Data & privacy
Where your research data lives and what leaves the machine.
Your projects stay local
Research projects, datasets and participant rows are stored on your own device, under your Windows user profile. They are not uploaded, and statistical computation happens locally.
What does leave the machine
Three things involve the network: signing in and validating your licence; AI-assisted steps such as proposing variables or building an extraction sheet from a sample; and the update check.
AI-assisted steps send the text of the request needed for that step. Aggregate outputs only — individual participant rows are not sent.
The research assistant on this website
The research assistant at starshipai.online/assistant is a separate service from the desktop app, and it follows the same rule: your conversations are never stored on a StarshipAI server. They are held in your own browser, which is why they do not follow you to another device and why clearing your browsing data deletes them.
What the server keeps is a count of how many messages you have sent today, so your daily allowance can be enforced. The questions and the replies themselves are not written to the database and not written to the logs.
The messages you send are passed to the AI provider in order to answer them. Treat that as you would any external service: it is the right place for your own draft text and your own summary results, and the wrong place for identifiable patient information.
Backups
Because your data is local, backing it up is your responsibility. Copy the data folder listed on the Installation page as part of your normal backup routine.