Legal
Privacy Policy
What we collect, why, and the control you have over it. Last updated 11 August 2026.
This policy explains what UroCompanion (the “Service”) collects about you, the legal basis for each use, who else touches it, how long we keep it, and the rights you can exercise. It sits alongside our Terms of Use and Cookie Policy. We have written it to be read, not to be survived — where a term has a legal meaning, we say what it means in plain words.
The short version
- You can read almost the entire Service without an account. Most of what follows applies only if you choose to sign up.
- We never sell or rent your personal data, never share it for advertising, and run no advertising, tracking, or analytics of any kind.
- We collect what the study features need to work, and nothing we cannot justify to you in the table below.
- You can delete your account yourself from your settings, at any time, without asking us.
- We do not ask for, and you should never enter, information about real identifiable patients.
1. Who is responsible for your data
UroCompanion is provided by Mohammed Abunayan, operating from Saudi Arabia. Where data-protection law uses the word controller — meaning whoever decides why and how personal data is used — that is us, and we are accountable to you for everything described here.
For any privacy question or to exercise any right below, email urocompanion@gmail.com. A real person reads it.
UroCompanion is used by residents and students in many countries, so rather than granting the minimum any single jurisdiction requires, we apply the stronger EU/UK GDPR standard to everyone, wherever you live. Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) also applies to us. Where the two differ, we follow whichever gives you more control.
2. What we collect
Everything below is either given to us by you or generated by your own use of the Service. We do not buy personal data, and we do not build profiles of you from outside sources.
a. Account details — required to sign up
Your name, a username, your email address, and a password. The password is handled by Amazon Cognito and is stored only as a cryptographic hash; we never see or store your actual password, and neither can we recover it — a reset creates a new one.
b. Profile details — entirely optional
Training level, institution, country, city, and a profile photo. Leave any of them blank and the Service works exactly the same. Your photo is stored in private storage and served only back to you.
c. Study activity — created as you use the Service
Bookmarks and tagged items, in-text highlights, page notes and per-question notes, flashcards you write, your spaced-repetition schedule and review history, question attempts and which answer you chose, personal tests, decks, topic views, and your progress statistics. This exists so the features work and follow you between devices.
d. Things other people can see
Three features are shared by design, and it is worth being explicit about each:
- Comments you post on a question or card are visible to other signed-in users and are shown next to your username.
- Answer distributions — the “what other people picked” bar under a question — include your answer, but only ever in aggregate, never attributed to you.
- Sharing a deck sends the recipient the deck and your email address, so they can see who sent it. Only share with people you are happy to reveal that to.
e. Questions you ask UroBot
The text of your question is sent to our AI provider to generate an answer, and is stored so we can serve the same answer faster next time. Two consequences you should know about:
- The cached question and answer are shared across all users and stored without any link to your account — the cache records the question, not who asked it.
- Because of that, a question you ask may be shown to other signed-in users in the “popular questions” suggestions, in the wording you typed. So please do not put anything personal, confidential, or patient-identifying into a question.
If you rate an answer with the thumbs up/down control, that rating is linked to your account (so you cannot vote twice), together with the question it relates to. We also count how many questions you ask per day to keep the service affordable and to stop abuse.
f. Technical data
Ordinary server logs — IP address, browser type, pages requested, timestamps and errors — generated automatically whenever any website is visited. We use these to keep the Service running and secure. We also record IP addresses briefly against sign-up attempts to rate-limit automated abuse.
g. Cookies and browser storage
Listed individually, with purpose and duration, in the Cookie Policy. There are no third-party cookies on this site. Change your choice at any time via .
h. What we deliberately do not collect
We do not ask for and have no wish to receive: patient-identifiable information, your own health data, payment card details (the Service is free and takes no payments), government ID numbers, or precise location. Please keep clinical notes you write on the Service de-identified.
3. Why we use it, and our legal basis
Under GDPR every use of personal data needs a lawful basis. Here is ours, purpose by purpose, with nothing held back into a catch-all.
| What we do | Data used | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Create and run your account; authenticate you | Account details | Contract — we cannot provide an account without it |
| Save and sync your study work across devices | Study activity, profile | Contract |
| Schedule flashcards and show progress | Review history, attempts | Contract |
| Answer your UroBot questions | Question text, site content | Contract |
| Cache answers so common questions are fast and cheap to serve | Question and answer text, not linked to you | Legitimate interests — keeping a free service sustainable |
| Show comments and answer distributions to other users | Comment text, username, chosen answer | Contract — it is the feature you chose to use |
| Send account emails (activation, password reset, email change) | Email address | Contract |
| Keep the Service secure; prevent abuse and spam sign-ups | Logs, IP address, usage counts | Legitimate interests — protecting the Service and its users |
| Moderate reported comments | Comment text, reporter and author account IDs | Legitimate interests — keeping the community usable |
| Fix faults and improve the Service | Error logs, aggregate usage | Legitimate interests |
| Store non-essential preferences on your device | Browser storage | Consent — and you can withdraw it at any time |
| Comply with a legal obligation or respond to a lawful request | Whatever the law requires | Legal obligation |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is overridden by your rights and concluded it is not — the uses are narrow, expected, and none of them involve profiling or advertising. You can object to any of them (see section 8) and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds not to.
4. What we never do
- We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal data. Ever, to anyone.
- We do not share your data for anyone’s advertising, and we do not display advertising.
- We run no analytics, tracking pixels, fingerprinting, or cross-site tracking.
- We make no automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you, and we do not profile you.
- We do not use your notes, highlights, or questions to train any AI model of our own, and we do not give anyone your study data for that purpose. Answering a UroBot question does require sending its text to our AI provider; how they may use it is governed by their own terms, linked in section 5. This is the reason we ask you to keep questions free of personal or patient-identifying detail.
5. Who else processes your data
We keep the list of companies with access deliberately short. Each acts as our processor — they may only use the data to provide their service to us, under a written contract, and never for their own purposes.
| Provider | What they do | What reaches them | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Hosting, database, file storage, and the Cognito identity service that holds your login credentials. | Everything you store with us: account details, study activity, profile photo, and server logs. | Frankfurt, Germany (eu-central-1) |
| Google (Gemini API) | Generates UroBot's answers from UroCompanion's own content. Called from our server, never from your browser. | The text of the question you ask UroBot and the site content used to answer it. Your name, email, and account identifier are not sent. | Google Cloud infrastructure |
| Resend | Sends account emails — activation codes, password resets, and email-change verification. | Your email address and the contents of that email. | United States / European Union |
Beyond those, we disclose personal data only when:
- the law compels us — for example a valid court order. We will tell you unless legally barred from doing so, and we push back on requests that look overbroad;
- it is necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of UroCompanion or its users, such as investigating abuse; or
- the Service is ever transferred to a new owner — in which case you will be told beforehand, this policy continues to apply to data already collected, and you can delete your account first if you prefer.
6. Where your data lives, and transfers abroad
Your account and study data are stored in Frankfurt, Germany (the European Union) on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Because UroCompanion is operated from Saudi Arabia and two of our providers operate globally, your data may be accessed from or processed in countries outside the one you live in.
Where that involves moving personal data out of the EU/UK, the transfer is covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (or the UK equivalent) in our agreements with those providers, which is the legal mechanism that keeps GDPR protections attached to your data after it leaves. You can ask us for details of a specific transfer.
7. How long we keep it
We do not keep personal data “just in case”. Each category has an end.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account and profile details | As long as your account is open. Deleted when you delete your account. |
| All study activity — notes, highlights, cards, attempts, progress | As long as your account is open. Deleted when you delete your account. |
| Profile photo | Until you replace or remove it, or delete your account. |
| An account you have asked to delete | Permanently erased 30 days after you request deletion. During those 30 days it is deactivated and you can restore it by signing in. |
| Your comments | Until you delete them or delete your account. |
| Cached UroBot questions and answers (not linked to you) | Removed automatically once they fall out of active use. They carry no account identifier, so they are not personal data about you. |
| Your UroBot answer ratings | As long as your account is open. |
| Anti-abuse rate-limit records | Swept automatically; kept no longer than 24 hours. |
| Server and security logs | Kept only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting, then rotated out. |
| Backups | Deleted data can persist in encrypted backups for a short period before those backups cycle out. It is not restored to the live service. |
8. Your rights
These apply to everyone using UroCompanion, not only people in Europe.
- Access — get a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Correction — fix anything inaccurate. Most of it you can edit yourself in your account settings.
- Erasure — have your data deleted. You do not need to ask: delete your account from your settings and it happens automatically.
- Portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format, or have us send it to another provider where technically feasible.
- Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a dispute about accuracy or legitimacy is resolved.
- Objection — object to any processing we base on legitimate interests.
- Withdraw consent — for anything based on consent, withdraw it at any time via . Withdrawing does not undo processing that already lawfully happened.
- Complain — to your local data-protection authority. In Saudi Arabia that is the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA); in the EU or UK, your national supervisory authority. We would rather you came to us first, but it is your right either way.
To exercise any of these, email urocompanion@gmail.com. We reply within 30 days and it costs you nothing. We may need to confirm you are the account holder before acting — a safeguard for you, not an obstacle. We will not treat you differently for exercising a right.
9. Deleting your account
You are in control of this and do not need our permission. In your account settings choose to delete your account and confirm with your password. Then:
- your account is deactivated straight away and you are signed out everywhere;
- for 30 days you can undo it by signing back in — a deliberate safety net against a mistaken or impulsive deletion;
- after 30 days everything is permanently erased: your login, profile, photo, and every note, highlight, card, deck, attempt, and progress record. This cannot be reversed.
Two things deliberately survive, and neither identifies you: anonymous aggregate answer counts (removing your single answer would corrupt other users’ statistics for no privacy gain), and cached UroBot answers, which were never linked to your account. If you want your public comments gone, delete them before deleting your account, or ask us and we will.
Prefer not to use the button? Email us and we will do it for you. Want your data first? Ask, and we will send you an export before it goes.
10. How we protect it
No online service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can tell you is specifically what we do:
- Passwords are managed by Amazon Cognito and stored only as hashes — we never hold them.
- Session cookies are httpOnly and cannot be read by any script, so a scripting flaw cannot steal your session.
- Traffic runs over HTTPS, and the connection to the database is TLS-encrypted with certificate verification pinned to a trusted bundle.
- Profile photos live in private storage with no public access; they are streamed back only to the account that owns them.
- Every query for personal data is scoped to the signed-in account, and an automated check runs on every deployment that refuses to build the site if any change could read or write another user’s rows.
- Credentials and API keys exist only as server-side configuration, never in the codebase or in anything sent to your browser.
- Sign-up is rate-limited to blunt automated abuse.
If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours where the law requires it, and tell you directly and promptly where there is a significant risk to you — including what happened and what you should do.
11. Children
UroCompanion is built for medical professionals, trainees, and students, and is not directed at children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account, or older where your country sets a higher age for consenting to online services. If we learn that we hold data from a child below that age, we delete it. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us at urocompanion@gmail.com.
12. Changes to this policy
We update this policy when the Service changes. The date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change is material — a new purpose, a new category of data, a new processor — we will tell you before it takes effect, by email or a notice in the Service, and where the change affects anything you consented to we will ask you again rather than assume. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.
13. Contact
Questions, requests, or complaints about privacy go to urocompanion@gmail.com. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to your data protection authority, as described in section 8.
UroCompanion is an educational study aid, not medical advice, and is not a clinical system. Do not enter patient-identifiable information anywhere on the Service.