Privacy

HMW Study Companion is run by HowMedWorks. This page describes what the app stores about you and why. It is written to be specific rather than broad: where the app chooses not to collect something, that choice is named.

What we store

Your account

• Your email address and a display name, if you give one.
• Your password, which is hashed by our authentication provider. We never see or store the password itself.

Your studying

• Exams you add: which guide each covers and its date.
• Sections you star.
• Every question you answer: the question, the option you chose, whether it was right, and when. This is what turns cards gold and what the missed-questions list is built from.
• Thumbs up or down on a question, with the preset reason you pick. The reasons are a fixed list rather than a text box, on purpose.
• If you answer “How are you liking the app?”: your thumbs up or down, and anything you choose to write. Phoebe may share kind words with other PA students, with your first name, or with no name if you ask to stay anonymous.
• Pop quizzes you send: which question, when, and the answers that come back. A friend may leave a first name with their answer, or stay anonymous; that name is shown to you and to nobody else.

If someone sends you a pop quiz

You can answer it without an account. We store the option you chose, whether it was right, and the first name you choose to leave, if any, tied to that link. We do not record your email address or your network address. One cookie on that link remembers that you answered, so the page can show your result again.

Phoebe AI

We do not store your conversations. What we record for a session is the number of messages you sent and the identifiers of the guide excerpts that were cited back to you. No question text, no answer text. Your chat history lives in your browser and is gone when you reload the page.

We also keep short-lived counts of how many messages you have sent in the last minute and the last day, which is how the daily limit works.

Purchases

• Which guides you own, and the status of any subscription.
• When you buy a study guide from our store at go.howmedworks.com or through Kit, we receive your name, the email address you bought with, and what you bought, so that we can issue an unlock code bound to that address.
• No card details. Payment is taken on Stripe’s own hosted checkout page. Card numbers never reach this app.

Technical records

• Page views, recorded as the path you visited, never the query string, because a redemption link carries a live unlock code in it.
• A small fixed set of product events: signing up, answering a question, sending a message to Phoebe AI, redeeming a code, starting checkout, completing it.
• Errors, so that a broken page can be found and fixed.

These are first-party: they are rows in our own database.

We may also use advertising and analytics tools from other companies, such as Meta, to understand how people find the app and to measure how our ads perform. These tools can record things like the pages you visit and whether you signed up or bought something. We do not give them your answers, your progress or anything you write to Phoebe AI.

Email

We email you about your account: confirming your address, resetting your password, and delivering unlock codes. We may also send other messages about your account and your studying, for example a welcome when you join, a reminder before a trial ends, or a note when a subscription ends. You can ask us to stop any email that is not needed to run your account by writing to the address at the bottom of this page.

What we deliberately do not collect

• Full Phoebe AI transcripts.
• Card or bank details.
• Health information about you or anyone else. This is a study tool. If you ask Phoebe AI about a real clinical situation it will decline and point you elsewhere.

Who else sees your data

We use a small number of providers, each for one job:

• Supabase: the database and sign-in system. Your account and study records live here.
• Netlify: hosting. It handles the requests your browser makes.
• Stripe: payments and subscription management. Stripe holds your payment details under its own privacy policy; we hold only the resulting subscription status.
• Resend: sending the emails described above.
• Kit: our email list and one of the stores that sells the study guides. A purchase made there is how we learn to issue your unlock code.
• Advertising and analytics partners, such as Meta: measuring our ads, as described under Technical records.
• Google: the model behind Phoebe AI. When you send a message, that message and the relevant guide excerpts are sent to Google’s Gemini API to produce an answer. We do not store the exchange, but it does leave this app in order to be answered.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share your study records or Phoebe AI conversations with advertisers.

Cookies

The app’s own cookies keep you signed in and remember where you were headed while you create an account. Advertising and analytics partners, such as Meta, may set their own cookies to measure our ads. You can block or clear cookies in your browser, though the app needs its sign-in cookies to work.

How long we keep things

• Your account and study records: for as long as you have an account. Your progress is the product; deleting it as you go would defeat the purpose.
• Technical records (page views, product events, errors): only as long as they are useful for running and fixing the app.
• Unlock codes: the code itself is destroyed the moment it is redeemed.

Your choices

You can see and change your display name, exams and bookmarked sections in the app at any time. To get a copy of your data, correct it, or have your account and its records deleted, email phoebe@howmedworks.com. Deleting your account removes your study history; guides you have bought remain yours, and records we must keep for tax and accounting reasons are kept.

Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your personal data, including the right to object to how it is used or to complain to a data protection regulator. The same address is the place to start.

Children

This app is built for physician assistant students and is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of this page and, where the change affects how your data is used, tell account holders by email.

Contact

phoebe@howmedworks.com. The terms of service cover what you are agreeing to when you use the app.