Privacy policy

Summary

• No accounts, no logins, no ads, no advertising trackers, no cross-site tracking, and no sale of your data.
• Cloudflare, our network and security provider, sees every request, counts page views for us without cookies, and its bot protection may set a security cookie. Pages load fonts from Google Fonts, which sees your IP address.
• The AI assistant runs an open model on hardware Robinson Labs operates. Your messages are not sent to any outside AI company, and we do not keep transcripts of your chats. One narrow exception is described in section 2.3.
• If you fill in the assistant’s contact form, your name, your email address or phone number, and the messages you typed go to Robinson Labs as a Telegram message so we can reply.
• There is no email newsletter. The journal and the news page are available as feeds.
• You can ask us what we have, ask us to fix it, or ask us to delete it: [email protected].

1. Who we are

Robinson Labs LLC (“Robinson Labs,” “we,” “us”) is a North Carolina limited liability company and a technology consulting firm. We design, build, deploy, and operate software, data, and AI systems for businesses. We are the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.

This policy covers robinsonlabs.ai and its subdomains, including assistant.robinsonlabs.ai (together, the “Site”), and the Robinson Labs AI assistant (the “assistant”) wherever it appears, including on stephenrobinson.dev, the personal website of our founder, Stephen Robinson. It does not cover work we do for clients under contract; that is governed by the applicable services agreement.

This policy describes our practices. It is a notice, not a contract.

2. What we collect, and why

The Site has no user accounts. What we collect depends on what you do.

2.1 Browsing robinsonlabs.ai

robinsonlabs.ai (home, about, advisory, security, writing, news, and lab pages) is a static website. Its files are hosted by Porkbun and delivered through Cloudflare. When you visit:

• Cloudflare, our DNS, content delivery, and security provider, handles every request. It sees your IP address, browser user agent, and request details in order to deliver the page and block attacks. Its bot protection adds a small script to our pages and may set a security cookie (see section 3). Cloudflare also shows us aggregate traffic counts in its dashboard, such as total requests and requests by country, which are not tied to you.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics. Cloudflare adds a small measurement script, loaded from static.cloudflareinsights.com, to our web pages (on robinsonlabs.ai, its subdomains, and stephenrobinson.dev). When a page loads, the script reports the page address, the referring page, your browser type, and how long the page took to load to Cloudflare, which shows us aggregate counts such as page views and top pages. Cloudflare states that this service does not use cookies or local storage and does not fingerprint visitors. We do not use it to identify you or to follow you to other websites.
• Porkbun hosts the site’s files and receives each request as Cloudflare forwards it. Porkbun may keep standard web server logs under its own policies. We do not run this web server ourselves, and we do not keep our own access logs for robinsonlabs.ai.
• Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com): our pages load their typefaces from Google, so Google receives your IP address, user agent, and the address of the page you are viewing (the referrer) when serving the font files. See Google’s privacy policy.

Apart from Cloudflare Web Analytics, we do not run analytics. We do not run advertising pixels or third-party trackers, and we do not set cookies ourselves.

2.2 Browsing stephenrobinson.dev

stephenrobinson.dev is Stephen Robinson’s personal website: a single static page hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like robinsonlabs.ai, it runs no advertising or third-party trackers, is measured by Cloudflare Web Analytics (section 2.1), loads fonts from Google Fonts, and is protected by Cloudflare’s bot protection. The only feature on it that collects anything you type is the Robinson Labs assistant embedded on the page, described in section 2.3.

2.3 Using the AI assistant

The assistant is the chat window marked as an AI assistant. It appears on stephenrobinson.dev and on pages at assistant.robinsonlabs.ai, and it may also appear on robinsonlabs.ai pages. Every chat window carries a notice that it is an AI assistant that can make mistakes. You are talking to software, not to Stephen or any other person, and nobody at Robinson Labs sees your conversation unless you send it through the contact form (section 2.4), apart from the short log line described below.

When you send a message:

• Your browser sends it, together with the earlier messages in the same chat window, to our assistant service, which runs on Cloudflare. The service uses only the most recent part of the conversation and cuts long messages short. It forwards the conversation over an encrypted Cloudflare connection to inference hardware that Robinson Labs operates in the United States, where an open AI model writes the reply. On the robinsonlabs.ai version of the assistant, your latest message is also used to search an index of our own published pages so the answer can draw on them; that search also runs on hardware we operate.
• Your messages are not sent to any outside AI provider (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). If we ever add an outside provider, for example as a backup for when our hardware is unavailable, we will update this policy before turning it on.
• The conversation exists only in your browser tab. The assistant has no database, does not use cookies or local storage, and does not tie your chat to an account or to your identity. Closing or reloading the page erases it.
• We do not keep transcripts. Our assistant software does not store your IP address or pass it to the AI model. Our servers keep routine technical logs that record that a request arrived (the time, which service handled it, and the result), without your message text and without your IP address. A rate limiter keeps a count of recent requests per network address, in memory only, to stop floods. It does not save those addresses; when it refuses a request, the web server log records the refusal without your address.
• One exception. When you use the robinsonlabs.ai version of the assistant, the step that searches our published pages writes the first 80 characters of your latest message into a diagnostic log on the server that ran the search. That line carries no name, IP address, or other identifier, it is stored on hardware we operate, and it is deleted automatically when that log reaches its size limit, which at the current volume of logging takes about two months. The stephenrobinson.dev version of the assistant does not run this search and writes no such line.
• We use your messages only to answer you, to follow up when you ask us to through the contact form, and to keep the service working and protected from abuse. We do not use them for advertising, we do not sell them, and we do not use them to train AI models.
• Messages are length-limited, and requests that arrive too quickly are refused.

Please don’t put sensitive personal information (yours or anyone else’s) into the assistant.

2.4 The assistant’s contact form

The assistant can show a short contact form. You can open it yourself from the link at the bottom of the chat window, and the assistant may also offer it, for example when you ask to be contacted. The form says what it sends before you press its button. If you fill it out, we collect:

• your name, and an email address or phone number (at least one is required);
• the messages you typed in that chat window, your own messages only and not the assistant’s replies, cut to a length limit, so we know what you asked about;
• which website the form was sent from.

Sending the form is a request for Robinson Labs to contact you. The submission is delivered to Robinson Labs as a Telegram message, sent through the Telegram Bot API, and read by Stephen Robinson on our behalf. Telegram stores that message in the Telegram account that receives it. We use it only to reply to you about the question you raised or about working together. If you give a phone number, we use it only to call or text you back, by a person, about your request. We do not send automated or marketing text messages, we do not send marketing email, and we do not add you to any mailing list. We do not share phone numbers, email addresses, or text-messaging consent with anyone for their marketing.

Our assistant service also writes a short note that a submission was sent, containing your first name, the first letter and domain of your email address, and the last four digits of your phone number. Cloudflare shows that note to us only in real time, and we do not store it.

We keep the submission for as long as we have a business reason to, typically until the conversation with you concludes, or until you ask us to delete it.

2.5 Experimental pages on assistant.robinsonlabs.ai

assistant.robinsonlabs.ai also hosts test pages that are not linked from our sites. One of them, an on-device model test, loads code from the jsDelivr content network (cdn.jsdelivr.net), downloads an open model from Hugging Face (huggingface.co), and runs it entirely inside your browser. Text you type on that page stays on your device and is not sent to us. Your browser may keep the downloaded model files in its storage until you clear it. jsDelivr and Hugging Face receive your IP address and user agent when serving those files.

2.6 Feeds, and no newsletter

We do not send an email newsletter, and the Site has no sign-up form. The journal and the news page publish feeds that your feed reader fetches like any other page. If we start a newsletter, we will update this policy first.

2.7 Emailing us

If you email us directly, we keep the correspondence as long as needed to respond and to keep a record of the conversation. Email for our domain is hosted by Porkbun.

3. Cookies, browser storage, and browser signals

• We do not set cookies. Neither robinsonlabs.ai, stephenrobinson.dev, nor the assistant uses cookies, local storage, or similar technologies to remember you.
• Cloudflare security cookie. Cloudflare’s bot protection runs a small script on our pages and may set a security cookie, such as one named cf_clearance, that records whether your browser passed its automated check. It is used only to protect the Site from automated abuse, it is strictly necessary for that purpose, and we do not use it to identify or track you.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics. The measurement script described in section 2.1 does not set cookies or use browser storage, according to Cloudflare.
• Model files. The experimental on-device page in section 2.5 stores downloaded model files in your browser’s storage.
• Other parties. We do not allow advertising networks or other third parties to collect information about your activity over time and across other websites through the Site or the assistant. The providers listed in section 5 receive the technical data described above, such as your IP address, when they deliver their part of a page, and they handle it under their own policies.
• Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. We do not track you across sites or sell data, so the Site works the same whether or not your browser sends these signals.

4. What we don’t do

• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not “share” personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• We do not run ads or allow third parties to advertise on the Site.
• We do not track you across other websites.
• We do not build profiles of visitors.
• We do not use your assistant messages or contact form submissions to train AI models.

5. Service providers

We rely on these third parties to run the Site and the assistant. Each receives only what it needs to do its job.

The AI model behind the assistant runs on hardware Robinson Labs operates; no outside AI provider processes your assistant messages. We may update this list as providers change; the current version lives on this page.

6. How long we keep things

7. Security

Both sites are served over HTTPS. Cloudflare provides edge protection, a web application firewall, and bot protection. Our inference hardware is not reachable directly from the internet: the assistant service reaches it only through an outbound-only Cloudflare Tunnel, and every request must carry a secret key. Assistant input is length-limited and rate-limited. Access to contact form submissions and server logs is restricted to Robinson Labs. No system is perfectly secure, and we can’t guarantee against every breach, but we take reasonable measures appropriate to the data involved. Our public security page, robinsonlabs.ai/security, explains how to report a problem.

8. Your choices and rights

Wherever you live, you can:

• Stop using the assistant at any time. Nothing from your chat persists once you close the page, apart from the diagnostic line described in section 2.3, which is not linked to you.
• Ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it by emailing [email protected]. We will not treat you differently for asking.

How requests work

Email us from the address you used with us (for example, the address you put on the contact form). Replying from that address is how we verify the request. Because we do not keep assistant conversations or link them to anyone, we usually cannot find or return a past chat, but we can find and delete a contact form submission. We’ll respond within 30 days. If we can’t honor a request (for example, because we have a legal obligation to keep something), we’ll tell you why.

9. If you’re in the EU, EEA, UK, or Switzerland

Most of our visitors are in the United States, but if you’re covered by the GDPR or UK GDPR, here is what you should know.

Legal bases for processing:

• Legitimate interests: operating and securing the Site, preventing abuse, and answering the questions you send the assistant.
• Steps at your request before entering a contract: following up on a contact form you submitted.

Your rights include access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection (including objecting to processing based on legitimate interests). You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

International transfers: we are based in the United States, and the assistant’s AI model runs on hardware we operate in the United States. Our providers may process data in the United States and in other countries.

10. California and other US states

We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we have not done so in the past 12 months. The kinds of personal information we collect are described in section 2: identifiers you choose to give us (name, email address, phone number), the IP address and request details our providers handle, page-view measurements, and anything you type into the assistant or the contact form. We disclose them only to the service providers in section 5, for the purposes described there. Section 3 explains how we respond to Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals.

Whatever state you live in, you can use the requests in section 8 to learn what we hold, correct it, or delete it.

11. Children

The Site and the assistant are not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, email [email protected] and we will delete it. The assistant’s contact form does not ask for your age.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the Site, the assistant, or our providers change. We’ll update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. For a material change, such as a new kind of data collected or a new outside provider that receives assistant messages, we’ll also post a notice on the Site before the change takes effect.

13. Contact

Robinson Labs LLC, Charlotte, North Carolina. Privacy requests, legal notices, and general inquiries: [email protected].