Privacy Policy
Effective October 1, 2026 (updated for progress tracking)
What the forge collects
To build your personal copy of the AI Kickstart or TinkerTime we ask for your email, your name, your role (job title and company, or major and school), and your general location, which we prefill from your connection and you can change. If you give us a LinkedIn profile URL, we look up that public profile through a third-party data provider (Fresh LinkedIn Profile Data on RapidAPI) and read your headline, about section, experience, education, skills, and certifications. We never request your posts. Short playful lines on the page, and the social posts written for your share links, are generated by DeepSeek's API from those profile details, your counts, and your reflection. DeepSeek does not receive your email.
Where it goes
The details you confirm are written into your copy of the skill, which downloads to your device and runs in your own Claude account. We also store your contact details and which edition you downloaded in our CRM (HubSpot) and notify our team in Slack. If you tick the newsletter box, your browser subscribes your email to Paul Cheek's Substack. TinkerTime purchases are processed by Stripe; we see the purchase status and the email and name on it, never your card.
Progress tracking
AI Kickstart sends nothing on its own. At checkpoints it offers you a share link to tinkerti.me that carries your name, email, user ID, a count of your AI assets (skills, plugins, projects, artifacts, connectors, scheduled tasks, shared skills and tasks, agents), your average quality score, and the one-line reflection you wrote. Opening it stores those numbers and your reflection, writes a post for you, and publishes a share page at a link only you are given until you post it.
TinkerTime also connects to a small progress server on tinkerti.me. Each time you build something it sends your user ID, your email, the type of thing you did (for example "created a skill"), and a 0 to 100 quality score when something was rated. The server keeps exactly those fields and discards anything else it receives. It never receives the names or contents of your skills, projects, files, or chats. You can turn it off at any time by telling TinkerTime to stop, or by removing the connector.
Your dashboard at tinkerti.me/me is behind a one-time sign-in link sent to your email. If you join a cohort with a code, the members of that cohort and its organizer see your name, habit score, active days, streak, and average quality on the cohort leaderboard. Nothing else.
What we do not do
We do not sell your data. We do not receive anything you share with Claude while using the skill; that is governed by your agreement with Anthropic. If a LinkedIn lookup fails or you skip it, we log the failure (with the profile path, not its contents) so we can fix it.
Your choices
Skip LinkedIn at any time with the button on the page. To have your record deleted, email skill-help@paulcheek.com.