Privacy Policy

Ping My Nest is a student-built project that alerts University of Southern Mississippi students when a seat opens in a class section. It is not operated by or affiliated with the University of Southern Mississippi. [To review: legal name of the operator (you, a student org, or a company)]

We store your verified email and the class sections you choose to watch. We don't store other personal profile data, passwords, or browsing history beyond what's needed to run alerts.

• Verified email (so we can send seat alerts)
• Your watches (which sections you asked us to monitor)
• Single-use sign-in links, which expire

Seat counts come from USM's public Class Search. We use them to detect when a watched section opens; we don't access your SOAR login or private student records.

When you sign in we set two session cookies so you stay signed in: a short-lived access cookie (15 minutes) and a refresh cookie (30 days, renewed while you use the site). Both are httpOnly, so scripts on the page can't read them. Signing out ends your session on every device. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies. [To review: update this if you add analytics]

To protect the service and USM systems, our API rate-limits requests by IP address. IP addresses are held in memory for this purpose and are not tied to your account. [To review: confirm what your host (e.g. Vercel, Fly.io) logs and for how long]

We don't sell your data. Alert and sign-in emails are delivered through a third-party email relay, which receives your email address and the message content. [To review: confirm the provider (currently Resend, resend.com) and link its privacy policy]

We keep your email and watches while your account is active. [To review: set a retention period, e.g. delete inactive accounts after a semester]

You can stop any watch from your watches page. To delete your account and all associated data, contact us at [To review: contact email] and we will remove it.

Class availability information used by Ping My Nest is publicly available. USM Information Security provided the following guidance: [To review: confirm this is an exact quote you have permission to publish]

Since the information involved is publicly available, we do not have specific guidance to provide regarding the collection or use of that data beyond ensuring that all activity complies with applicable laws, policies, terms of use, and university requirements.

Information Security does not generally modify, disable, or make exceptions to security monitoring or protective controls for individual projects. Our security controls and monitoring processes remain in place to protect university systems and resources.

If you have specific questions regarding university policy, acceptable use requirements, or concerns about how your activity may interact with university systems, please let us know and we will be happy to review those questions and provide any guidance we can.

We rate-limit polling and design the service to stay conservative with university systems.

If we change this policy we will update the date above. Questions? Open an issue on GitHub. See also our Terms & Conditions.