Privacy Policy

Accounts are limited to people who sign in with a Columbia University (@columbia.edu) or Barnard College (@barnard.edu) Google account. We do not offer accounts to the general public, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

From your Google account, when you sign in. Your name, school email address, profile picture, and the account identifier Google gives us. We never receive or store your password.

What you tell us during onboarding. Your school (Columbia College, SEAS, General Studies, Barnard, or Graduate) and your expected graduation term and year.

What you create in the app. Depending on which features you use, this can include:

• Free-food tips you post — title, building, room, quantity, dietary tags, and any photo you attach
• Events you submit to Campus Pulse, including any photo, and your Going / Can't go responses
• Club ratings and written reviews
• Courses, credits, grades, and GPA targets you enter in GPA Compass
• Action Day signups, saved items, and your profile picture if you upload one

Basic technical information. We use Vercel Analytics to count page views so we can see which parts of the app get used. It measures visits in aggregate and does not use cookies to track you across other websites.

This is the part most people care about, so it is spelled out feature by feature.

• GPA Compass is private. Your courses, grades, and GPA targets are visible only to you. They are never shown to other students and never appear on your Passport.
• Food tips, events, and club reviews are public to other signed-in students, along with the name on your account.
• Anonymous reviews hide your name from other students, but not from administrators — see the note below.
• Photos you upload are public. They are stored at an unlisted web address that anyone with the link can open, even without signing in.

To run your account and keep you signed in, to show you content relevant to your school and year, to let other students see what you post, to moderate content that breaks the rules, and to understand in aggregate which features are worth building on. We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

Account and content data is stored in a Postgres database hosted by Neon. Uploaded photos are stored with Vercel Blob. The app itself runs on Vercel. These providers process data on our behalf in order to host the service.

Signing in creates a session cookie called cia_session that keeps you logged in for up to 30 days. It is an essential cookie — without it you would be signed out on every page — and it is not used for advertising.

• Edit or delete most of what you post directly in the app — food tips, ratings, courses, and RSVPs.
• Update your name, school, graduation year, and profile picture from your profile page.
• Ask us to delete your account and the content attached to it by emailing the address below.
• Sign out at any time, which ends your session.

Some content may remain visible after deletion where it has been quoted, aggregated into a club’s overall rating, or retained for moderation reasons.

As the app grows, this policy will change. When it does we will update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Columbia in Action after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions, corrections, or deletion requests: columbia.in.action@columbia.edu.

See also our Terms of Service.