Build Your Alpaca

Privacy Policy

Last updated September 13, 2026

Build Your Alpaca builds personal software. The short version of this policy is that there is no business model here that involves anyone's data, because there are no customers and no analytics.

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Who operates this

Build Your Alpaca and the software described on this site are operated by Chris Thompson as an individual. Questions can go to support@buildyouralpaca.com.

Who this policy covers

The tools described on this site are single-user programs. They have no sign-up, no accounts, and no users other than their owner. If you are reading this because you saw it linked from a Google consent screen, that consent screen was shown to the owner authorizing his own account.

This website itself sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and collects nothing from visitors. It loads fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's font servers when you open a page.

What Google data the Assistant accesses

The Assistant connects to its owner's Google Account only after he grants permission through Google's own consent screen. It requests access to two services:

• Gmail. To read messages and summarize what needs attention, to label, archive and trash mail while tidying an inbox, to locate receipts and attachments, and to send or reply to messages that the owner has explicitly approved first.
• Google Calendar. To read events in order to surface what is coming up and flag conflicts, and to create or update events so appointments land on the correct calendar.

Permissions are requested at the narrowest level that still does the job. The Assistant does not request permission to permanently delete mail.

Where the data goes

Message and calendar content is fetched from Google's APIs, held in memory while a task runs, and written only to storage on hardware that Chris Thompson owns and controls. Authorization tokens are stored on that same hardware.

Message content is processed by a language model that runs locally on that hardware. It is not sent to a third-party model provider.

Limited Use

What never happens

• Data received from Google APIs is never sold.
• It is never transferred to anyone, except back to Google's own APIs while acting on the owner's behalf.
• It is never used for advertising, and never used to build a profile of anyone.
• It is never used to train a machine learning model.
• No human other than the account owner reads it.

Keeping and deleting data

Information fetched from Google is kept only as long as it is useful for the task at hand, and is deleted along with the local storage it sits in. Because the only account involved belongs to the operator, deletion is a matter of removing files from his own machine.

Withdrawing access

Access granted to the Assistant can be revoked at any time from the Google Account permissions page at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Revoking it immediately invalidates the stored tokens, and the Assistant loses all access to Gmail and Calendar.

Changes

If this policy changes, the revised version is posted on this page with a new date at the top.

Contact

Chris Thompson, support@buildyouralpaca.com.