Privacy

This covers all of grind.fyi: the website, the Chrome extension, and the desktop app. They share one account and one backend, so they share one policy. It is written for a person to read, and it describes what the software actually does rather than the widest thing a lawyer could permit.

The short version

• We hold the things you would put on a job application, because filling job applications is the whole product.
• We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not share it with data brokers or recruiters.
• The extension does not watch your browsing. It reads a page only on the job sites it is built for, and only when you have asked it to apply.
• Your logins at employer sites stay in your own Chrome profile. We never see those passwords or cookies.
• Email us and we delete the lot. There is a working delete; it is not a promise to look into it.

What you give us

Your account. Email address and name, held by our identity provider, Clerk. If you sign in with Google we receive your email address and name from that sign-in — we do not receive your Google password, and we ask for no access to your Gmail.

Your record. The facts an application asks for: contact details, work history, education, links, work authorisation, notice period, and whatever else you enter. Optionally, and only if you choose to save them, your salary expectation and your self-identification (EEO) answers — race, gender, veteran status, disability status. These are sensitive, they are optional, and you can leave every one of them set to ask me each time.

Your resume. The files you upload, and the text we extract from them to fill in your record.

What you are looking for. Roles, levels, locations — the preferences that decide which jobs you are shown.

Chrome extension disclosure at a glance

Before it fills a supported employer form, the extension sends grind.fyi the posting address and the form’s questions: labels, field types, which fields are required, the choices offered, and values already on that form. To answer those questions it uses the application record you saved: contact details, work history, education, links, work authorisation, resume, and any answers you chose to save. Salary expectations and voluntary EEO answers are included only when you chose to save them.

This information goes to grind.fyi’s service (AWS for storage, Clerk for identity, and OpenAI’s API for an ambiguous question that needs language understanding) and, when you send an application, to that employer. If you choose to forward employer mail, we also receive only the messages your rule forwards, such as confirmation emails and security codes. We do not collect browsing history, bookmarks, unrelated tabs, or email outside that forwarding rule.

What the extension sees, and what it sends

When you apply to a job, the extension reads the form in front of it and sends that form’s shape to us: the label of each question, its type, whether it is required, the options offered in a dropdown, and anything already filled in, along with the address of the posting. We answer, per field, and the extension types the answer. It is the extension that touches the page; the decision is made on our servers so that a fix reaches every installed copy as a deploy rather than a store release.

Two things answer those questions. The first is your record, directly: your name, your contact details, your links, your dates, your resume, and your own saved salary and EEO answers. The second is a language model, for everything a rule cannot read — screening questions, attestations, consents, phrasings no one anticipated. To answer those it is given your record as grounding. That means your record and the question in front of it are sent to OpenAI’s API, which is the model provider we use. It runs under an API agreement that does not train models on what we send. A model answer is only filled in when it is confident and grounded in something you actually wrote; otherwise the question comes back to you.

We never invent a self-identification or salary answer. Those come from what you saved, matched against the employer’s own list of options — and when nothing on their list matches what you said, the question is handed to you rather than guessed at. If it is optional and you saved nothing, it is skipped.

What the extension does not do: it does not read your browsing history, your bookmarks, your other tabs, or your keystrokes. Its content scripts run only on the job-board hosts listed in its manifest, and even there the only thing it sends before you press a button is whether that page is a job posting it recognises, so it knows whether to offer to apply. Pages on every other site are outside what it is permitted to touch.

Signing in, and the sessions we never touch

To talk to our API the extension mints a short-lived token from Clerk — good for five minutes, reused for four, held in memory and never written to disk or to extension storage. Signing out or removing the extension takes it with them.

At employer sites you are signed in as yourself, in your own Chrome profile, exactly as if you had opened the page and typed. The extension does not read, copy, or transmit those cookies, and it never receives your password for any site you already had an account on.

Accounts we create in your name

Some employers — Workday tenants especially — will not accept an application without a candidate account first. When you apply to one of those and you do not already have an account there, we create one: registered to your own email address, with a password our server generates. That password is stored in your account and shown to you on the Passwords page, so an account made on your behalf is one you can always get into. It is kept the way a password manager keeps a password, and it is not your grind.fyi password.

These accounts exist at the employer, under their privacy policy, and deleting your grind.fyi account does not delete them. We keep the list so you can find and close them yourself.

Forwarded mail

Employer sites send verification codes and confirmations by email, and an application cannot get past them without one. So we give you a private intake address and you set up one forwarding rule in your own mail provider that sends job mail to it. We read those messages for what the run needs: security codes, confirmation that an application arrived, and where an application got to. We do not have access to your mailbox, only to what your own rule forwards.

Worth being blunt about: that rule keeps forwarding after you uninstall the extension. It lives at your mail provider, not with us, and only you can remove it. Delete the rule wherever you made it — Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail — and the forwarding stops. Deleting your grind.fyi account deletes the intake address and everything received at it, but it cannot reach into your mail provider to switch off your own rule.

Where it lives, and for how long

On our own AWS account in the United States (us-east-1): your record and your runs in DynamoDB, your resumes and forwarded mail in S3, both encrypted at rest. Resumes are fetched by the extension through a short-lived signed link, not from a public URL. Your identity — email, name, sign-in — lives with Clerk.

We keep what you gave us for as long as your account exists, because an application record you cannot look back at is not much use. We do not have a background job that quietly ages your data out, and we would rather say so than imply a retention limit we do not enforce. If you want something gone before you leave, delete it — resumes, entries, and past runs each delete on their own — or ask us and we will.

Deleting everything

Email hello@grind.fyi from your account’s address and ask. It runs a real deletion: your record, entries, documents, resumes, runs, preferences, the accounts list, your intake address and the mail received at it, and your Clerk identity. It is not reversible and there is no copy held back.

Two things deletion cannot undo, and we would rather you knew before than after: applications already sent are with the employer and are governed by their policy, and candidate accounts created at employer sites remain until you close them there. See above about the forwarding rule.

Chrome Web Store Limited Use

Our use of information received from Google APIs, and of any data the extension obtains from your browser, adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data is used only to provide and improve the single purpose this extension exists for — filling job applications you have asked it to fill. It is not transferred to anyone except as described above, not used for advertising, not sold, and not read by a human at grind.fyi except where you have asked us for support, or where the law or an investigation of abuse requires it.

What we never do

• Sell or rent your data, to anyone, for any price.
• Show you ads, or use your record to target them.
• Pass your details to recruiters or data brokers.
• Train a model of our own on your record.
• Read pages outside the job sites the extension is built for.
• Ask for the password to your email, or for access to your mailbox.

Children

grind.fyi is for people old enough to work and is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly hold data from a child; if you believe we have, write to us and it will be deleted.

Changes, and how to reach us

When this page changes, the revision date at the top changes with it, and anything material gets said plainly rather than slipped in. Questions, deletion requests, and complaints all go to the same place: hello@grind.fyi.

The companion to this page is our automation policy, which covers what the agent does on a job site rather than what we hold about you.