Your data, in plain words.

Raindrop is run by RAIN, the Real World AI Network at UC San Diego. It is where students, faculty and labs, student orgs, founders, campus staff, alumni, industry partners, and investors find each other.

Raindrop is RAIN's own platform. It is separate from the university's systems of record, and it reads nothing from them.

Nothing in Raindrop comes from university records. The university sends RAIN no roster, transcript, enrolment record, or directory entry, and Raindrop never asks for one.

You sign in with your own email, and everything on your profile is something you typed, picked, or uploaded yourself. You can change it or take it down whenever you like. Because members enrol themselves, the university discloses nothing about anyone.

• Your account. Your name and the email address you sign in with.
• Your profile. Whatever you choose to add: your role, department, class year, a headline, what you are working on, what you are looking for, what you can offer, skills, interests, links, a photo, and a resume if you upload one.
• What you do here. Needs and offers you post, applications, saved items, connections and introduction requests, messages, event RSVPs and check-ins, and dataset access requests.
• A phone number, only if you add one.
• A light activity record. The days you were active, and counts of actions such as searches and questions asked. RAIN uses these for limits and for the totals it reports. The text of what you type into Ask Raindrop is not stored.
• On the iPhone app. A push token for your device if you allow notifications. The camera is used only to scan an event check-in code, only when you tap scan, and no picture is kept.
• Cookies. Only the ones that keep you signed in. Raindrop carries no advertising and no third-party trackers.

Raindrop does not collect grades, student ID numbers, financial details, or citizenship or nationality.

Officers of a student org can upload their member list, so their members are verified the moment they sign in. Raindrop turns each email address into a salted hash, keeps the hash, and discards the list.

The hash is one-way, so the list cannot be read back out of it. It does one job: recognising a member when they sign in with the same address. Officers can see how many entries their roster holds, and nothing else.

• Everyone at UC San Diego, by default. That means anyone signed in to Raindrop with a UC San Diego account, and the alumni and guests RAIN invited. Anyone who can see your profile can send you a message.
• You choose. In settings you can show your profile to everyone at UC San Diego, to your connections only, or to nobody. When it is limited or hidden, people you are not connected with cannot start a conversation with you. Whoever you write to sees your name, photo, and headline in that conversation, whatever the setting.
• Blocking. You can block anyone from their profile or from a conversation. They can no longer see your profile, find you, or message you, nothing they do notifies you, and Raindrop does not tell them. Your conversation stays, closed to both of you. You unblock in settings.
• Connections. You and someone are connected once you have both sent each other a message. Nobody sends or accepts a request. You can remove a connection from their profile, and that ends what it opened.
• Industry partners, investors, and anyone who joins as a partner. A partner sees your profile only when you apply to one of its postings or opt in to its talent pool. Withdraw the application or leave the pool, and the partner stops seeing you. Everyone who joins through the partner door from outside UC San Diego, alumni and mentors included, sees what partners see. Partners and investors the RAIN board confirmed can also see each other.
• Partners who ask to join. Someone from outside UC San Diego who asks to join as a partner sees nobody on Raindrop, and nobody but the RAIN board sees them, until the board confirms the account.
• Contact details. Your email, phone number, and resume stay hidden until you and someone are connected, which happens once you have both sent each other a message. There is one exception, and you control it: when you apply to a posting and choose to share your resume, the person managing that posting can see your resume and contact details for that application.
• The public. Nothing on your profile is public. The pages open without signing in are the landing page, startups that chose to be showcased, events marked public, and program application forms. Raindrop asks search engines to stay out of everything behind the sign-in.

Board members run the platform. They verify accounts, act on reports, and keep the numbers. To do that they can see profiles and postings.

Contact details are handled differently. When a board member opens a member's email address or phone number, the read is written to an audit log: who looked, at whom, and when. The board can review that log.

Two features use a language model. Both are optional, and everything they do can be done by hand in Explore and in your profile form.

• Ask Raindrop searches with your own permissions, so it can never find more than you could find yourself. Your question and the results found for you are sent to the model to write the answer. The conversation lives in your browser tab and is gone when you close it. Raindrop stores a count of your questions and never their text.
• Profile import reads a resume, a link, or pasted text once, to fill in your profile form. The import keeps nothing, and you review every field before it is saved.

Model requests go to Anthropic's API. Anthropic does not train its models on API traffic. It may hold requests for a limited time to watch for abuse, under its commercial terms.

Your data lives in RAIN's own Supabase project, in the us-west-2 region in the United States. Files such as resumes sit in private storage and are reached through links that expire.

These services handle data for Raindrop, each for one job:

• Supabase runs the database, sign-in, and file storage.
• Vercel serves the app.
• Anthropic runs the language model behind Ask Raindrop and profile import.
• Resend delivers sign-in codes and notification email.
• Apple delivers push notifications to the iPhone app.
• Google handles sign-in, if you choose to sign in with your UC San Diego Google account.

Text messages are switched off. If RAIN turns them on, they will go through Twilio, and only to members who opted in.

RAIN does not sell member data. RAIN does not share it with advertisers or data brokers. RAIN does not use it to train models, and neither does Anthropic.

RAIN reports totals to the university and to its sponsors, such as how many students joined and how many research positions were filled. RAIN may disclose information when the law requires it.

Raindrop keeps a catalog: which lab holds which dataset, how ready it is for AI work, and who to ask about it. The data itself never moves through Raindrop.

Datasets stay where they live and are registered in place on the National Data Platform at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Access requests go to the lab that owns the data, and the lab decides.

Both are in settings, and neither needs an email to anyone.

• Export my data downloads what Raindrop holds about you.
• Delete my account removes your profile, contact details, skills, postings, applications (program applications included), connections, messages, and files.

A few records that belong to someone else's process stay behind with your name and addresses taken off: an org or event you created, a dataset access request you sent to a lab (the lab keeps what you asked and what it decided), and RAIN's log of the emails it sent you. Notifications other members received say “Someone” where your name was. Activity counts stay as anonymous totals. Copies in database backups age out on their own.

Every table in the database carries row-level security. The rules on this page are enforced by the database itself, so they apply equally to the website, the iPhone app, and Ask Raindrop.

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign-in uses a one-time code sent to your email, so there is no Raindrop password to steal. Sign-in with a UC San Diego Google account, which runs through campus single sign-on, can be turned on as well.

When this page changes in a way that matters, RAIN will say so inside Raindrop. The date at the top always shows the latest version.

Write to rain@ucsd.edu with any question about your data, or to ask for a correction.