Privacy Policy

CareerPigeon ("CareerPigeon," "we," "us," or "our") provides an AI-powered career platform that helps you tailor your resume, practice mock interviews, track job applications, and manage professional networking. This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use and share it, and the choices and rights you have.

This Policy applies to the CareerPigeon website and web application at careerpigeon.ai, the CareerPigeon browser (Chrome) extension, and related services that link to this Policy (together, the "Service"). It does not apply to third-party websites or services that we do not control.

CareerPigeon is based in the United States and is the controller responsible for the personal information processed through the Service. References to "CareerPigeon," "we," "us," and "our" mean CareerPigeon. You can reach us using the contact details in Contact us.

At a glance

This summary is for convenience only; please read the full Policy below.

Contents

1. Information we collect

We collect information in three ways: information you provide, information we collect automatically, and information we receive from third parties.

Information you provide to us

Account and profile information. When you create an account we collect your name, email address, and a password (which we store only as a salted bcrypt hash, never as plain text). As part of onboarding and your profile you may also provide your job title, target role, target industry, experience level, a short bio, and your time zone. If you set up Personal Recruiter matching, we also store the job preferences you choose with your profile, including your salary floor, salary currency, preferred locations, remote-work modes, dealbreakers, whether visa sponsorship is required, and your years of experience. We use these preferences only to match you to roles and do not share your salary expectations with employers. If you arrive via a marketing link or tell us how you found us, we store that with your account.

Career content. To deliver the Service, you provide content such as:

• Resume content. You build your resume in the Resume Workshop, either by importing a PDF or DOCX file or by starting from scratch. When you import a file, we process it in memory to extract its content into a draft you review, using our own software and, when you import a PDF that our software cannot confidently read, a trusted third-party AI provider (see Section 6); we do not keep the uploaded file itself and do not write it to disk. While an import review is open, we store the extracted content (proposed contact details, work and education entries, and any text we could not place) together with a technical checksum of the file, until you finish or cancel the review, and in any case no later than 30 days after you last work on it. The items you confirm or add directly (employers, job titles, dates, schools, degrees, locations, bullet points, skills, and contact details) are saved in your Career History, and the ones you place on your resume make up your current resume.
• Deleted Career History items. When you delete an item from Career History (including when you replace your resume), it moves to Recently deleted, where you can restore it for up to 30 days before it is permanently deleted, or sooner if storage limits force earlier deletion.
• Job descriptions and job links you submit for analysis or tailoring.
• Tailored resumes we generate for you. Each accepted tailored resume is a self-contained copy that includes the Career History items it used, the job description you provided, and the finished document. We keep your newest 15 accepted tailored resumes; accepting a new one permanently deletes the oldest beyond that limit, and we warn you before that happens unless you have turned the warning off. Unfinished tailoring drafts are deleted after 14 days. You can delete any tailored resume at any time; deleting a Career History item later does not change tailored resumes you already accepted.
• Job application records. Company, role, job URL, status, application date, and any notes you add.
• Networking contacts. The names, companies, roles, LinkedIn URLs, relationship descriptions, and notes you record about people in your network, and the outreach drafts our AI generates for you.
• Mock interview content. The messages in your practice interviews, including the questions, your typed or spoken answers, and the optional context you provide (your name, target role, target company, and resume highlights), together with the AI-generated feedback and scores.

Payment information. When you upgrade to a paid plan, payment is processed by our payment provider, Stripe. Stripe collects and processes your payment card and billing details directly; we do not receive or store your full card number. We retain a record of your transactions (such as plan, amount, currency, payment status, and a Stripe transaction identifier) and your subscription status.

Communications. If you contact us for support or otherwise communicate with us, we collect the information you choose to provide.

Information we collect automatically

Usage and log data. When you use the Service, our servers record limited operational information about API requests, such as the endpoint accessed, the HTTP method, the response status, the request duration, and your account identifier. This request log is automatically deleted on a rolling 7-day basis and does not include your IP address or browser user-agent.

Friend activity status. We record the time of your latest authenticated activity so accepted friends can see a coarse status such as “recently,” “3 hrs,” or “2w.” This setting is on by default. You can turn it off in the Friends area of your profile; your friends will then see “Last seen: unknown.” We do not show friends the underlying timestamp.

Operational and cost telemetry. We log technical events about AI operations (for example, request volume and the computed cost) to operate, monitor, and bill for the Service. When you edit your Career History or resume, we also keep short-lived change receipts containing identifiers and counts only. These records exclude the content of your Career History, interview answers, audio, transcripts, and passwords.

Security data. To protect against abuse, we may temporarily process network information such as your IP address (for example, for rate-limiting sign-in and extension requests). We do not retain this information as part of your account record.

Import integrity fingerprints. To prevent abuse of resume imports, when you import a resume file we may compute a keyed cryptographic fingerprint (an HMAC) of the file. We store that fingerprint, never the file or its content, together with the account identifiers of the accounts that used it. We keep it for 90 days after the most recent time we see that file, and use it to stop the same resume file from being imported under more than one account. The fingerprint cannot be reversed to reconstruct your file.

We understand how the Service is used through our own server-side operational logs described above. We do not use third-party product-analytics or session-replay tools, and we do not record replays of your screen or interactions. See Section 9 for details on cookies and local storage.

Information from third parties

If you connect or use an integration (such as our browser extension), we receive the information described in Section 8. We may also receive transaction and subscription status information from Stripe.

Information we do not collect

We do not request or knowingly collect government identification numbers, financial account credentials, precise geolocation, health information, or other special categories of data. Please do not include such information in the free-text fields of the Service (for example, resume text or interview answers).

2. How we use your information

We use personal information to:

• Provide the Service. Create and manage your account; deliver the Resume Workshop (resume building, your Career History, and resume tailoring), mock interviews, application tracking, networking tools, and gamification features (XP, levels, quests, and friend leaderboards), and use your stored job preferences to match you to roles through Personal Recruiter.
• Power AI features. Process your content through trusted third-party AI service providers to generate tailored resumes, interview questions and feedback, Personal Recruiter role recommendations, and networking drafts (see Section 6).
• Process payments. Manage subscriptions, upgrades, and billing through Stripe.
• Maintain and improve the Service. Monitor performance, debug, and develop new features using our own operational logs.
• Communicate with you. Respond to your requests and send service-related messages.
• Protect the Service. Detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, security incidents, and violations of our terms.
• Comply with law. Meet our legal, tax, and regulatory obligations and respond to lawful requests.

We do not use your content to train our own artificial-intelligence models. See Section 6.

3. Legal bases for processing (EEA/UK)

If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we process your personal data under the following legal bases of the GDPR (and UK GDPR):

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance those interests against your rights and freedoms. You may object to such processing as described in Section 12. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting processing already carried out.

4. How we share and disclose information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We disclose personal information only as described below:

• Service providers. We share information with vendors that perform services on our behalf, under contracts that require them to protect it and use it only for the services they provide to us. See Section 5.
• Payment processing. Billing details are processed by Stripe.
• Other users, at your direction. If you send a friend invitation, the recipient's email address is used to create the invitation, and your name is shown to the person you invite. Friends connected to your account may see your name and gamification standing (such as XP) on a private friends leaderboard. They may also see a coarse description of when you were last active unless you turn off activity visibility in your profile. Your career content (Career History, your resume, tailored resumes, applications, interviews, and networking contacts) is private to your account and is not shown to other users. Your salary expectations and Personal Recruiter preferences are never shared with employers.
• Legal and safety. We may disclose information if required by law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of CareerPigeon, our users, or others.
• Business transfers. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any change in ownership or use of your personal information.
• With your consent. We may share information for other purposes with your consent or at your direction.

We may also share aggregated or de-identified information that cannot reasonably be used to identify you.

5. Third-party service providers (subprocessors)

We rely on the following categories of service providers to operate the Service. Each processes personal information on our behalf under contractual data-protection obligations.

We also use cloud hosting and database infrastructure providers to run and store the Service. We may update our service providers over time. Material changes will be reflected in this Policy in accordance with Section 17.

6. AI features and your data

CareerPigeon uses artificial intelligence to power features such as resume import, resume tailoring, AI mock interviews and feedback, Personal Recruiter role recommendations, and networking outreach drafts. You are interacting with an AI system when you use these features.

To provide them, we send the content needed to run a feature (for example, a resume file you import, your resume text, the job description, your interview responses and the name we use to address you in mock interviews, or a networking contact's details) to trusted third-party AI service providers. They process that content to generate the output you requested and return it to us.

We do not use your content to train our own AI models. To provide and improve the AI features, the content you submit is shared with our third-party AI service providers, which may use it to operate and improve their services, including to train and improve their AI models, in accordance with their terms.

Resume import. When you import a resume file, our own software reads and parses it first. If you import a PDF that our software cannot confidently read, we send the file to a trusted third-party AI provider to extract it into the draft you review. What we send is the whole file as you uploaded it, including the contact details it contains and any metadata the file carries. We do not store the uploaded file or the provider's raw output; only the extracted draft you review is kept, as described in Section 1. This happens automatically as part of the import you asked for; there is no separate prompt. If you would rather no AI provider see your file, build your resume from scratch instead.

Resume tailoring and your Career History. Career content is shared with an AI provider outside of import only when you start an AI feature such as tailoring. When you start tailoring, we send the job description and the resume content needed to do the work: the identity of each entry on your resume (for example, employer, job title, dates, school, degree, entry location, and project, credential, and award names) and the bullet points and skills you have marked available. Bullet points and skills carry an availability control you can change at any time, individually or in bulk; newly saved ones are available by default. Entry identity fields do not have an availability control and are included whenever you tailor. When tailoring, contact details (your name, email, phone, address, and links) are never sent to the AI provider, and we screen the bullet points, skills, and job description text we send for direct identifiers. If you use Personal Recruiter job matching, a text version of your resume (excluding contact details) is also processed by our AI provider to compare your background with job postings; availability controls do not apply to matching.

Human involvement and automated decisions. Our AI features provide suggestions, generated content, feedback, and practice scores to assist you. They are advisory and do not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you without human involvement. You can contact us at privacy@careerpigeon.ai to request human review of an AI-assisted output.

Accuracy. AI-generated content can contain errors or omissions. You are responsible for reviewing AI output before relying on or submitting it. CareerPigeon's AI features are designed not to fabricate credentials or experience, but you should always verify your resume and other materials.

No professional advice or guaranteed results. CareerPigeon provides career tools and informational content only. It does not provide legal, financial, medical, or other professional advice, and we do not guarantee any particular result, including interviews, job offers, or employment. You are solely responsible for the materials you submit to employers or other third parties. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the Service and all AI-generated content are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, and we disclaim warranties of any kind regarding the accuracy, reliability, or fitness of AI output.

7. Voice and audio data

Our mock-interview feature lets you answer questions by speaking.

• We do not store your voice recordings. Audio you record is transmitted to a trusted third-party transcription service solely to convert your spoken answer to text. We hold it only transiently in memory for the duration of that request and do not write it to disk or to our database.
• We do not create voiceprints or other biometric identifiers. We do not collect, capture, store, or use biometric identifiers or biometric information (such as voiceprints) as those terms are defined under applicable biometric-privacy laws, including the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), and we do not use your voice to identify or authenticate you or for any other biometric purpose.
• Transcripts. The text transcribed from your speech is returned to your browser. If you submit that text as an interview answer, it is saved in your interview session, like any typed answer, so you can review the conversation later.
• AI voice replies. When the AI reads its responses aloud, the generated audio is cached on our servers during your session so you can replay it. This cached audio is deleted shortly after a session ends: typically within minutes of ending a session, and at most a few hours after a session times out.

8. The CareerPigeon browser extension

The CareerPigeon Chrome extension helps a signed-in user save a job application from a Gmail confirmation email open in the active browser tab.

What the extension does

When you open the extension, it reads the visible Gmail message in that tab, parses application details on your device, fills a review form, and sends only the fields you confirm.

What leaves your device

The extension sends these data categories:

1. Authentication information at sign-in: your CareerPigeon login credentials are sent to CareerPigeon to issue a scoped extension token. The password is not stored by the extension. The token is stored in chrome.storage.local so you stay signed in across browser restarts, expires after 14 days, is included in the extension sign-out revocation request, and is revoked on password change.
2. The user-confirmed application record: company, role, job_url, status, notes, and applied_on.
3. Content-free operational diagnostics while you are signed in: extension_version, event, code, provider: "gmail", and parser_provider_matched.

Operational diagnostics are associated with your CareerPigeon account server-side because they are stored with the account's user_id. They are retained for about 30 days. You can turn diagnostics off in the extension settings menu.

What does not leave your device

The extension does not send Gmail email subject, body, sender, received date, raw DOM, screenshots, or message HTML to CareerPigeon. Gmail parsing runs on your device. Email-derived links stay local unless you confirm one as the final job_url field in the application record.

Token lifecycle and sign-out

The extension token is scoped for extension application saves and content-free diagnostics. It is write-only for this extension workflow and expires after 14 days. Signing out of the extension sends a revocation request to CareerPigeon, then clears the local token and any pending import state. When the revocation request reaches CareerPigeon, the token is revoked server-side. Changing your CareerPigeon password also revokes the extension token.

Diagnostics opt-out

Diagnostics are on by default to help detect operational failures in the extension workflow. They contain only the five content-free fields listed above. You can opt out in the extension settings menu. When opted out, the extension does not send diagnostics.

Limited use statement

The CareerPigeon extension does not use the Gmail API and does not request a Google OAuth scope. It reads the currently open Gmail message through the page DOM only after you invoke the Chrome extension action for that tab, using the activeTab and scripting permissions.

The extension's use of information from the open Gmail message is limited to its single purpose: saving the application from that confirmation email to your CareerPigeon tracker. Gmail message content is used on your device to prefill the application form. It is not sent to CareerPigeon, sold, used for advertising, used for credit or eligibility decisions, or transferred to third parties.

9. Cookies and tracking technologies

We use browser local storage and session storage to operate the Service and remember your preferences. We do not use third-party analytics, advertising, or session-replay technologies.

Strictly necessary / functional storage. We store your authentication token and certain preferences (such as your interface theme and voice settings) in your browser's local storage so you stay signed in and the app works as expected. These are necessary for the Service to function.

Google authentication. The sign-in page loads Google Identity Services so you can choose to authenticate with a Google account. Loading and using that control sends technical request data to Google. If you continue with Google, Google provides your name, verified email address, and Google account identifier so we can authenticate or create your CareerPigeon account.

First-party attribution storage. If you arrive through a marketing link or from another site, we may store the marketing source, referring site origin, landing path, and first-seen time in local storage so we can include it if you create an account. We do not store full referring URLs or unrelated landing-page query parameters for this purpose.

We do not use advertising or tracking cookies and do not allow third-party advertising networks to track you across other sites through the Service.

Your choices. You can control cookies and local storage through your browser settings, though disabling necessary storage may prevent the Service from working. We honor recognized opt-out preference signals, including Global Privacy Control (GPC), where required by law. Because there is no common standard for browser "Do Not Track" signals, we do not respond to them.

10. Data retention

We keep personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service, and thereafter only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, including to comply with our legal, tax, accounting, and reporting obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

Specific retention practices include:

• Account and career content (profile, Career History, your resume, applications, networking contacts, interview sessions). Retained until you delete the item or request deletion of your account.
• Resume import files. Not stored. Files are processed in memory and are not kept after extraction (see Section 6 for when an AI provider is involved during that processing).
• Resume import drafts. Deleted when you finish or cancel the review, and automatically 30 days after you last work on them.
• Recently deleted Career History items. Permanently deleted after up to 30 days (sooner if storage limits are reached).
• Tailoring drafts. Deleted automatically after 14 days if not finished.
• Accepted tailored resumes. We keep your newest 15 per account; accepting a new one permanently deletes the oldest beyond that limit. Each includes the job description you provided for it.
• Resume edit receipts. Short-lived technical records of resume changes (identifiers and counts only, no career content) are deleted after 7 days.
• Import integrity fingerprints. Deleted 90 days after the file was last imported.
• Voice audio. Not stored (see Section 7). Voice replies are cached only during a session and deleted shortly after it ends.
• Operational request logs. Automatically deleted after 7 days.
• Operational and extension diagnostic events. Retained for a limited period (generally about 30 days).
• Payment and transaction records. Retained as required for financial and legal compliance.

When you delete content or your account, we delete or de-identify the associated personal information within a reasonable period, subject to backups that are overwritten on a rolling basis and to legal-retention requirements. Deleting an individual Career History item does not remove copies of it contained in tailored resumes you have already accepted (see Section 1.1); you can delete those tailored resumes separately.

11. Data security

We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encryption of data in transit, hashing of passwords (bcrypt), access controls, scoped and revocable authentication tokens, and strict separation that keeps your interview transcripts, audio, and networking content out of our internal analytics and admin views.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a personal-data breach that affects you, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by applicable law.

12. Your rights and choices

You have choices and rights regarding your personal information. Subject to applicable law, these include the rights to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you and receive a copy.
• Correct inaccurate or incomplete information.
• Delete your personal information or your account.
• Port your data and receive it in a portable, machine-readable format.
• Restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on our legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent where we rely on it, at any time.

How to exercise your rights. You can update much of your profile and delete individual items directly within the Service, including editing Career History, deleting items (with a restore window of up to 30 days), controlling which bullet points and skills are available to AI tailoring (entry identity fields are always included; see Section 6), deleting tailored resumes, replacing or deleting your resume, and deleting applications, interview sessions, and networking contacts. You can also download your resume as a PDF at any time. To access, export, or delete your entire account, or to make any other privacy request, email us at privacy@careerpigeon.ai. We will verify your request (typically by confirming control of your account email) and respond within the timeframe required by applicable law (generally within 30 to 45 days, with extensions where permitted).

You may use an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf where the law allows; we may require proof of authorization and verification of your identity.

If the data-protection laws of your country, state, or region grant you rights beyond those described in this Policy, we will honor those rights to the extent required by applicable law.

If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection supervisory authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)). We would appreciate the chance to address your concerns first.

13. U.S. state privacy rights

Depending on your state of residence (including California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws), you may have the rights to confirm whether we process your personal information, to access, correct, delete, and obtain a portable copy of it, and to opt out of targeted advertising, the "sale" of personal information, and certain profiling. We do not engage in profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you; see Section 6. You may exercise these rights as described in Section 12, and we will not discriminate against you for doing so.

No sale or sharing. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) and similar state laws. We have not sold or shared personal information in this sense in the preceding 12 months.

Categories of personal information. In the past 12 months, we have collected the following CCPA categories: identifiers (such as name, email, and account identifiers); customer records (such as billing details processed by Stripe); commercial information (such as subscription and transaction history); internet or other electronic network activity (such as operational usage and log data); audio/sensory information (mock-interview audio, processed transiently for transcription); professional or employment-related information (such as resume content and job history); and inferences (such as AI-generated feedback and analysis). We collect this information from you and automatically through your use of the Service, and we use and disclose it for the business purposes described in Sections 2, 4, and 5.

Sensitive information. We do not seek to collect sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you, and we do not use or disclose it beyond the purposes permitted by law.

Appeals. If we decline your request, you may appeal our decision by replying to our response or contacting privacy@careerpigeon.ai. If your appeal is denied, you may contact your state attorney general.

Preference signals. Where required, we honor opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control (GPC).

California "Shine the Light." We do not share your personal information with third parties for their own direct marketing purposes (California Civil Code Section 1798.83).

14. International data transfers

CareerPigeon is based in the United States, and we and our service providers process personal information in the United States and potentially other countries. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.

When we transfer personal data from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland to a country that has not received an adequacy decision, we rely on appropriate safeguards, including the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum for UK transfers) and, where applicable, other lawful transfer mechanisms. You may contact us for more information about these safeguards.

15. Children's privacy

CareerPigeon is intended for users who are at least 13 years of age. The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

If you are under 13, please do not use the Service or provide any personal information about yourself. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13 without verifiable parental consent, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us at privacy@careerpigeon.ai so that we can delete it.

If you are located in the EEA or UK, you must be at least 16 years old (or the minimum age of digital consent in your country, which may be as low as 13) to use the Service.

16. Third-party links and services

The Service may contain links to third-party websites and services (for example, job postings, LinkedIn profiles you save, or Stripe's checkout). We do not control and are not responsible for the privacy practices of those third parties. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third-party sites or services you visit.

17. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated version with a new "Last Updated" date. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date of an updated Policy constitutes acceptance of the changes.

18. Contact us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your personal information, please contact us:

• Privacy and data-rights requests: privacy@careerpigeon.ai
• General support: help@careerpigeon.ai