Aura Privacy Policy

Aura only accesses accounts you explicitly connect through the provider’s own consent screen. It requests these permissions:

• Google — Gmail read and modify: reading messages and attachments, and changing state such as read, unread, starred, archived, or moved to trash. That same permission is what lets Aura send the replies, forwards, and messages you compose here; Aura does not request a separate send permission. Aura also requests read-only access to your Google Calendar. Both are requested together on a single Google consent screen. You may decline the calendar permission, in which case Aura runs without any calendar features and never reads your calendar.
• Microsoft— mail read and write, mail send, read-only calendar access, your basic profile (used solely to learn the connected mailbox’s own address), and offline access so the connection can be refreshed without re-prompting you.

Write permissions are requested because Aura performs those actions on your behalf when you use it — sending a reply, archiving, or moving a conversation to trash. Aura does not use them for anything you have not initiated.

When an account is connected, Aura imports and stores in its own database: message content (both plain text and HTML), subjects, senders and recipients, timestamps, conversation grouping and read/starred/archived state, attachment metadata, calendar events where calendar access is granted, and contact records derived from the people appearing in your messages.

Attachment file contents are stored on the filesystem of the server running Aura. Aura also stores information it derives from your messages — summaries, categories, priority signals, extracted people and organisations, reply-expectation judgements, and the vector embeddings used for search described in section 6.

For your Aura login itself, Aura stores your name, email address, and a hash of your password. It does not store your password.

The access and refresh tokens that let Aura reach your provider accounts are encrypted before they are written to the database, using AES-256-GCM with a key held in the deployment’s configuration and not in the database. Revoking Aura’s access from your Google or Microsoft account settings stops it reaching your mailbox regardless of what Aura holds.

To produce the summaries, categories, and other derived information described above, and to let you search your messages by meaning, Aura sends message content and related metadata to third-party AI providers over their paid, commercial APIs. It uses two, and no others:

• Anthropic — the Claude Developer Platform (commercial API, pay-as-you-go), model claude-haiku-4-5. It receives a message’s subject, the names and addresses of its sender and recipients, an excerpt of the message body, and the file names of any attachments — never attachment contents. Anthropic’s Commercial Terms of Service state that Anthropic may not train models on customer content submitted through its services, and Anthropic states that API inputs and outputs are automatically deleted within 30 days.
• Google — the Gemini Developer API (Google AI Studio) on a paid Tier 1 prepaid account. Aura uses this one service for two separate purposes:
  • Reading messages, with model gemini-3.1-flash-lite. It receives a message’s subject, its sender’s name, the cleaned text of the message body, and text extracted from attachments, and returns the people and organisations mentioned.
  • Semantic search, with model gemini-embedding-2. It receives a message’s subject and body text, and returns a vector embedding — a list of numbers — which Aura stores and uses to rank your search results. Section 6 describes this in full.
  Under Google’s Gemini API Additional Terms of Service, for paid services Google does not use prompts or responses to improve its products, and logs them only for a limited period to detect and prevent abuse and to meet legal obligations. Aura does not use the free tier of this API, on which those terms would not apply. Both uses above run on the same paid account and under those same terms.

Calendar events are never sent to any AI provider. They are used only inside Aura’s own database, to render your agenda and to place meetings alongside related messages.

The uses listed above are the only ones in which the contents of your messages leave the server Aura runs on. Aura does not sell your data, and does not send it to advertising or analytics services.

Aura’s use of information received from Google Workspace APIs, including any raw or derived user data, adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In particular:

• Aura uses Google Workspace data only to provide the user-facing features described in this policy — the inbox, search, calendar, and the summaries and priorities you see in the product.
• Aura does not transfer Google Workspace data to anyone except the two AI providers named in section 4, which process it solely to return a result to Aura, and except where required to comply with applicable law or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Aura does not use Google Workspace data for advertising of any kind, does not sell it, and does not share it with data brokers or information resellers.
• Aura does not allow humans to read your Google Workspace data except with your affirmative agreement, where necessary for security purposes, or to comply with applicable law. Aura is deployed privately for a small number of named users; the administrative access that exists in this deployment, and its limits, are described in section 9.
• Aura does not use Google Workspace data — raw or derived — to develop, improve, or train generalised or non-personalised artificial intelligence or machine learning models. The providers named in section 4 process this content under commercial terms that prohibit training on it.

Search runs inside Aura’s own database, using PostgreSQL full-text and trigram matching. Your messages are not sent to a third-party search service, and every result is assembled from your own data. Search queries you type may be recorded with their timing so search quality can be measured.

So that you can search by meaning and not only by wording, Aura also builds vector embeddings— numeric representations — of your message subjects and text, and stores them in its own database. Building one requires sending that text to Google’s Gemini Developer API, on the same paid account and under the same terms described in section 4, using the model gemini-embedding-2. The embeddings are used only to find and rank your own conversations when you search.

Aura does not treat an embedding as anonymous, and does not claim the text it was made from cannot be recovered from it. An embedding is derived from your message content, is stored and protected exactly as the rest of that content is, and is removed with it when an account is deleted, as described in section 11. Embeddings are never returned by Aura’s interface and are never shared with anyone.

Only the recent conversations Aura already analyses automatically are embedded. Older conversations are not.

So that new mail is picked up promptly, Aura can register for change notifications with Google (via Google Cloud Pub/Sub) and Microsoft (via Microsoft Graph subscriptions). These notifications tell Aura that something changed; Aura then fetches the change over the same authorised connection. Incoming notifications are verified before being accepted.

Aura writes operational logs recording activity and errors, which are used to diagnose faults. It also keeps an audit record of account-level actions — such as signing in and out, and administrative changes — storing who acted, what the action was, what it affected, and when.

Aura is deployed privately rather than offered as a shared public service. People with administrator access to the deployment can reach administrative screens including the audit log, the user list, and AI usage reporting, and have access to the server and its database. Aura does not provide a technical guarantee that an administrator cannot read stored message content.

Aura does not automatically delete imported messages after a set period. Data imported from a connected account is kept until you delete it, disconnect and remove the account, or delete your Aura account.

Disconnecting a provider account stops further syncing and stops Aura acting on that mailbox, but data already imported from it remains in the database until it is removed.

When an Aura account is deleted it is first marked for deletion and remains recoverable for 30 days. After that window elapses, a scheduled purge permanently removes the account’s data in a single database transaction — messages, conversations, attachment records and their stored files, contacts, calendar data, derived intelligence, ingestion records, and the connected accounts themselves, including their stored tokens.

Copies of data may persist in database backups after deletion, until those backups are rotated or removed.

Traffic to Aura is served over HTTPS. Provider tokens are encrypted at rest as described above, and the database is not exposed to the public internet. Passwords are stored only as hashes.

Aura makes no certification claims. It has not been audited against SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or any similar standard, and it does not use end-to-end encryption — message content is stored in a form the server can read, which is what allows it to be summarised and searched.

If this policy changes, the effective date above will be updated. Material changes to what Aura collects or where it sends data will be reflected here.

Aura is operated privately for a small number of named users. For questions about this policy, or to request access to or deletion of your data, contact:

nikilkumarkonda2005@gmail.com