Privacy Policy

Last updated: 30 October 2026

1. Who we are

Lighthouse ("Lighthouse", "we", "us") is a career app provided by Jarno van Kessel, based in the Netherlands. This policy explains what personal data we collect when you use the Lighthouse app, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what rights you have over it.

If you have questions about this policy or want to exercise any of the rights described below, contact us at jarnovankessel@gmail.com.

This policy applies to the Lighthouse mobile and web application, including the public page where people you invite give you feedback. It does not cover third-party websites you may reach by following a link from within Lighthouse.

2. What data we collect

We collect only what's needed to provide the service. Specifically:

Account data

• Your name and email address
• If you sign in with a password: a securely hashed password, handled entirely by our authentication provider — we never see or store your plaintext password
• If you sign in with Google: your name, email address and profile photo as Google shares them, under Google's own terms
• When you confirmed you're 16 or older and agreed to this policy, and which version of it you agreed to
• Your preferred language / device locale

Profile data you provide

• Why you use Lighthouse, and the goal you're working toward
• Your view on your pay, how open you are to a career change, and whether you'd rather go deeper into your field or lead people
• Your job-search status and professional category
• Personal details you add yourself: place of residence, driver's license status, languages spoken, availability, and work preferences (remote days, hours per week, travel time)

Skills, personality, interests and wishes

• Your scores from questionnaires and your own ratings across hard skills, soft skills, personality traits, interests and work wishes, and your progress through each questionnaire
• Any skills, wishes or traits you add yourself that aren't in our standard list

CV and work history

• If you upload a CV (PDF or Word document), its content is processed to fill in your profile and/or give you feedback on it — whichever you choose. We show you what will be saved before anything is stored. The file itself is never stored; its extracted text is kept for at most one hour so the coach can work from it during that conversation.
• Work experience you add yourself: job titles, employers, dates, and what you did, liked and disliked

Your goal and plan

• The steps toward your goal, with why each matters and an optional target date
• Actions (small things you plan to do), with their deadline, your notes, and how it went once you mark one done
• Jobs you're considering, their good and less good sides, and the fit scores calculated from comparing them with your profile
• If you export your plan, the document is generated when you ask for it and handed straight to you; we don't keep a copy

Conversations with our AI coaches

• The messages you send to Lighthouse's AI coaches, and their replies
• A summary of your conversations, kept so a coach can refer back to earlier context
• Which coaches you've already met
• Replies you report to us as wrong or inappropriate, with your optional note

Sensitive information you choose to share. What you write to a coach is up to you. People sometimes mention their health, such as stress or burnout, or other sensitive matters. The first time you open a coach chat, we ask whether that's okay with you: if you agree, a coach may use what you share about your health to answer you; it is stored with your conversation and sent to our AI provider like any other message (see Section 4). If you'd rather not, the chat works the same, and we ask you not to share health details. You can change your choice at any time in Settings. We never ask for this information and don't use it for anything other than answering you.

Daily card, games and progress

• Your answers on the daily card, including short reflections you write
• Your own guess at a score before you take a questionnaire, and results of practice games (mock interviews, salary negotiation), including the coach's short feedback
• Your weekly streak, your XP and rank, and a log of what you did in the app (such as a questionnaire finished or an Action done), used for progress, ranks and recaps

Texts and suggestions we generate for you

• Suggestions in Explore (which skills and questionnaires fit your goal), generated from your profile and plan
• A weekly roundtable, where the coaches discuss your profile together
• Occasional reminders and check-ins, for example about an Action whose deadline is near or after a quiet period
• "Career Wrapped" recaps of your progress

Feedback from people you invite

• If you start a feedback round, the people you share the link with can answer a few questions about you on a public page. They don't need an account, and their name is optional. Their answers are stored with your account and you can read them once three people have answered.
• To limit abuse, we count answers per network address using a one-way hash; the address itself is never stored.

Notifications

• If you allow push notifications: a device token so we can reach your phone, and your time zone so messages arrive at a sensible hour

Job-search feature data

• When you ask a coach to benchmark a salary or search live job listings, we send the job title and location you specify to our job-data provider — never your name, email, or any other identifying information

Technical data

• Authentication tokens used to keep you signed in
• Crash and error reports if something in the app goes wrong, so we can fix it. They don't contain your name, email or account ID.
• Usage counters for our AI features, to enforce fair-use limits
• Basic technical metadata (such as IP address) incidentally processed by our infrastructure providers as part of serving any request over the internet

We do not collect payment information, biometric data, or precise location data.

3. Why we process your data, and on what legal basis

We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell your personal data to anyone.

Automated decisions and AI answers. Lighthouse's coaches are AI, and the chat says so on every screen. Their answers and the texts we generate are suggestions based on what you've shared and can be wrong, so check anything important before you act on it. Lighthouse makes no automated decisions about you with legal or similarly significant effects: scores, fit percentages and suggestions only inform choices you make yourself. You can use Lighthouse without ever talking to a coach.

4. Who we share your data with

We share data only with the service providers who help us run Lighthouse, and only what each one needs to do its job:

• Google (Firebase / Google Cloud Platform) — hosts our database, handles sign-in, sends push notifications, and runs the backend code that powers the app. Our database (EU multi-region eur3) and backend functions (europe-west1) run in the European Union. Crash reports go through Google's Firebase Crashlytics.
• Anthropic — the AI provider whose Claude models power our coaches and the texts we generate for you. What's sent: your chat messages; any CV content you ask a coach to read; the parts of your Lighthouse data a coach reads to answer you (such as your profile, scores, plan, reflections, and feedback you received, without the names of the people who gave it); and, for the suggestions, roundtable, reminders and plan export, the parts of your profile and plan each one is based on. The Wrapped recap only sends counts (such as how many Actions you finished), never your own words. Anthropic's Commercial Terms of Service state, in the Customer Content section: *"Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services"* — this covers the Anthropic API, which is what Lighthouse uses. Anthropic deletes these inputs and outputs within 30 days, unless its automated safety systems flag a conversation as breaking its usage policy, in which case it may keep them for up to 2 years (Anthropic privacy center).
• Adzuna — our job-data provider. Only a job title and location you specify are sent, for salary benchmarking or job-listing search — never your name, email, or anything else that identifies you. Because no personal data reaches Adzuna, it does not process personal data on our behalf.

Sign-in with LinkedIn is not offered at the moment. If we add it, this policy will say what LinkedIn shares with us before it goes live.

Each provider that processes personal data for us is contractually bound (via their own standard data processing terms) to only use your data to provide their service to us, not for their own independent purposes.

We do not share your data with any other third party, and we never sell it.

5. International data transfers

Our database and backend code run in the European Union. Some of our service providers may process data outside the EU/EEA, including in the United States: notably Anthropic, and Google for sign-in (Firebase Authentication), crash reports (Crashlytics) and push messages (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which run as global services. Google covers these transfers with the EU Standard Contractual Clauses in its Firebase and Google Cloud data processing terms. Anthropic's Data Processing Addendum is automatically incorporated into its Commercial Terms of Service and includes the 2021 EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two, controller-to-processor), plus UK and Swiss transfer addenda.

6. How long we keep your data

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account — either from Settings or by asking a coach to do it for you, both of which require you to confirm first — all of your data is permanently deleted immediately: your profile, scores, work experience, goal and plan, conversations, feedback rounds and everything else. This cannot be undone. For disaster recovery we keep weekly encrypted backups of the database for up to six weeks; deleted data disappears from them as they expire and is never restored into the app, except to recover from a system failure.

At our providers. Anthropic deletes what it received within 30 days (up to 2 years only for conversations its safety systems flag, see Section 4). Crash reports are kept by Crashlytics for 90 days.

Feedback rounds. Answers from people you invited are kept until you delete that round or your account. A round that never reached three answers can't be read by anyone, including you, so it is deleted automatically 30 days after it closed (about two months after you made the link). The people answering are told this on the page itself.

Inactive accounts. If you don't use Lighthouse for two years, we delete your account and all its data, exactly as if you had deleted it yourself. The two years count from 30 October 2026 at the earliest.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR (and equivalent laws elsewhere), you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate data (most of this you can already do yourself in the app)
• Erase your data — available today, instantly, via "Delete my account" in Settings or through a coach
• Receive a copy of your data in a portable format (data portability) — available today via "Export my data" in Settings
• Object to processing based on legitimate interest
• Restrict how we process your data in certain circumstances
• Withdraw consent at any time, where processing is based on consent

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at jarnovankessel@gmail.com. We will respond within one month.

If you believe we have not handled your data properly, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority — in the Netherlands, this is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.

8. Security

We rely on our infrastructure providers' industry-standard protections: all data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Access to your data is restricted to your own account — our database rules, which are tested automatically, ensure no other user can read or write your data. Administrative actions are limited to a small number of authorized accounts and are logged.

9. Cookies and tracking

Lighthouse's authentication relies on session tokens necessary to keep you signed in. We do not use analytics, and we do not use cookies or similar technology for advertising or cross-site tracking.

10. Children's privacy

Lighthouse is intended for users aged 16 and older. Nobody can use the app without first confirming this (whichever way they sign in), and we record when they did. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger than this. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make a material change, we'll let you know in the app and ask you to agree again before you continue. The date at the top of this page always reflects the most recent version.

12. Contact us

Jarno van Kessel
The Netherlands
jarnovankessel@gmail.com