Privacy Policy

1. Introduction & Acceptance

Welcome to TaxplAIn. By accessing or using our website and services, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. If you do not agree to these terms, you must immediately discontinue use of the Service.

This policy outlines our practices regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of information when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data.

2. Beta Program Notice

BETA MODE - Quality Improvement Program

TaxplAIn is currently in beta. During this period, we collect and review user questions and AI-generated responses to improve the quality and accuracy of our service.

What we collect during beta:

User Questions: The tax-related queries you submit to our AI assistant may be used for service improvement and quality enhancement purposes.
AI Responses: The answers generated by our system.
Feedback Signals: Whether responses were helpful, confidence scores, and error patterns.

How we use this data:

To identify and fix inaccurate or misleading responses
To improve our AI's understanding of tax questions
To enhance the quality and reliability of our knowledge base
To train and fine-tune our AI models for better accuracy
To refine our proprietary tools and educational features

Privacy Protection: All collected Q&A data is anonymized and stripped of any personally identifiable information before review. We never associate your questions with your identity, email, or any account information.

By using TaxplAIn during the beta period, you consent to this data collection for quality improvement purposes. Your questions may be used to enhance our service capabilities and improve the educational tools available to all users.

3. Information Collection

We prioritize data minimization. However, to provide our AI-powered services, we process specific types of data:

3.1 User-Provided Information

Chat Interactions: Texts, queries, and scenarios you input into the chat interface.
Questionnaire Inputs: Financial data points (e.g., filing status, approximate income) used to generate educational visualizations.
Preferences: Local settings such as theme choice (Light/Dark) or font scaling.
What we stopped collecting (September 2026): we no longer ask for your previous state of residence or the date you moved. We had been collecting those details for a part-year state calculation we do not perform, so the questions were removed rather than reworded. We still ask which state you live in, and whether you moved, because both change what we can tell you about your coverage.

3.2 Automatically Collected Data

Usage Data: We collect anonymous metrics on feature usage, session duration, and error rates to improve system stability.
Device Information: Browser type, operating system versions, and viewport sizes for responsiveness optimization.

4. Sensitive Data Policy (Do Not Submit)

WE DO NOT REQUEST, COLLECT, OR STORE SENSITIVE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION (PII).

You represent and warrant that you will not submit any of the following into our system:

            Social Security Numbers (SSN)
Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN)
Full Bank Account Numbers
Credit or Debit Card Numbers
Driver's License or Passport Numbers
Exact Home Addresses or Phone Numbers

        

If such information is detected, we reserve the right to immediately delete it and/or terminate your access. We are not liable for any data breaches resulting from your voluntary submission of sensitive PII.

How this is enforced in code

Identity fields are not merely “not asked for”, they are absent from the application’s data vocabulary entirely. There is no field for a Social Security Number, so a value supplied by any route has nowhere to be stored. An automated test verifies this on every build; it is not a promise resting on policy alone.

Photographing a tax document (“Doc Drop”)

An earlier version of this policy asked you not to submit tax documents. The product now offers to read one for you, so this section replaces that instruction and states exactly what happens.

The image is sent to an AI model vendor to be read. If your Social Security Number is printed on that document, it is in the image. The model is instructed not to transcribe it, that is a model-side instruction, and we do not present it to you as a guarantee.
Only a fixed list of numeric fields can come back. Wages, withholding and similar figures are accepted; any other field the model reports is discarded on our server before it can reach your profile.
We do not store the document. It is read and discarded within the request. Files above roughly 1 MB are briefly buffered to temporary disk by the web server while being received, then removed when the request ends.
It is entirely optional. Every figure can be typed in instead, and the result is identical.

5. Use of Information

We use the collected data for the following purposes:

Educational Service Provision: To operate the chat interface, generate educational visualizations, and provide AI-powered educational responses. This involves sending your inputs to AI/large-language-model providers (for example, for generating explanations and organizing your entries) that process the data on our behalf to return a response.
Service Improvement: To analyze usage patterns, debug technical issues, and enhance system functionality and educational tools.
Compliance: To detect and prevent fraudulent or illegal activity.

Data Quality & Improvement

Your questions and our responses are evaluated for accuracy as we continuously improve our data processing and AI models.

Important: Please do not share your full name, credit card numbers, or Social Security Number in the chat.

6. Third-Party Data Sharing

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal identification information to others. We share generic aggregated demographic information not linked to any personal identification information with our business partners.

Service Providers:

Cloud hosting: Google Cloud Run hosts the application; your data is processed there as part of normal operation.
AI model providers: Your questions, and the tax figures needed to answer them, are sent to third-party language-model providers to generate an answer. If you use Doc Drop, the document image is sent to a vision model in the same way (see Section 4).
Payments: Stripe processes payments. Card details are entered on Stripe’s systems and are never received or stored by us.
Error monitoring: Sentry alerts us to faults. It is configured NOT to attach personal data or request contents to those reports.
Email: Resend delivers transactional email such as sign-in codes.

We do not sell your data, and your tax figures are never used to target advertising.

7. Data Security

We adopt appropriate data collection, storage, and processing practices and security measures to protect against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of your personal information. However, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

8. Local Storage & Tracking

We use localStorage technology to save your preferences (e.g., theme, font size) and chat history directly on your device. This data is not synced to our servers unless explicitly stated.

We do not use third-party advertising cookies.

9. Children's Privacy

Our Service is not directed to children under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us immediately.