Privacy Statement
Effective date: August 2026
This Privacy Statement describes how the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (“TUCCA”, “we”, “us”) collects, uses, and shares Personal Data in connection with the Cellular Agriculture AI Library (“CAAIL” or “the Service”).
Personal Data is information that is directly linked, or can be linked, to you.
The Service is published as static files through GitHub Pages at tucca-cellag.github.io/caail/.
Because that is not a tufts.edu address, the Service falls outside the scope of the
Tufts University web privacy statement, which governs
tufts.edu properties. This Statement governs the Service.
The Service requires no account, no registration, and no payment. You may read every page without providing Personal Data.
Personal Data We Collect
Section titled “Personal Data We Collect”Data collected automatically when you visit. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to measure page views and page performance. For each page view we receive the page address, the referring page, your browser and operating system, page timing measurements, and the country to which your IP address resolves. Cloudflare states that it does not store any portion of the IP address, and query strings are discarded. This measurement is in operation today, and TUCCA accesses the resulting reports.
Data collected by our hosting provider. GitHub receives your IP address and user agent in the ordinary course of serving the pages, as any web host does. That processing is governed by GitHub’s privacy statement.
Data you provide voluntarily. Where you submit a question through the optional “Ask CAAIL” feature, we collect the text you submit. See Sharing of Personal Data.
Usage measurements. We record two events concerning your use of the Service:
- Outbound link clicks. Where you follow a link to an external resource, we record the destination address, its domain, and a coarse classification of the resource as a DOI, a code repository, or other.
- Site searches. Where you search the Service, we record the term you entered and the number of results returned.
Search text is the only free text collected. It is redacted before transmission, and again on
receipt: any query containing an @, exceeding 80 characters, shorter than two characters, or
consisting of seven or more digits with no letters is discarded and never recorded. The digit rule is set to catch telephone
numbers and similar identifiers while preserving accession numbers and DOIs, which are among the
most useful things to know people are searching for. A query is recorded once, after you stop
typing, rather than keystroke by keystroke.
These events are transmitted to an endpoint operated by TUCCA and are stored in aggregate. No cookie is set, no identifier is assigned, and no part of your IP address is stored alongside either event, so neither event can be attributed to you or linked across visits.
The endpoint does read your IP address when it receives an event, in order to count recent requests from the same source and refuse a sender that is flooding the measurements with fabricated events. For IPv6 the source counted is your network prefix rather than your full address. That count is maintained by Cloudflare for the length of a short counting window, is never written to the event records, and is used for no other purpose.
We do not set cookies, employ device fingerprinting, or assign any persistent identifier. We are therefore unable to recognise you across visits or across sites, and we do not attempt to.
Processing Purposes: How We Use Your Personal Data
Section titled “Processing Purposes: How We Use Your Personal Data”We process the data described above for the following purposes only:
- to measure use of the Service and understand which resources are of value to readers;
- to maintain and improve the accuracy and coverage of the library’s contents;
- to respond to questions submitted through the “Ask CAAIL” feature, and to review the questions received in order to improve the answers that feature gives;
- to maintain the security and availability of the Service.
We do not sell Personal Data, use it for advertising, or use it to build a profile of you.
Sharing of Personal Data
Section titled “Sharing of Personal Data”Subprocessors and service providers. We use the following vendors to provide the Service on our behalf:
| Recipient | Purpose | Data received |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub, Inc. | Hosting | IP address, user agent |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Analytics, and hosting of the events endpoint operated by TUCCA | Page view data, the two usage events described above, and your IP address as the sender of an event |
| Sevalla | Hosting of the “Ask CAAIL” service (United States region) | The text of your question |
| Google LLC | Generative Language API (Gemini models), used to compose answers | The text of your question, with relevant passages from CAAIL |
The “Ask CAAIL” feature. This feature is optional and transmits nothing until you use it. No request is made when a page loads or when the panel is opened. Where you submit a question, the text you submit is transmitted to the recipients identified above, both of which are outside Tufts University. The service records the full text of each question it receives in its server logs. We are not presently able to state the retention period applicable to those logs.
You should not submit personal, confidential, or identifying information through this feature. It is provided to answer questions concerning cellular agriculture and artificial intelligence research, and you should treat it as correspondence with an external company.
The feature retains no conversation history, stores nothing in your browser, and requires no account. It may be hidden for the remainder of your visit, and the Service functions without it.
Other disclosures. We may disclose Personal Data where required by law or where necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of TUCCA, Tufts University, or others.
Our Use of Cookies and Tracking Technologies
Section titled “Our Use of Cookies and Tracking Technologies”The Service sets no cookies and employs no tracking technologies.
The Service stores the following display preferences in your browser. These are set only where you have expressly requested the corresponding behaviour, and fall within the exemption in Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive for storage strictly necessary to provide a service explicitly requested by the user. They are not transmitted to us or to any third party.
| Key | Purpose | Storage | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
caail-nav-collapsed | Records that you collapsed the sidebar | Local | Until cleared |
caail-toc-collapsed | Records that you collapsed the “On this page” panel | Local | Until cleared |
caail-tableview | Records your table or card display preference | Local | Until cleared |
caail-chat-dismissed | Records that you hid the “Ask CAAIL” button | Session | End of session |
Because no consent is required for the foregoing, no consent banner is presented. Should we introduce any technology requiring consent, we will update this Statement and obtain consent before that technology is deployed.
Links to Third-Party Sites
Section titled “Links to Third-Party Sites”The Service consists substantially of links to external resources, including journal articles, code repositories, sequence archives, and databases operated by third parties. Those sites are not operated by TUCCA and are not governed by this Statement. Their operators may collect considerably more Personal Data than the Service does. Inclusion of a resource in the library does not constitute an endorsement of its operator’s privacy practices.
Your Privacy Rights
Section titled “Your Privacy Rights”Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to request access to, correction of, erasure of, or restriction of processing of Personal Data concerning you, to object to processing, and to data portability. Where processing is based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time.
Because the Service assigns no identifier to you, we ordinarily hold no Personal Data capable of being linked to you. The exception is text you have submitted through the “Ask CAAIL” feature, which will appear in that service’s logs.
To exercise these rights, contact us using the details below. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority.
Security and Retention
Section titled “Security and Retention”The Service is a static site and stores no data of its own. Data held by the recipients identified above is retained in accordance with their respective terms. We are not presently able to state the retention period applicable to “Ask CAAIL” logs, and are seeking to establish it.
Changes to This Privacy Statement
Section titled “Changes to This Privacy Statement”We may revise this Statement from time to time. Where a revision materially expands the categories of Personal Data collected or the recipients with whom it is shared, we will make the change prospectively and update the effective date above.
Contact Us
Section titled “Contact Us”Privacy enquiries and requests to exercise the rights described above should be directed to the Tufts University data privacy office at dataprivacy@tufts.edu.
Enquiries concerning the contents of the library, rather than Personal Data, may be raised on the CAAIL repository.
Linked external resources are independent of TUCCA and Tufts University and remain under their own licenses.