacy & data handling
Masters practices the data architecture it recommends.
This page describes how information is handled across the static website, the Masters Guide, the guided Contact and Join Masters intake forms, and the Ask Masters reference desk — including which data the website stores, which it only transmits, and the concrete retention periods below.
Data minimization
Describe the problem at a level safe to share.
The Masters Guide does not need secrets to produce a useful first report. Please do not submit passwords, credentials, API keys, protected health information, payment-card data, export-controlled secrets, unnecessary personal data, or confidential material that is not needed to describe the problem.
The Guide asks only for an email address plus information that materially improves the report. It does not require an account, a password, a phone number, a job title, or a company size.
Email and marketing
Your email delivers the report. It does not enroll you in anything.
- Delivery, not marketing.
Your email address is used to deliver and recover your report. Receiving a report does not subscribe you to marketing.
- Marketing consent is separate.
Any future Masters communications require a distinct, optional opt-in that is never a condition of receiving the report.
- Follow-up is your choice.
You become a consulting contact only when you explicitly ask to discuss a report with Masters. A report-delivery email alone is not treated as consent for a sales sequence.
Contact and Join Masters
The website transmits these submissions. It does not store them.
The guided Contact and Join Masters forms are handled by a small endpoint on this website that validates what you sent and delivers it by authenticated email to Masters. There is no database behind them, no analytics attached to them, and no third-party form service in between.
- Consulting contact.
What you want to change, how it is handled today, why it matters, any hard constraints, and how to reach you. The purpose is to decide whether a first conversation is worthwhile and to be able to answer you.
- Professional intake.
Your identity and contact details, graduate foundation, the domains you are prepared to lead and those you should not be asked to lead, links to work that is already public, your written responses, and your engagement preference. The purpose is professional consideration by a person.
- Not stored by the website.
The endpoint keeps no copy of your submission. The operational record is the Masters mailbox that receives it, and that is stated here rather than implied away.
- No file uploads.
Neither form accepts a file, a resume, or an attachment. Please link to public work instead.
- No marketing enrollment.
Submitting either form does not subscribe you to anything. Marketing consent remains a separate, optional opt-in that is never bundled into an intake.
- No training use.
Submissions are not used to train models by default, and nothing you write is scored automatically. A person reads it.
- Deletion on request.
Reply to the confirmation email, or write to Masters, and ask. The record is the mailbox, so deletion is a mailbox action.
Retention for these submissions is managed as mailbox correspondence on its own terms. The Guide's 90-day rule is deliberately not applied to them: a consulting enquiry and a professional application are different purposes, and inheriting a period written for something else would be a claim this page cannot honestly make. No fixed period is asserted here until the implementation actually enforces one.
Ask Masters
The question you type stays in your browser.
Ask Masters searches a static copy of published Masters material in your browser. The question you type is not sent to Masters, and it is not sent to an AI provider — there is no model involved at any point, and no inference call is made.
To be precise rather than flattering: opening the reference desk downloads two ordinary static files from this website, and those file requests appear in normal web-server logs like any other page or image request. What those logs cannot contain is your question, because it is never transmitted. Ask Masters does not place your question in browser storage, in the address bar, or in a request to any server; the application keeps it only in the current page while you are using the reference desk. What your browser or operating system may do with text you type — form history, spell-check, or similar — is outside any website's control, so this page does not make claims about it.
Abuse prevention, not analytics
What the submission endpoint records.
To stop automated abuse, the endpoint keeps a short-lived counter of how many submissions have arrived from a connection. The counter is stored under a one-way keyed hash — your address itself is never written down — it expires on its own, and it cannot be used to reconstruct who visited or what they read.
There is no CAPTCHA on these forms, which means no third-party challenge provider observes you in order to submit them. Voice dictation, where offered, is your browser's own feature: Masters receives the text you submit, never a stored audio recording.
Separate data domains
User problem data and Masters evidence stay separate.
Masters keeps logically separate: Guide problem and report data; consulting-contact submissions; professional-intake and application data; marketing consent; the vendor and evidence knowledge base; and operational logs. These are different purposes with different bases, and a record created for one is not silently reused for another.
A visitor's submission does not silently become a fact in the vendor-evidence corpus. The public Guide does not add your submission to a training corpus by default. Any future research use would require a separate, explicit consent path or sufficiently transformed aggregate data with a documented legal and privacy basis.
Private reports
Reports are reached by an unguessable link, not listed publicly.
A generated report is retrieved through a high-entropy access token rather than a sequential or guessable address. Private report links are not included in the public sitemap and are not indexed by search engines.
You can view your report in the browser immediately after it is generated, and recover it later using the private link delivered to your email.
Retention and deletion
What is kept, and for how long.
- Submissions and reports: 90 days.
Your problem submission and the generated report are retained for 90 days so you can recover the report, then automatically deleted. Deletion runs on a schedule and is enforced by the service, not left to manual cleanup.
- Operational logs: shorter.
Operational logs are kept for a shorter period than submission data (currently 30 days) and are then removed.
- Separate records are kept intentionally, not by accident.
If you explicitly ask to discuss a report with Masters, or opt in to marketing, that request or consent is recorded as its own separate record with its own basis. The 90-day deletion of submission and report data does not remove those separate records; they are managed on their own terms and you can ask us to delete them.
- Deletion on request.
You can ask Masters to delete your submission, report, or a marketing or consulting record at any time. Deletion is supported directly by the service.
The static website
Reading the site requires no account and no tracking.
The public institutional website is static and does not require authentication, a database, or analytics to operate. Its one dynamic component is the submission endpoint described above, which runs only when you choose to send a form and stores nothing. Every page remains readable if that endpoint or the Guide service is unavailable. Any future analytics would be disclosed here and chosen to respect these same boundaries.
Questions
Ask about how your information is handled.
If you have a question about privacy, data handling, or deletion, contact Masters directly and it will be answered by a person.