CareerForge

Privacy policy

How ZIGRAWBOHNBAWERICK collects, uses, shares, protects and deletes personal information in CareerForge.
Last updated 30 September 2026

The short version

  • We collect what you give us to build your Portfolio and your job documents, and what we need to run your Account and keep it secure.
  • Before any of your text goes to AI, you agree to it. Third-party AI service providers then process it to do the work you ask for, some of them outside Australia, including in the United States. We cannot guarantee that all of them will never keep your text or use it for training.
  • The iPhone and Android apps record your sessions, with every word, field and image covered, so we can find and fix faults.
  • We do not sell your personal information, show you ads or track you across other apps and websites.
  • You can see, correct and export your Portfolio, and delete your Account, from Profile at any time.
  • Questions, requests and complaints go to [email protected].
The numbered sections below give the full detail.

1. Who we are

CareerForge is provided by ZIGRAWBOHNBAWERICK, a business registered in Australia ("we", "us" and "our"). We decide how and why your personal information is used in CareerForge, so we are responsible for it. Under the European Union and United Kingdom data protection laws, we are the controller.
Contact us about privacy at [email protected].

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers the CareerForge apps for iPhone and Android, the website at career-forge.life and emails you exchange with us. It does not cover websites and services run by others, such as employer websites, job boards, app stores or the sign-in services of Apple, Google and GitHub. Their own privacy policies apply to them.

3. Information we collect

Information you give us:
  • Account: your email address, your password (we store only a salted hash of it, never the password itself) and when you agreed to AI processing.
  • Profile: your name, phone number, location, birth year, a Photo, headline, links, career goals and interests, where you want to work, and the lowest yearly pay you would accept. All of these are optional.
  • Portfolio: resumes and other files you upload (PDF, Word, text and Markdown), links you add, and your work history, education, projects, skills, languages and examples of your work.
  • Story and practice: your typed answers to Story questions and interview practice. CareerForge does not record audio.
  • Jobs and applications: job ads you paste, link or add from Explore, the jobs you star in Explore, notes, the status of each application, and the resumes, cover letters and interview briefs we prepare with you.
  • Support and feedback: messages you send us, and for feedback sent from the app, the screen you were on and the app version.
Information we collect automatically:
  • Security and sign-in: your IP address, your browser or device type, and when each session started.
  • Approximate location: our network provider adds the country and city your IP address points to on each request. When you have not given a location, Profile starts with that country. When you have not told us where you want to work, Explore guesses your city from it to choose where to start. We work the guess out on each request, do not store it and do not send your IP address anywhere to find it.
  • Usage records: which AI tasks ran for your Account, how much text each used and whether it failed.
  • Error reports: when something fails, the error, the screen and the app version.
  • Session recordings: the iPhone and Android apps send crash reports and record sessions, showing the layout of each screen, your taps and the screens you move between, with every word, field, image and embedded web page covered (see section 7).
  • Device storage, described in section 11.
Information from other sources:
  • Sign-in services: if you sign in with Apple, Google or GitHub, we receive your email address, your name and a link to your profile picture where the service gives them, whether the email is verified, and tokens that let us sign you in and later disconnect CareerForge.
  • Payment services: the status of your purchase, your plan, renewal dates and transaction references. We never receive your full card details.
  • Public web pages: pages at links you add, a public LinkedIn job page when you give us its link, and public pages on an employer's official website so we can summarise the company for a job.
  • Job listing services: the jobs shown in Explore come from job listing services. We ask them for jobs in Australia once a day and send them nothing about you. When you open an ad on another site, that site's own privacy policy applies. LinkedIn's job search, opened from Explore, starts on the place you chose in setup, so LinkedIn receives that place. In the iPhone and Android apps, "Add to my jobs" on that site's page copies the page's text into Add a Job on your device, and nothing is sent until you add the job.
  • AI output: the summaries, questions, Match results and documents made from your information, which we store with your Account.
Sensitive information: CareerForge does not ask for health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, union membership, criminal record or similar sensitive information. If your resume or answers contain it, we process it with the rest of your text to provide CareerForge to you, which includes sending it to AI service providers as described in section 5. Leave it out if you do not want it used this way.
Information about other people: your Portfolio and job ads can name other people, such as colleagues, referees or a hiring manager. Public pages we read about an employer can name its staff too. Add other people's details only where you are allowed to. We use them only to provide CareerForge to you, which includes sending them to AI service providers with the rest of your text (section 5), and they are deleted with your Account. Anyone named can contact us about their information.

4. How we use your information and why we are allowed to

Under the European Union and United Kingdom data protection laws, each use needs a legal basis. We use your information for these purposes:
  • To provide CareerForge: running your Account and sign-in, reading your resume, building your Portfolio, showing jobs where you want to work, comparing your Portfolio with jobs, asking Story questions, preparing documents and practice, and exporting your Portfolio. Basis: performing our contract with you.
  • To send your text to AI service providers so they can do that work. Basis: performing our contract with you. Separately, we ask for your explicit agreement before the first time (section 5).
  • To keep CareerForge secure: protecting sign-in, limiting repeated attempts, preventing abuse and enforcing usage limits. Basis: our legitimate interest in a secure, reliable service.
  • To find and fix faults: error reports, crash reports and session recordings. Basis: our legitimate interest in a service that works.
  • To take payments and manage subscriptions. Basis: performing our contract with you, and our legal duty to keep financial records.
  • To answer your messages and requests. Basis: performing our contract with you, or our legitimate interest in helping people who contact us.
  • To send service emails: sign-in codes, email confirmation and password resets. Basis: performing our contract with you. We do not send marketing email.
  • To comply with the law and respond to lawful requests. Basis: our legal obligations.
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights. We use only the information needed, share it only with the service providers in section 7, and do not use it to advertise to you or to build a profile of you for anyone else.
What you must provide: an email address and a password or sign-in service to create an Account, and your agreement to AI processing to use CareerForge. Everything else is optional, but CareerForge can only prepare documents from what you add.
We do not use your personal information for purposes unrelated to CareerForge. If we want to use it for a new purpose, we will tell you first.

5. AI processing

To read your resume, ask your Story questions, check job ads and write your documents, CareerForge sends text you give it to third-party AI service providers. That text can include your resumes and other Sources, the contact details in them, your Portfolio, your career goals, interests and lowest acceptable pay, Story answers, interview practice, the job ads you add, public pages about the employer and your document drafts. These providers may process it outside Australia, and for most of this work it is not practicable for us to list the countries in advance. Your Story answers, with the question asked and the Portfolio lines they relate to, may also go to a second AI service that judges what to ask next. That service processes and stores this text in the United States and has agreed not to use it to train its AI models. It keeps the text as long as it needs to provide its service and meet legal duties, and may keep technical records derived from it, such as logs and statistics, for longer. We cannot control or know everything these companies do with your text, just as you cannot see everything other online services do with your data. Apart from that agreement, we do not guarantee that they will never store your text or use it for training. Review AI output before sharing it.
Nothing is sent to an AI service until you agree on the "Before you start" screen. Our server refuses every AI request for an Account that has not agreed.
You can withdraw your agreement at any time by emailing [email protected]. We will then stop sending your text to AI services, and the parts of CareerForge that need AI will stop working for your Account. Withdrawing does not affect processing that happened before. You can also delete your Account.

6. Automated processing and profiling

CareerForge uses automated processing to help you, not to decide things about you:
  • Match: when you add a job, AI reads the ad and lists its requirements. For each requirement, AI rates your stored examples and skills as a strong, partial or no fit, and each rating must point to an example you gave. Our server removes any rating that does not. Your Match is the average across the requirements, shown as a percentage and a word, and a low Match shows a warning.
  • Story: AI picks the next question from the requirements you have the least evidence for.
  • Documents: every line about your ability must point to an example you gave, is checked by our server and is read again by a separate AI review. A line that fails is left out and becomes a Story question instead.
These results are advice to you. We do not send your Match, your documents or anything else to employers, and nothing in CareerForge makes a decision about you that has legal or similarly significant effects. You decide which jobs to apply for and what to send.

7. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with these kinds of recipients, and only what each needs:
  • AI service providers that process your text to provide CareerForge features (section 5).
  • Hosting and network providers that run our servers, carry network traffic to them, protect them from attacks and store our encrypted backups.
  • An email delivery provider that sends sign-in codes, email confirmations and password resets. It receives your email address and the message.
  • An error monitoring service, for the iPhone and Android apps only. It receives crash reports and session recordings. Before anything is sent, the app covers every piece of text, every field you type in, every image and every embedded web page, so a recording does not show your resume, your answers or sign-in codes. The service is not used on the website.
  • Payment and subscription services: Apple processes App Store purchases, a subscription management service records those purchases against an Account identifier, and a card payment processor handles purchases on our website and receives your email address and an Account identifier.
  • The sign-in service you choose: Apple, Google or GitHub. When you delete your Account, we ask it to revoke CareerForge's access.
  • Websites we read for you: when we fetch a page at a link you add, a LinkedIn job page or an employer's website, we send that site only the page address.
  • Professional advisers, and courts, regulators or law enforcement where the law requires us to.
  • A new owner, if CareerForge or our business is sold or transferred. The new owner must keep your information under this policy or tell you before anything changes.
We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for advertising, including cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not let other companies use it for their own marketing. No advertising or analytics companies collect information about you through CareerForge, and no other company tracks your activity across websites through our pages.
Our service providers use your information to provide their service to us under their own terms and privacy commitments. We cannot promise that every one of them protects it in exactly the way this policy describes.

8. Where your information is processed

We are based in Australia. Many of the recipients in section 7 process information in other countries:
  • AI service providers: countries outside Australia, including the United States. The provider that handles a request can change from one request to the next, so it is not practicable to list every country in advance.
  • The Story judgment service and the error monitoring service: the United States.
  • Payment, subscription, sign-in, network and email services: these are international companies that may process information in the United States and other countries.
Privacy laws in those countries may protect your information less than the laws where you live, and it may be harder to enforce your rights there.
For people in the European Union or United Kingdom: Australia does not have an adequacy decision from the European Commission or the United Kingdom. When we send your information on to recipients in other countries, we rely on your explicit agreement on the "Before you start" screen and on the transfer being necessary to provide the service you asked for.

9. How long we keep it

  • Your Account, Profile, Portfolio, Story answers, practice, jobs, documents, usage records, error reports and feedback: until you delete them or your Account.
  • Sign-in sessions: until you sign out or 90 days after you last use CareerForge.
  • Sign-in and password-reset codes: they expire within 15 minutes.
  • Records of repeated sign-in attempts and wrong beta download codes: up to 24 hours.
  • A marker that an AI request of yours is running: removed when it ends, or within two minutes.
  • Payment event records: after you delete your Account, we keep the record of each payment event without a link to your Account, so our payment records stay complete.
  • Backups: encrypted and replaced on a rolling schedule. Deleted information can remain in a backup until that backup is replaced. If we ever restore a backup, we delete again anything you deleted after it was made.
  • Server logs: replaced automatically as they fill up.
Our service providers keep their own records, such as transaction, delivery and security records, for the periods their own policies and the law require.

10. Your rights and choices

In CareerForge you can, at any time:
  • see and correct your details and Portfolio, and remove Sources;
  • export your Portfolio as a file;
  • delete your Account from Profile. This deletes your Account and its data from our active database, deletes your stored files, signs you out everywhere and asks your sign-in service to revoke our access. It cancels a subscription bought on our website straight away. It does not cancel an App Store subscription, recall text already sent to AI service providers, or delete the records payment and subscription services keep about your purchases (section 9). Copies you downloaded or shared are outside our control.
If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you also have these rights, and people elsewhere may have them under their own laws. You can:
  • get a copy of all the personal information we hold about you, not only your Portfolio, and details of how we use it, including who we have shared it with;
  • have it corrected or deleted;
  • restrict how we use it, or receive it in a portable format;
  • withdraw your agreement to AI processing at any time (section 5);
  • not be treated differently for using your rights.
Right to object: where we rely on legitimate interests (section 4), you can object at any time to our use of your information for that purpose. We will then stop, unless we have compelling reasons that override your interests or need it for a legal claim.
To make a request, email [email protected]. We may need to confirm that the Account is yours before we act. We respond within one month, and we do not charge for requests.
Do Not Track: we do not track you across websites, so CareerForge works the same whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track signal.

11. Cookies and device storage

We use only the cookies and device storage CareerForge needs to work. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and no other company sets cookies on our pages.
  • Sign-in cookie: on the website, a secure cookie keeps you signed in. Scripts on the page cannot read it. It lasts until you sign out or 90 days after you last use CareerForge. Short-lived cookies also protect the sign-in step when you use Apple, Google or GitHub.
  • Phone app sign-in: in the iPhone and Android apps, your session is kept in the phone's secure storage instead of a cookie.
  • Preferences: whether you chose Black or White mode, and filters you set on a list.
  • Unsent work: drafts of forms, Story answers and document changes you have not saved yet, so you do not lose them if the page closes. These can contain the text you typed. They stay on your device and are removed when you save or finish, sign out or delete your Account.
  • Navigation and progress: the page to return to after you sign in, and how long making a document usually takes, so the progress display is accurate.
If you pay for a subscription on our website, you move to the payment processor's own checkout page. That page sets its own cookies under the payment processor's privacy policy.
You can clear cookies and site data in your browser settings, or delete the app to clear its storage. If you block the sign-in cookie, you cannot stay signed in. Changing Black or White mode in Profile replaces that preference.

12. How we protect it

We protect your information with measures including:
  • encrypted connections (HTTPS) between your device and our servers;
  • salted password hashing, limits on repeated sign-in attempts, and signing out your other sessions when you change or reset your password;
  • sign-in kept in secure storage on your phone, and in a cookie that scripts on our pages cannot read;
  • checks so that each Account can reach only its own records;
  • keys for outside services held only on our server, never in the app;
  • backups encrypted before they leave our server;
  • a server that reads only public web addresses when it fetches a page for you.
No system is completely secure. Keep your password private and tell us straight away if you think your Account has been misused.

13. Data breaches

If a breach of security affects your personal information, we will tell you and the privacy regulators when, and as quickly as, the law where you live requires.

14. Children

CareerForge is not meant for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you think a child under 16 has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

15. Information for California and other US states

This section gives the information that California and other US state privacy laws ask for, where they apply.
  • Categories we collect: identifiers (such as name, email address, IP address and Account identifier); professional and employment information; education information; commercial information (purchases and subscriptions); internet activity (sign-in and error records); approximate location worked out from your IP address, which we do not store; inferences drawn from your Portfolio (your Match results); and account login details, which the law treats as sensitive.
  • Sources: you, your device, the sign-in and payment services you use, and public web pages (section 3).
  • Purposes: those in section 4. We use sensitive information only to provide CareerForge and keep it secure.
  • Disclosures: to the categories of recipients in section 7, for business purposes only.
  • Sale and sharing: we do not sell or share personal information, as those words are defined in California law, and we have not done so in the past 12 months. We do not knowingly sell or share the information of anyone under 16.
  • Retention: section 9.
  • Your rights: section 10. You can also have an authorised agent make a request for you. We will ask the agent for proof of authority and may ask you to confirm your identity.

16. Changes to this policy

When we change how we handle personal information, we update this page and the date at the top. Before a material change takes effect, we tell affected people by email or in the app.

17. Contact and complaints

Email [email protected] with any question, request or complaint about privacy. Tell us what happened and how to reach you. We acknowledge complaints within 30 days, look into them and tell you the outcome.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to a privacy regulator:
  • in the European Union, the data protection authority in the country where you live or work;
  • in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk);
  • in Australia, you may be able to complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).
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