Privacy at Yakkademia

Depending on how you use the service, Yakkademia may process your name; institutional and login email addresses; university and staff role; membership-verification status; public university staff-directory information used for verification; your real-name profile and persistent Yakkademia username; protected account-to-username mappings; discussions, replies and private-conversation messages; poll and petition activity; administration/support messages; optional device push-subscription information; and technical, security and privacy-request records.

For the University of Sussex beta, you provide your name and a Sussex institutional email address. Yakkademia looks for an unambiguous matching name in Sussex's public staff directory. If a match is found, a verification code is sent to the official Sussex staff mailbox associated with that directory record. This allows ordinary Sussex email aliases to work without treating an alias as proof of staff identity.

Yakkademia also keeps a deliberately minimal verification cache as insurance against a temporary directory outage. It contains only fields needed for verification, such as staff record ID, name, canonical institutional email, optional role/department, source URL and freshness information. A live directory result is authoritative and a cached record never overrides a live “not found” result. The cache is refreshed approximately every six weeks; cached records are eligible as a fallback for no more than eight weeks and records not observed for 90 days are removed.

Yakkademia uses personal information to provide the service you choose to use; verify eligibility; keep role- and institution-restricted spaces correctly separated; prevent fraud and abuse; protect username privacy; deliver transactional emails and optional notifications; operate polls, petitions and private conversations; respond to privacy or support requests; and meet legal obligations.

The principal Article 6 lawful bases expected for the beta are contract where processing is necessary to provide the requested service, legitimate interests for proportionate verification, integrity, security and privacy protection, and legal obligation where the law requires processing. Where legitimate interests are relied upon, Yakkademia's interests are maintaining a trusted staff-only community, preventing identity abuse and protecting the service and its members while using the minimum information reasonably necessary.

Yakkademia checks contributions before publication for issues such as personal abuse, threats, discriminatory content and potentially serious allegations. The moderation system uses local rules and may also use a language model to assess the text of a contribution together with a limited amount of relevant conversational context. The checker is not given protected identity mappings, institutional email addresses or other private account information about the author.

Ordinary text that has not been submitted to the moderation checker is not retained by Yakkademia as a moderation dossier. If a submitted contribution is held for moderation, Yakkademia keeps the submitted text, the checker's decision and the limited review context for up to 30 days so that the intervention and moderation system can be reviewed. This audit record remains even if the member then edits or withdraws the contribution; withdrawal does not by itself count as a misconduct finding or strike.

Human review of a contribution held for moderation is identity-blind by default. The ordinary moderation-review feed deliberately does not show the author's real name, Yakkademia username, email address, account identifier or posting history. Relevant conversational context is supplied without those account or participation-identity fields. The text of a contribution may nevertheless contain information that allows a reviewer to infer who wrote it, so Yakkademia cannot promise anonymity from clues the member included in the text itself.

The language model does not automatically learn from an individual member's posts and Yakkademia does not use it to build a behavioural profile of a member. Carefully reviewed and, where appropriate, de-identified examples may be retained for longer as moderation test cases so that changes to the checker can be evaluated against a stable benchmark.

If OpenAI API moderation is enabled, the contribution text and limited conversational context are sent to OpenAI for that check. OpenAI states that API inputs and outputs are not used to train its models by default. Depending on the API account's data-retention configuration, OpenAI may retain API inputs and outputs for up to 30 days for service delivery and abuse monitoring; Yakkademia will review whether a more restrictive eligible retention setting should be used before a wider launch.

Yakkademia does not ask members to provide special-category personal information for membership or ordinary participation. During the Sussex beta, members should discuss issues and ideas without using Yakkademia to publish sensitive personal information about themselves or another identifiable person, including personal information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, health, sex life or sexual orientation. This conservative beta restriction will be reviewed before the service is broadened.

Your verified real-name profile is visible when you choose to use it. Your persistent Yakkademia username can be recognisable across the service without revealing the verified member behind it. Yakkademia does not offer a separate conversation-specific anonymous posting mode for new contributions.

Private ownership mappings are not available to ordinary members. Routine administration does not expose username ownership, private conversations or ballots. Account-level administrative access is reason-coded and logged. The ordinary admin dashboard does not provide a general lookup from a username to its owner.

Some historical contributions created before 27 September 2026 may have used the former conversation-specific anonymous mode. Yakkademia does not retroactively attach those contributions to a member's persistent username. Where such material remains visible, it may instead use a neutral legacy-participant label.

Forum conversations use the audience shown in the product. Role-restricted conversations are visible only to eligible members of that staff group; institution-wide conversations are visible to eligible members at that university; and network conversations are visible to eligible Yakkademia members across participating institutions. Invite-only private conversations are available only to eligible members who join them. Yakkademia necessarily processes conversation membership and message content to deliver and secure those conversations, but private conversations are not an ordinary administrative browsing surface.

Notifications are optional and enabled separately on each supported device. If you turn them on, Yakkademia stores the technical Web Push subscription endpoint and cryptographic delivery keys supplied by that browser or installed web app. These are used only to route notifications to that device and are not public profile information.

A notification can identify the participation name that generated the activity and the relevant conversation or Private-chat title. For a new Private-chat message, the notification deliberately does not contain the message text. Delivery necessarily passes the encrypted push message through the push service used by your browser or operating system. The device itself controls whether and how the notification appears on a lock screen and whether an app-icon badge is displayed.

You can turn Yakkademia notifications off from Your Yakkademia or through your device settings. Yakkademia removes expired device subscriptions when the push service reports that they are no longer valid.

Poll ballots are recorded privately so Yakkademia can enforce one verified account per vote. Other members see aggregate results, not who selected an option.

Petitions deliberately work differently. Before signing, the product explains that a signatory’s verified real name will be available to the petition convenor in the final petition and may be supplied to the stated recipient, but only if the petition reaches its published threshold and completes the review process. Names and individual signatures are not displayed publicly on Yakkademia, and petition documents never include members’ email addresses or usernames.

After signatures close, signatories have a 48-hour finalisation window in which they can see the count and withdraw. A named final petition can be generated only after that window has closed and only if the petition still meets its published signature threshold. If the threshold is not met, the convenor may extend the petition or close it without submission; signatory names are not released to the convenor. Once a final petition has been generated, a later withdrawal cannot remove a name from copies that have already been downloaded. Joining a private post-petition updates conversation is separate and optional.

Yakkademia currently uses Supabase for authentication, database and backend services; Vercel for application hosting and delivery; and Resend for transactional email. If AI-assisted contextual moderation is enabled, Yakkademia also uses the OpenAI API for that moderation check. Optional Web Push delivery also uses the push-notification infrastructure associated with the member's browser or operating system. These providers may use subprocessors and may process information outside the UK. Their current data-processing terms include contractual mechanisms for relevant international transfers, including UK transfer provisions where applicable. Yakkademia does not sell member information to advertisers.

Registration attempts and completed or failed verification-email operational records are removed after 30 days. Moderation records for contributions that are held for review are also removed after 30 days; carefully reviewed and appropriately de-identified benchmark examples may be kept longer. The Sussex verification cache follows the freshness and deletion periods described above. Completed staff-cache refresh diagnostics are retained for a limited operational period. Account, membership and community information is retained while needed to provide the service, subject to the deletion rules below. Push subscriptions are retained only while needed to notify an enabled device and are removed when disabled, expired or no longer associated with the account.

You can request deletion from Your Yakkademia. The request suspends membership access immediately and signs the account out. Ordinary requests are then processed by a protected service worker.

Deleting an account does not silently destroy other people's shared conversation history. Yakkademia removes the Auth account, membership/verification information and private ownership mappings that are no longer needed. Retained Forum contributions are de-identified and may use a neutral legacy-participant label so the former account no longer creates a public identity link. In shared private conversations, the departing participant is removed and retained messages are de-identified.

Text that itself identifies a person may still be personal information and can require separate review. Petition identity history and administrator accounts are stopped for manual privacy review because historical disclosures or governance obligations cannot necessarily be undone automatically.

Depending on the circumstances and lawful basis, UK data-protection law may give you rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability. You can make a request whether or not you currently have a Yakkademia account by using the privacy contact form. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office.

Yakkademia uses technical and organisational controls intended to keep verification information and protected identity mappings separate from ordinary community use. A complaint about a contribution does not by itself entitle another member or third party to the poster's underlying identity. Information may nevertheless be disclosed where Yakkademia is legally required to do so.

This notice will be updated when the service, processors or privacy practices materially change. Material changes affecting how members' identities or private content are handled should be brought to members' attention before the new use begins.