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SPAR

Privacy Policy

Version 2.1 · Last updated

What SPAR collects, why, and what you can do about it. Start with the part that applies to you.

Your rights, wherever you live. Ask what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it.
On this page

Overview

What applies to you

How we handle information

Your rights and more

By region

Who we are

SPAR (the Supervised Program for Alignment Research) is a research mentorship program run by Kairos AI Project, Inc. ("Kairos", "we", "us"), a Delaware nonprofit corporation recognized as a 501(c)(3) public charity, with EIN 33-4777472. Our registered address is 131 Continental Dr., Suite 305, Newark, Delaware 19713, United States. For anything in this policy, email us at spar@kairos-project.org.

This policy covers the SPAR websites (sparai.org, forms.sparai.org, dash.sparai.org, and library.sparai.org), SPAR applications, and the information we handle while running the program. It applies only to SPAR. Kairos's hiring and its other programs are covered by the Kairos privacy policy.

The short version

  • We collect what you give us when you apply and take part, plus usage data on our sites through PostHog analytics, which sets a cookie that lasts a year. You can turn it off.
  • If you sign in to the dashboard, your activity there is linked to your email, and so are earlier visits to our sites from the same browser.
  • Every mentee application gets an AI evaluation that mentors see, and by default it sets the order they see applications in. People make every decision, and no score triggers an automatic acceptance or rejection. Here's how that works.
  • We share data with the vendors that run our infrastructure, with the mentors reviewing your application, and, only if you opt in, with organizations we name where we ask.
  • If you become a mentor, your profile and project become public on this site. If you complete the program, you get a certificate page you can share.
  • We do not sell personal information, we do not use it for advertising, and there are no advertising trackers on our sites.
  • Wherever you live, you can ask us to access, correct, or delete your information at spar@kairos-project.org.

Visiting our websites

What we collect

Which pages you look at and when, how you arrived (the site or search that sent you, plus any campaign tags carried in the link), what you click and interact with, how far down a page you scroll, which sections of a page you reach, the approximate location worked out from your IP address (country, region, and city), your device and browser, and any errors the page runs into. This is collected by PostHog, our analytics provider.

Events go first to ingest.kairos-project.org, an address Kairos runs that passes them on to PostHog, so ad blockers don't silently remove our own measurements. Nobody signs in on the public sites, so there this data is held against a random identifier stored in your browser rather than against your name.

Cookies

Our analytics writes one cookie to your device. It holds a random visitor identifier and a session identifier. While you are signed in to the dashboard, the visitor identifier is your email address. It lasts 365 days, and it is set for sparai.org and all of its subdomains, so the same identifier is used on forms.sparai.org, dash.sparai.org, and library.sparai.org. We also keep a small amount of analytics state in your browser's local storage.

When you click a link from our sites to kairos-project.org, globalchallengesproject.org, or generatorresidency.org, we attach that identifier to the link for a moment so the visit is counted as one journey rather than two, and links from those sites to ours do the same. In plain terms, one identifier can follow you between SPAR and Kairos's other program sites.

All of this measures how our sites are used. None of it is advertising, and there are no advertising or social-media trackers on our sites. Some older project galleries show tables embedded from Airtable, our database provider, which can set its own cookies when those pages load.

You can turn analytics off for sparai.org in this browser below. It stays off until you turn it back on or clear this site's data. The application forms and the dashboard keep their own setting, so to stop analytics everywhere, block cookies for sparai.org in your browser settings. Doing so does not stop you using any part of our sites.

Signing in to the dashboard

When you sign in to dash.sparai.org, our analytics links your activity on the dashboard to your email address. Because the dashboard shares the analytics cookie with our other SPAR sites, earlier visits from the same browser to sparai.org and our application forms become linked to your email too. When you sign out, the link is reset, so the next person to use that browser starts fresh.

Session replays

Our public websites don't record session replays. Our application forms and the dashboard can, to help us find and fix problems with them, and on the dashboard to study how applications are reviewed. A session replay is a reconstruction of what the page showed and how the pointer, the keyboard, and scrolling moved through it.

  • On the application forms, a notice tells you when the form records and lets you turn recording off. In the EU, the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, and California, a form records only after you agree. Answers we mark as sensitive are hidden from recordings.
  • We may record the sessions of mentors and SPAR staff reviewing applications on the dashboard. A notice tells reviewers when the dashboard records and lets them turn recording off, and they can change their choice at any time in the dashboard's Settings (on the Admin Panel for staff). In the EU, the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, and California, the dashboard records only after the reviewer agrees. A dashboard recording shows the screen as the reviewer saw it and what they typed, except passwords, so it can include the names and email addresses of applicants, mentees, and mentors, and application content.

Recordings are stored with PostHog, our analytics provider, which keeps them for 90 days. Only Kairos staff watch them.

Newsletter and updates

If you sign up for the SPAR newsletter or ask to hear about future rounds, we keep your email address and send you updates through our email tools. Every update has an unsubscribe link.

Contacting us

If you email us, we hold your message along with the address it came from and whatever you choose to put in it. Our email runs on Google Workspace.

Applying as a mentee

The application asks for your name and email, your career or education status (education level, institution, and an optional GPA and transcript), your resume, an optional LinkedIn or personal website link, the country, city, and time zone you will be in during the program, your weekly availability, your written answers (career plans, experience, engagement with AI safety, project-specific answers, and anything else you choose to tell us), and how you heard about SPAR. You control what your resume and written answers include.

We invite some technical applicants to a skills assessment run by CodeSignal, and we receive your results and use them alongside the rest of your application. Mentors can also ask an applicant to record answers to a short, standard set of interview questions on a video-interview platform. Every mentor who requests it sees the same recording, alongside the rest of your application.

Every application receives an AI evaluation that the mentors of the projects you apply to see, as described under How we review applications. Mentors and SPAR staff review applications on the dashboard, and recordings of their sessions there can show your application (more on session replays). Two optional consents on the form let us share your application with organizations looking for references or evaluating SPAR's impact, and declining either never affects your application.

Applications that don't lead to participation are deleted or de-identified no later than 4 years after the round's application period closes (more on retention).

Applying as a mentor

The mentor application asks for your name and email, career status, affiliations, time zone, a short bio, links you provide, a photo, and your project proposals, including any funding needs. SPAR staff review mentor applications and may use AI tools to help, and a person makes every decision.

If you're accepted, your name, affiliation, bio, photo, links, and project description are published on sparai.org. You review applications to your projects on the dashboard, where your activity is linked to your email (more on the dashboard), and the ratings and feedback you give on applicants are kept with their applications.

Taking part in SPAR

While you take part, we keep project and enrollment records, check-ins, reports, mentor feedback, survey responses, Demo Day submissions, awards, certificate records, and your activity in the SPAR Slack workspace and program tools. If your project receives research funds, we also hold records of the card transactions, receipts, and reimbursements made from them. We check the names of mentors and accepted mentees against sanctions lists.

Your name and email appear in the participant Slack workspace and the cohort directory so your team and cohort can work with you. If you complete the program as a mentee, we issue a certificate page showing your name, cohort, and completion date at a link only you receive, which you can share. Demo Day materials and research outputs from your project may name you as a contributor. We will take down or anonymize your certificate or other program-page content about you on request.

We keep participant records for as long as they stay useful for recognizing returning participants and supporting you as an alum, and you can ask us to delete them at any time (more on retention).

How we review applications

We want you to know how this works before you apply.

Every submitted mentee application receives an AI evaluation. A large language model (currently Claude, made by Anthropic) reads your application and resume, can look up the public sources described below, and produces scores, a summary, and an analysis. We test the evaluation by comparing its scores with how mentors and our staff judged the same applications, and revise it where they disagree. We also run an AI-writing detector (Pangram) over your written answers to check the rule that answers are your own writing.

Mentors see the evaluation next to your application. By default, the dashboard lists the applications to a project in order of the evaluation's project-fit score, and each mentor decides how many to read, so the evaluation affects which applications a mentor reads.

People make every decision. The evaluation cannot output an acceptance or a rejection, and no score or detector verdict triggers any automatic action. Mentors choose whom to interview and shortlist. A matching step then combines mentor shortlists with applicant preferences, and SPAR staff review and finalize every match, including any call on a suspected rule violation.

Mentor applications are reviewed by SPAR staff, who may use AI tools to assist their review. A person makes and is accountable for every decision there too.

If you think an evaluation or a decision got something wrong about you, or you want to know more about how your application was reviewed, email spar@kairos-project.org. A person will look at your case and, where warranted, re-review your application without the AI evaluation.

Information from other sources

When we review applications, we may look up information you pointed us to or that is publicly available about your work. This can include your LinkedIn profile, publication records on Google Scholar, OpenAlex, and arXiv, your GitHub activity, competitive-programming profiles, and posts on public research forums. We use these lookups to verify what applications claim, and we keep what we find with your application. If you took part in SPAR before, we also use our records from earlier rounds, including your mentor's feedback, when reviewing a new application.

How we use information

  • To run the application process. We review applications, verify claims, match applicants with projects, and communicate decisions.
  • To run the program. We manage projects and their research funds, track participation and reports, issue certificates, run events like Demo Day, and support participants.
  • To keep in touch. We send program emails to applicants and participants, and news about future rounds only if you opted in.
  • To find people for roles, programs, and events at Kairos. We look through applications and program records to invite people to apply.
  • To improve SPAR. We analyze applications and outcomes, mostly in aggregate, to understand and improve the program.
  • To run our websites and understand how they are used, so that we can improve them.
  • To keep SPAR safe and lawful. We enforce program rules (including the rule against AI-written applications), prevent fraud and abuse, and comply with legal obligations, including sanctions screening.

How we share information

Service providers

We use vendors to run SPAR, and each of them processes data only to provide its service to us. They fall into these categories.

  • Our application databases, and hosting for our websites, forms, and dashboard.
  • Logs, uptime monitoring, and alerting for those systems.
  • The AI model provider that runs the application evaluation (named above), under commercial terms that do not allow training on your data.
  • Review tools, including the AI-writing detection service, a technical-assessment platform, a video-interview platform, and the lookup data providers we query during review (for LinkedIn and Google Scholar data).
  • The analysis tools we use to audit and improve the AI evaluation.
  • A sanctions-screening service.
  • Analytics and session replay (PostHog), and email delivery.
  • Tools for running the program, including the participant Slack workspace, our email, document, and video-call tools, our staff workspace, and our program-guide and survey tools.
  • AI services that help match participants for optional coffee chats.
  • Card, payment, and accounting providers for project research funds.

Mentors

Mentors of the projects you apply to see your application materials and the AI evaluation. They do not see the sections the form marks as hidden from mentors, such as your data-sharing choices and feedback to us.

Other participants and the public

If you are accepted, your team and cohort see your name and email in the participant Slack workspace and the cohort directory. Mentor profiles, certificates, Demo Day materials, and research outputs can be public, as described under Taking part in SPAR.

Organizations, if you opt in

We sometimes offer optional programs that share data with other organizations, such as providing references or supporting evaluations of SPAR's impact. Each has its own consent checkbox, unticked by default and hidden from reviewers, and declining never affects your application or participation. What each one shares is described where we ask. You can withdraw any of these consents at any time by emailing us, with effect going forward.

Legal and safety

We share information when the law requires it, to protect the rights and safety of any person, or with our professional advisors. If Kairos ever reorganizes or transfers the program, the data moves with it under this policy.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

International transfers

Kairos is based in the United States, and most of the vendors above process data there. Some also process it in other countries, including our hosting provider and the AI model provider that runs the application evaluation. When you apply from outside the US, you send your information directly to us in the US. Wherever your data is processed, this policy and our vendor contracts protect it, and if you are in the EEA or UK you keep all the rights described below.

How long we keep information

  • Applications that do not lead to participation: we delete or de-identify them no later than 4 years after the round's application period closes. Keeping them until then lets us recognize returning applicants across rounds and understand our program over time.
  • Participant records: we keep them for as long as they stay useful for recognizing returning participants and for supporting you as an alum (certificates, references, invitations to later opportunities). You can ask us to delete them at any time.
  • Summary AI evaluation scores follow the application they belong to. The detailed records behind them (the model's full write-up and research trace) are deleted within 18 months of the round closing, since they are only needed for quality control and for re-examining recent decisions.
  • Analytics data is kept by our analytics provider for up to 7 years, and session replays for 90 days.
  • Emails you send us are kept for as long as they are useful for the conversation and for our records.
  • Database backups are kept for about 90 days. When we delete your information, it is removed from our live systems right away and from backups as they expire. Other copies in logs and archives can take a few months longer to age out.
  • Certificates and published research outputs are meant to last, so we keep them until you ask us to take yours down.
  • If you opted into a data-sharing program, the data shared under that consent is kept for as long as the consent stands.
  • We keep some records longer where the law requires it or where they are needed for legal claims, security, or proof of performance.

Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you can email spar@kairos-project.org about your information. The fastest path is usually to ask your specific question directly, for example whether we looked at a particular public profile, or how your application was handled, and we will answer it. You can also ask us to correct information we hold, to delete it, to re-review your application as described above, to stop using it to find people for roles and programs at Kairos, or to tell you what information we hold about you. We honor all of these as a matter of policy, not only where the law requires it. We will verify the request comes from you, usually by replying to the email address on your application. If you ask us to delete an application that is still under review, we will treat that as withdrawing it.

If you are in the EEA or the UK, you additionally have the legal rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection to processing based on legitimate interests, and data portability, and you can withdraw any consent at any time without affecting prior processing. You also have the right to complain to your supervisory authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner's Office.

Analytics on our public sites is not tied to your name, so in most cases we have no way to find which records are yours. Turning analytics off or blocking cookies stops that data being collected in the first place. Dashboard analytics is tied to your email, and you can ask about it or have it deleted like any other information we hold.

Some limits apply. We may keep what the law requires us to keep, along with records we need for security, for legal claims, or to enforce program rules, such as a record of a rule violation. Feedback given to us in confidence by others may be protected, in which case we will tell you it exists without disclosing its source. If requests are clearly abusive or repetitive, we may decline them, as data-protection law allows.

If you are under 18

SPAR is open to people 13 and older. Do not apply if you are under 13, and if we learn we hold personal information about a child under 13, we will delete it.

If you are under 18, tell us in your application. Before you can participate, we will need a parent or legal guardian to consent for you. We exclude participants we know are under 18 from the optional data-sharing programs described above.

Security

We limit access to personal information to the people who need it to run the program, and our vendors encrypt data in transit and at rest. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your data at risk, we will tell you promptly.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we will update it here with a new date. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will email the people it affects before it takes effect. If we ever want to use information we already hold for a purpose this policy does not cover, we will either ask for your consent or keep handling that information under the rules that applied when we collected it.

Contact

Email spar@kairos-project.org, or write to Kairos AI Project, Inc., 131 Continental Dr., Suite 305, Newark, Delaware 19713, United States. If you need this policy in another format, tell us and we will help.

By region

Two sets of details apply only in some places.

California disclosures What the California Online Privacy Protection Act asks us to state
  • The categories of personal information we collect are described under Visiting our websites, Applying as a mentee, Applying as a mentor, and Taking part in SPAR.
  • The categories of third parties it is shared with are named under How we share information.
  • How to see, correct, or delete your information is described under Your rights and choices, and that is open to you wherever you live.
  • How we announce changes to this policy is described under Changes to this policy.
  • Our websites don't change what they collect in response to a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal from your browser. You can turn analytics off for sparai.org with the control under Cookies.
  • This version's number and the date it took effect are at the top of this page.
  • No advertising or tracking company collects information about your activity through our sites. Our own analytics identifier is carried between Kairos program sites, and some older project galleries embed tables from Airtable, both described under Cookies.