Privacy
Short version: you can use all of BearCourses without an account. If you sign in, we keep your email, name and the plans you save, and nothing else about you. No ads, no third-party analytics, nothing sold or shared. If something here is unclear, take the stricter reading as the one we meant.
What you type
Your courses, busy times, professor picks and other settings are sent to the BearCourses server so it can build your plans. They're used for that request and then dropped. They aren't saved, tied to you, or written to a log, unless you press Save these plans while signed in.
Your plan link
Your settings are stored in the part of the link after the #. Browsers don't send that part to servers when the page loads, so it stays on your device unless you share the link. Anyone you send it to can see those settings.
Accounts are optional
Signing in is only for saving plans and checking their seats later. An account is your email address, your name and profile picture from Google, Google's ID for your account (so the same Google login finds the same account), the date you signed up and last signed in, and which version of the terms you agreed to. There's no password, because we don't use passwords: sign-in is Google only.
Signing in sets one cookie, bc_session. It only keeps you signed in. We store a one-way hash of it, not the cookie itself, so a leaked database isn't a set of live logins. It lasts 60 days or until you sign out.
Google's sign-in script is loaded only when you open the sign-in box, not on every page. When it loads, Google's own privacy policy applies to what it sees.
Saved plans
Saving stores the plan's name, the term, the settings you built it from, and the CRNs it picked, with your account. Check seats now asks Baylor's public Schedule of Classes about those CRNs when you press it; it sends nothing about you.
Counting, not tracking
To see whether BearCourses works and how much load it puts on Baylor's site, we keep daily totals:
- how many times each page was opened that day, and how many browsers opened it that day, and how many of those were visiting for the first time (your browser remembers the date it last visited, in its own storage, so a second visit the same day isn't counted twice and a returning visit isn't counted as new);
- how many times each feature ran, how long it took, how many failed, and how many requests it sent to Baylor and BUBooks;
- which course codes were put into builds that day, as a count per course (for example "CHE 1301: 42").
These are totals per day. They have no account, no address and no browser ID attached, so they can't be tied to you or joined across visits, by us or anyone else.
The contact form
A message you send goes as one email to one person, and that email is the only place it's kept. It includes what you wrote, the name and email you chose to give (both optional), the topic, the page you were on, your browser's user-agent, and your account email if you're signed in. The database records only that a message was sent: the time, the topic, whether it was delivered, and a salted one-way hash of your network address. That hash is there to stop the form being used to send a thousand emails; it's enough to count and not enough to identify you.
Where course data comes from
Our server asks Baylor's public Schedule of Classes, Baylor's catalog and BUBooks for course sections and professor reviews. Those requests come from our server, not your browser, and say who we are so Baylor's IT staff can reach us. They don't include anything about you. Public BUBooks and catalog pages are cached for about a day so repeat searches are faster. That cache holds course information, not information about you.
Other services your browser talks to
- Cloudflare hosts BearCourses and may keep standard access logs (like IP addresses and request times) under its own policy.
- Google Fonts serves this site's typefaces.
- Google Sign-In, only when you open the sign-in box.
- unpkg serves the map library, and OpenStreetMap serves the campus map tiles.
Each of these can see your IP address when your browser contacts it, under its own privacy policy.
Using an AI chatbot
"Copy AI instructions" copies text to your clipboard. If you paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or another chatbot, that service's privacy policy applies to what you share there. BearCourses doesn't send anything to an AI service.
What we don't do
No advertising. No third-party analytics, no tracking pixels, no cookies that follow you anywhere. No selling or sharing anything with anyone. No email list: we don't email you at all unless you write to us first.
Deleting things
Delete a saved plan from the Saved tab. Delete your whole account from the account box (press your name at the top of any page): the account, every saved plan, and every sign-in session go immediately, and no copy is kept. The daily totals above stay, because there's nothing in them that's yours.
Who it's for
BearCourses is meant for college students. It isn't directed at children under 13.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version is posted here with a new date. If it changes in substance, signed-in users are asked to agree again the next time they sign in.
Contact
Questions: jettstauver829@gmail.com, or the contact form.