FreeApply Privacy Policy

<h1>FreeApply Privacy Policy</h1>
<p class="meta">Version {{PRIVACY_VERSION}} · Effective {{EFFECTIVE_DATE}}</p>

<p>This policy explains what FreeApply does with information about you. FreeApply is published by {{OPERATOR}} ("we", "us"). In short: <b>your job-search data stays on your computer.</b> We receive only the categories described in section 2, and you control each one in Settings → Data sharing. Your contact details and resume leave your computer only if you join the optional Recruiter Talent Pool. We never receive your eligibility answers, demographic information, email content or passwords.</p>

<h2>1. Data that stays on your computer</h2>
<p>FreeApply stores the following only in its data folder on your device (by default <code>~/.freeapply</code>). We cannot access it:</p>
<ul>
<li>Profile: name, email, phone, city, region, country, LinkedIn and portfolio links.</li>
<li>Job targets: desired roles, fields, seniority, pay floor, locations, work modes and keywords.</li>
<li>Eligibility: work authorization, sponsorship need, security-clearance status, start date and years of experience.</li>
<li>Your resume files and the resume text your AI assistant extracts.</li>
<li>Job-tracking records: jobs found and applied to, application status, confirmation text, notes and documents used.</li>
<li>Email reply records: sender, subject, message identifiers, date, type of reply and a short summary.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can view, edit and export this data in the dashboard, and delete all of it by deleting the data folder.</p>
<p><b>Sponsored cards.</b> FreeApply is free and shows a sponsored card in the dashboard, clearly labeled. A few times a day the app checks our server for the current list of sponsored cards (an unchanged list is not downloaded again) and picks one on your computer, using your job targets there. No information about you is sent to choose or show a card, and no advertising scripts or trackers run in the dashboard. Like any download, the request shows your IP address to our network provider and our server, which use it only to deliver the file and prevent abuse. Only when you click a card does your browser visit the sponsor's site, which then handles your visit under its own policy. If you allow anonymous usage statistics, they include how many times each card was shown and clicked on your computer.</p>
<p><b>Updates.</b> About once a day the app also checks our server for a newer version of its signed instructions and downloads them if there is one. The request carries only the app's version number; like the sponsored-card download, it shows your IP address to our network provider and our server, which use it only to deliver the file and prevent abuse.</p>

<h2>2. Data we collect</h2>
<p>Nothing in this section is collected while its choice is off. Each choice is in Settings → Data sharing, where you can turn it on or off at any time with one click; turning a choice off takes no more steps than turning it on. Where you are decides how each choice starts:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>United States:</b> anonymous usage statistics and job-market data are collected by default, as stated next to the agreement when you accept these terms. There is no separate prompt at setup; turn either off at any time in Settings → Data sharing. The Talent Pool and product update emails are off unless you turn them on.</li>
<li><b>Everywhere else</b> (including the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Canada), and whenever your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal: nothing is collected unless you turn it on in Settings → Data sharing.</li>
</ul>
<p>Your Talent Pool profile and your update-email address are stored under a separate random ID that is never linked to your installation ID, so usage statistics and job-market data stay anonymous.</p>
<p>FreeApply decides where you are from the country in your profile or, if that is empty, from your computer's region setting. It treats you as outside the United States whenever it cannot tell.</p>
<table>
<tr><th>Choice</th><th>What is sent</th><th>Why</th></tr>
<tr><td><b>Anonymous usage statistics</b></td><td>A random installation ID (not linked to your name or email), FreeApply version, operating-system family, which features you use, counts of jobs by status and outcome, your response rate, the job fields and role titles you target, your state or region, and your pay floor rounded to a band. While FreeApply is running, it also sends a signal every 5 minutes that contains only this installation ID.</td><td>To understand how FreeApply is used, fix problems and improve it, and to show on our website how many people use FreeApply and how many are using it right now (totals only).</td></tr>
<tr><td><b>Job-market data</b></td><td>For each job you track: company, job title, city and state or region, work mode, posted pay range, posting link without tracking parameters, job board or applicant-tracking system used, application status and employer outcome (for example, interview or rejection), the week you applied and the days until a response. Linked only to the random installation ID.</td><td>To build de-identified job-market statistics (for example, response rates and pay by role and location) that we may publish or share in aggregated form.</td></tr>
<tr><td><b>Product update emails</b></td><td>The email address you enter for this purpose and the date you subscribed.</td><td>To send occasional FreeApply news. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can turn this off in Settings.</td></tr>
<tr><td><b>Recruiter Talent Pool</b></td><td>Your talent profile: name, email, phone (only if you include it), city and state or region, country, LinkedIn and portfolio links, desired roles, fields, seniority, work modes, locations, minimum pay, years of experience, and your resume text with the structured summary your AI assistant extracts from it (headline, skills, job titles, education, certifications). You can preview the exact profile before joining.</td><td>To let recruiters and employers who accept our Recruiter Terms find you and contact you about jobs. We may charge recruiters for access. <b>This is a sale of personal information</b> under some U.S. state laws, and you can opt out at any time by leaving the pool.</td></tr>
</table>
<p>We <b>never</b> collect: work authorization, citizenship, immigration, sponsorship or clearance answers; race, ethnicity, gender, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, religion or any other demographic or equal-employment answers; health information; government identification numbers; date of birth; passwords, verification codes or session cookies; or the content of your emails. Your resume and contact details are collected only if you join the Talent Pool. Before joining, remove from your resume anything you do not want recruiters to see.</p>
<p>When data is sent, your IP address is seen as part of the connection by our network provider, Cloudflare, and by our server. We do not store IP addresses with the data you share. Our server uses them only briefly, in memory and in short-lived security logs, to prevent abuse.</p>
<p><b>Our website.</b> Visits to www.mybotsai.com are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, without cookies: for each page view, the page, the referring site, the visitor's country, device type, browser and operating system, and how fast the page loaded. We see only totals. This applies to the website only; the FreeApply app sends none of it. Details, including how to avoid being counted, are on the website's <a href="https://www.mybotsai.com/legal/cookies/#analytics">Cookies, analytics and ads</a> page.</p>

<h2>3. How we use and share shared data</h2>
<ul>
<li>We use shared data only for the purposes listed above.</li>
<li>Outside the Talent Pool, we do <b>not sell</b> your personal information. We never use it for targeted advertising, and we never use any shared data to make decisions about you.</li>
<li><b>Talent Pool profiles</b> are shown only to recruiters and employers who have accepted our Recruiter Terms. Those terms limit use to recruiting you for jobs, forbid resale and discrimination, and require them to delete your profile when you ask. We do not rate, score or rank you for recruiters. Recruiters see the profile you provided. Once a recruiter has viewed or saved your profile, their own copy is governed by their privacy policy, and leaving the pool stops new access but cannot recall copies already made.</li>
<li>We may publish or share job-market statistics only in aggregated or de-identified form that does not identify you, and we commit not to try to re-identify it.</li>
<li>Our hosting provider, Contabo GmbH, runs the server that stores shared data and processes it for us as a service provider under its own data-protection terms. Backblaze, Inc. stores encrypted backup copies of that server's database for us (Backblaze B2 cloud storage, in the United States). The copies are encrypted on our server before they are uploaded, with a key that only we hold, so Backblaze cannot read them. Cloudflare, Inc. is our network and security provider: every connection to our website and server, including the app's downloads and the data you choose to share, passes through Cloudflare, which protects the server from attacks, caches public files and processes this traffic for us as a service provider under its own data-protection terms. Cloudflare also counts visits to our website for us (Cloudflare Web Analytics, see section 2).</li>
<li>We may disclose information if required by law, to protect rights and safety, or as part of a transfer of FreeApply to a successor who agrees to this policy.</li>
</ul>

<h2>4. Your AI assistant, email and other services</h2>
<p>FreeApply works with an AI assistant and connectors that you install and authorize, for example Claude and its Gmail connector. Information those services process, including the content of job postings, your resume text and your emails, is handled by those providers under their own terms and privacy policies, not by us. FreeApply does not use Google APIs and does not send any Google user data to our servers. Employer websites, job boards and applicant-tracking systems you apply through receive the information you submit to them under their own privacy policies.</p>

<h2>5. Retention</h2>
<p>Usage statistics and job-market records are kept for up to 24 months after the last time your installation shares data, then deleted or fully aggregated. Subscription emails are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them. Talent Pool profiles are kept while you are in the pool and deleted from our server within 30 days after you leave, or 12 months after your installation last refreshed the profile, whichever comes first. Our server's database is backed up every 6 hours into encrypted copies that expire on their own, so data deleted from our server can remain in those backups for up to 3 weeks. Local data stays on your computer until you delete it.</p>

<h2>6. Your choices and rights</h2>
<ul>
<li><b>Change or withdraw consent</b> at any time in Settings → Data sharing. Withdrawing consent stops future sharing.</li>
<li><b>Opt out of sale.</b> Leaving the Talent Pool (Settings → Data sharing) is your opt-out of the sale of your personal information. FreeApply also honors a Global Privacy Control signal sent by your browser to the dashboard by keeping the Talent Pool off.</li>
<li><b>Delete shared data</b> with "Delete my shared data" in Settings → Data sharing, which deletes everything linked to your installation ID on our server, or by emailing us.</li>
<li>Depending on where you live (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and other U.S. states, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and other countries), you may have rights to access, correct, delete or port your personal information, to opt out of its sale (the only sale is the opt-in Talent Pool, see above) or its use for targeted advertising (we do not do this), and to appeal our decision on a request. To exercise any right, email {{CONTACT_EMAIL}} with your installation ID, shown in Settings → Data sharing. We will respond within the time the law requires (generally 30 to 45 days). We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights. If we deny your request, you may appeal by replying to our decision, and if you are not satisfied, contact your state attorney general or your data-protection authority.</li>
<li><b>Legal bases (EEA/UK/Switzerland).</b> For users outside the United States, we process shared data only on the basis of your consent, which you may withdraw at any time without affecting earlier processing.</li>
<li><b>U.S. users and job-market data.</b> Job-market records linked to your installation ID are never sold. We sell or share only aggregated statistics, each covering at least five installations, which are de-identified. If that ever changes, we will ask for your permission first.</li>
<li><b>Categories, for California residents.</b> In the past 12 months, for installations that opted in, we collected: identifiers (installation ID; and name, email, phone and links for Talent Pool members), professional or employment-related information (resume, roles, experience, job-search activity) and inferences (role and field interests), from you, for the purposes in section 2; and, from visitors to our website, internet activity (pages viewed and referring site) with country, device type, browser and operating system, which we see only as totals. We disclosed Talent Pool profiles to recruiters (a sale), and all shared data to our hosting, network and backup-storage providers (a business purpose). We do not collect sensitive personal information as defined by California law.</li>
</ul>

<h2>7. Security</h2>
<p>Local data is stored only on your device. The dashboard accepts connections only from your own computer. Data you choose to share is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS) and stored with access restricted to us. No system is perfectly secure; protect your device and accounts. If a breach affects personal information we hold, we will notify you and authorities as the law requires.</p>

<h2>8. International users</h2>
<p>We are based in the United States. Shared data is stored on our server hosted by Contabo, which may process it in the United States or other countries, and encrypted backup copies are stored by Backblaze in the United States. Connections pass through Cloudflare's network, which may handle them in the country nearest to you. By sharing data, you understand that it will be transferred to and processed there.</p>

<h2>9. Children</h2>
<p>FreeApply is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has shared data with us, contact us and we will delete it.</p>

<h2>10. Changes</h2>
<p>This policy carries the version number of the FreeApply release it ships with. If we change it, we will update the effective date, and the dashboard will ask you to accept it again. If a change expands what we collect, we will ask for your consent before collecting it.</p>

<h2>11. Contact</h2>
<p>{{OPERATOR}} · {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}</p>
Choice	What is sent	Why
Anonymous usage statistics	A random installation ID (not linked to your name or email), FreeApply version, operating-system family, which features you use, counts of jobs by status and outcome, your response rate, the job fields and role titles you target, your state or region, and your pay floor rounded to a band. While FreeApply is running, it also sends a signal every 5 minutes that contains only this installation ID.	To understand how FreeApply is used, fix problems and improve it, and to show on our website how many people use FreeApply and how many are using it right now (totals only).
Job-market data	For each job you track: company, job title, city and state or region, work mode, posted pay range, posting link without tracking parameters, job board or applicant-tracking system used, application status and employer outcome (for example, interview or rejection), the week you applied and the days until a response. Linked only to the random installation ID.	To build de-identified job-market statistics (for example, response rates and pay by role and location) that we may publish or share in aggregated form.
Product update emails	The email address you enter for this purpose and the date you subscribed.	To send occasional FreeApply news. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can turn this off in Settings.
Recruiter Talent Pool	Your talent profile: name, email, phone (only if you include it), city and state or region, country, LinkedIn and portfolio links, desired roles, fields, seniority, work modes, locations, minimum pay, years of experience, and your resume text with the structured summary your AI assistant extracts from it (headline, skills, job titles, education, certifications). You can preview the exact profile before joining.	To let recruiters and employers who accept our Recruiter Terms find you and contact you about jobs. We may charge recruiters for access. This is a sale of personal information under some U.S. state laws, and you can opt out at any time by leaving the pool.