Privacy Policy

Summary

Princetons University is a private tool that lets you read your own Gmail in a web interface. It has read-only access, keeps no database, and stores no copy of your email. Your messages are fetched from Google each time you open a page and are never written to disk. Nothing is shared with anyone.

Who operates this app

Princetons University Mail is operated by Princetons University for its own members, at mail.princetonsuniversity.com. Princetons University is an independent organisation, is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google LLC, and is not affiliated with Princeton University. Questions can be sent to princetonuniversityof@gmail.com.

What the app accesses

When you sign in with Google, the app requests these OAuth scopes and no others:

• openid, userinfo.email, userinfo.profile to identify which account signed in and to display your name and address.
• gmail.readonly to list and read your mail. This scope cannot send, delete, modify, or label anything. It is technically incapable of changing your mailbox.

You can see exactly what was granted, and withdraw it at any time, at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

What is stored, and where

The app has no database and no server-side storage. The only thing it retains is a single session cookie in your browser, which holds:

• your Google account id, email address, and display name;
• the OAuth access and refresh tokens issued by Google.

That cookie is encrypted (JWE, AES-256-GCM), marked HttpOnly so browser scripts cannot read it, marked Secure so it is only sent over HTTPS, and marked SameSite=Lax. It is decrypted only on the server, for the duration of a request. It expires after 30 days.

Message content, subjects, senders, and attachments are requested from the Gmail API when you view them and are discarded once the response is rendered. They are never logged, cached, or persisted.

Google API Services Limited Use disclosure

Princetons University's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically:

• Your Gmail data is used only to display your mail to you inside this app.
• It is not transferred to any third party.
• It is not used for advertising, and it is never sold.
• It is not used to train any machine learning or AI model.
• No human reads your mail, other than you.

What is not collected

• No analytics, tracking pixels, or fingerprinting.
• No advertising or marketing identifiers.
• No third-party scripts beyond the web font served by Google Fonts.
• No sale or sharing of any data, ever.

Remote images in messages

HTML messages are rendered with their remote images loaded. This is how mail is meant to look, but note it is a normal property of email that a sender can infer you opened a message when its images load. That signal goes to the sender, not to this app.

Hosting and processing

The app runs on Vercel, which processes requests on your behalf and may retain standard operational logs (such as request timestamps and IP addresses) as part of running the platform. Requests for your mail go directly from that server to Google's Gmail API over TLS.

Deleting your data

Because nothing is stored server-side, revoking access removes everything. Either:

• click Sign out in the app, which deletes the cookie and actively revokes the token with Google; or
• remove the app at myaccount.google.com/permissions, which invalidates its access immediately.

Security

• Tokens never reach the browser in readable form and are never exposed to page scripts.
• Message HTML is sanitised, then rendered inside a sandboxed frame that cannot execute scripts.
• Attachments are always served as downloads and never rendered in the page, so an attachment cannot run code.
• Sign-in uses OAuth 2.0 with PKCE and a signed state parameter.

Children

This app is not directed at children under 13 and should not be used by them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page will be updated. Material changes will be reflected before they take effect.

Contact

Questions about this policy: princetonuniversityof@gmail.com.