Privacy policy

Pharos is operated by Stella Viae LLC. Questions, requests and complaints go to pharos@martintech.dev, and reach a person rather than a queue.

• Your email address. It identifies the account, verifies it at signup, and is the only way to recover it.
• A hash of your password, never the password itself. It is salted and cannot be reversed into what you typed.
• Your research history: what you asked for, the answers to the questionnaire, the results, the citations, the tracked items and the price history behind them.
• Your preferences and settings. Pharos no longer offers to store provider keys of your own. Any key stored before that feature was withdrawn remains encrypted at rest and is removed on request.
• A usage and credit ledger: units bought, units spent, and what spent them, alongside a Stripe customer reference. This is how billing stays auditable.
• Operational records: session and sign in attempts with a coarse network identifier, kept to stop brute force and abuse, and pruned as they age out.

Pharos does not store your card number, expiry, or security code. It never sees them. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own checkout page and stay with Stripe.

We use data to run the research you asked for, to keep your account yours, to authenticate users, to bill correctly and prove the billing, to support customers, to secure a paid service against abuse, and to meet legal and accounting obligations. Nothing above is collected for advertising, and there is no advertising on Pharos.

Stella Viae LLCdoes not sell your data and does not share it for anyone else’s marketing. We share it with the service providers that help operate the platform:

• Stripe processes payments and holds the card details Pharos never receives. Stripe receives your email address so it can send receipts.
• Brevo delivers account email: verification, password recovery, and service notices. It receives your address and the message.
• Research sources and model providers receive the query a run needs to make, which is derived from what you described. They do not receive your identity.
• Hosting and database infrastructure stores the data on our behalf.

Data may also be disclosed where the law requires it, and only as far as it requires.

Pharos sets a signed session cookie so you stay signed in, a small readable cookie recording desk layout and whether a demo tour is in progress, and nothing else. There are no advertising or cross site tracking cookies, and no third party analytics tags on the signed out pages.

Account data and research history are kept while your account exists. Sign in and rate limit records are pruned automatically once they are past their window. Billing records are kept as long as accounting and tax rules require, which outlives the account itself.

Passwords are hashed, any provider key stored before that feature was withdrawn stays encrypted at rest, sessions are signed and can be revoked everywhere at once, and card data is never in scope because it is never received.

No formal certification is claimed on this page, and no system can be guaranteed perfectly secure. You remain responsible for account hygiene and for the security of the device you sign in from.

You can read and change your account details and preferences in settings, delete a tracked item or a run at any time, and ask for your account and its data to be deleted by writing to the address above. Deletion removes the account, its research history and its preferences; it does not remove the billing records the law requires us to keep.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to a copy of your data, to correction, and to object to some processing. Ask, and you will get an answer.

The effective date at the top says when this version took effect. Material changes are announced by email to the address on your account. The terms of service govern the rest of your relationship with Pharos.