Privacy Policy

What Open Campus Advisor does

Open Campus Advisor is an open source tool that provides AI-powered academic advising by fetching publicly available data from university course catalogs and faculty pages. It works through Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) as a plugin or MCP server.

Data we collect

We do not create user accounts. We do not collect names, email addresses, or any personally identifiable information.

When you use the REST API (via ChatGPT or direct requests), we log anonymized usage events — specifically: which school was queried, which tool was used, and what keyword was searched. These events contain no personal information and are used only to understand aggregate usage patterns (e.g. "machine learning was searched 10 times in the COMP department this week").

Analytics are processed by PostHog. When using the MCP server locally (via Claude Desktop or Claude Code), no data is sent to our servers — all requests go directly from your machine to the university's public catalog.

University data

All course catalog data, faculty profiles, and research information is fetched from publicly accessible university websites and APIs (WesMaps for Wesleyan University, NIH Reporter for grant data). We do not store this data permanently — it is fetched live and cached for up to 60 minutes to reduce load on university servers.

Third-party AI services

Open Campus Advisor is accessed through third-party AI platforms (Claude by Anthropic, ChatGPT by OpenAI). Your conversations with those AI assistants are governed by their respective privacy policies — not this one.

Cookies

This website (opencampusadvisor.org) does not use cookies. The REST API (api.opencampusadvisor.org) does not set cookies.

Open source

The full source code is available at github.com/open-campus-advisor. You can inspect exactly what data is collected and how it is used.

Contact

Questions about this privacy policy? Open an issue on GitHub.