Rolebird Privacy Policy

Effective 8 August 2026; product-analytics paragraph updated 2 September 2026; security-event retention paragraphs added 14 September 2026.

This privacy policy explains how Rolebird Limited (a New Zealand company, company number 9447842), trading as Rolebird (“we”, “us”), handles personal information. It applies to all personal information we collect through our website, our browser extension, and our services. Rolebird is offered in New Zealand, and we handle your information under the Privacy Act 2020.

We may update this policy from time to time as the service changes. We will update the effective date above whenever we do, and we will tell you by email if a change is significant. Continuing to use Rolebird after an update takes effect means you accept the updated policy.

What personal information we collect

Like any website, our hosting provider and Cloudflare briefly process your IP address in security and access logs to keep the service running and safe. We don’t use it to identify you. One exception: if a request trips one of our abuse protections (a honeypot, a rate limit, a blocked upload, a rejected cross-site request), we record a security event holding the IP address, browser information, the page requested and, if you were signed in at the time, your internal account identifier. These are kept for up to 12 months, as described under “How long we keep it”.

What we don’t collect

Rolebird is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from people under that age.

Before you upload your CV and base cover letter

Before you upload, remove your personal details from your CV and cover letter.

Delete your name, email address, phone number, home address, date of birth, IRD number, and any links to profiles that identify you (LinkedIn, GitHub). Remove your referees' names and contact details too; those belong to them, not you.

Keep what describes your work: job titles, dates, achievements, skills, and qualifications. That is what we tailor against. Generalise your employers, though: replace each company name with a short description and keep the dates, so "Xero, 2019–2022" becomes something like "a NZ fintech, 2019–2022". The time you spent somewhere helps us tailor; the exact name is not needed and could identify you.

Rolebird reads your files in your browser and checks them for personal details before anything is sent. The original file never leaves your device, only the text does, after your removals and this check. The check is not a guarantee: some identifiers it refuses outright, but others (what looks like a name, a referee's details, a social media handle, a driver licence number) it can only warn you about, and if you accept the warning the text is sent as it stands. It cannot detect company names, and it cannot reliably catch exact dates. So review the result and remove or generalise anything that could identify you. The review step has a one-click tool for exactly this. You are responsible for what you upload. Rolebird does not need to know who you are to do its job.

Where your documents go: to write your letters, Rolebird sends the text of your CV and cover letter (after your removals and this check) to Anthropic, an AI company in the United States, which processes it on our behalf. This means your information leaves New Zealand. Anthropic holds a copy for up to 30 days to monitor for misuse, then deletes it, apart from anything their safety systems flag, or that the law requires them to keep, which may be held for up to two years. They do not use it to train their models. If you are not comfortable with that, do not upload, because there is no version of this product that works without it.

Your files are read on your device

Rolebird reads your files in your browser and checks them for personal details before anything is sent. The original file never leaves your device, only the text does, after your removals and our check. The check is not a guarantee: some identifiers it refuses outright, but others (a likely name, a referee’s details, a social media handle, a driver licence number) it can only warn you about, and you can accept a warning and continue. It cannot detect company names, and it cannot reliably catch exact dates. So review the result and remove or generalise anything that could identify you. The review step has a one-click tool for exactly this. You are responsible for what you upload. Rolebird does not need to know who you are to do its job.

How this works, in detail, including what it does not catch.

Being honest about what this does and does not do

Removing your name and contact details means that if we were ever breached, what leaked would be far harder to tie back to you. That is worth doing, and we enforce it.

It does not make your data anonymous. Even with your name gone and your employers generalised, your CV still carries your dates, your job titles, and your achievements, enough that someone determined could work out who you are. We also hold your email address, because you need an account. So your information is still personal information under the Privacy Act 2020, and we treat it that way.

How we collect your personal information

We collect your personal information directly from you, such as when you set up an account, contact us via email, use our website or access our service.

The purposes for which we use your personal information

We may use personal information collected from you to:

Who we disclose your personal information to and why

We are not the only ones who touch your data. A small number of overseas providers act on our behalf to process your personal information for the purposes specified above:

Our site is also served through Cloudflare’s network, so your requests pass through it in transit, and we use Cloudflare’s Turnstile anti-bot check on our public forms. We use these for delivery and security, not to profile you.

Your personal information is processed overseas

As stated above, some of your personal information is transferred to and processed by our providers outside New Zealand, principally in the United States. Before we disclose your information to a provider overseas, we satisfy ourselves on reasonable grounds that the provider is required, under its agreement with us, to protect your information in a way that, overall, provides comparable safeguards to those in the Privacy Act 2020.

Your CV leaves New Zealand

To write your letters and run interview practice, Rolebird sends the text of your CV and cover letter (after your removals and our check) to Anthropic, an AI company in the United States, to process it on our behalf. We also send a profile of your skills and roles that our AI derives from them, and the job listing you are tailoring against (its title, company, location, salary if shown, the listing URL and the full description). This means your information leaves New Zealand. If you ask for a revision, we also send your revision instruction and the previous draft.

Anthropic holds a copy of what we send for up to 30 days to monitor for misuse, then deletes it, apart from anything its safety systems flag, or that the law requires it to keep, which may be held for up to two years. It does not use what we send to train its models; that is a term of its commercial terms, not a setting we could switch off (see its trust centre). This retention is Anthropic’s own, as our processor; it does not extend the periods for which Rolebird itself holds your information, set out under “How long we keep it”.

This is the main reason we make you strip your name and contact details out first. What crosses the border is a work history, not an identified person. It is still your information, and you should know exactly where it goes.

Interview practice

If you use our interview practice feature, the interviewer’s questions are planned from the text of your CV and the job you are preparing for, so that text is sent to Anthropic on the same terms described above.

In voice mode, your spoken answers are transcribed on your own device. The audio is never uploaded and never stored; only the resulting text is submitted, exactly like a typed answer. Voice mode needs a one-time speech-model download into your browser; that file is served by Hugging Face, which sees the download request and your IP address but never your voice or your CV. The interviewer’s spoken questions are generated from the session’s own text by Google Cloud’s text-to-speech service. Because the interviewer sometimes repeats or refers back to what you said, some of your own words can be spoken back in its voice, so that part of your answer is included in the text sent for synthesis. What is never sent is your microphone audio itself - only text is ever submitted, exactly as when you type.

Session transcripts and debriefs are stored encrypted, belong to your account, appear in full in your data export, and are deleted when your account is. Your audio is never among them as it never left your device.

What we never do

Cookies

We use three first-party cookies, all functional. The first keeps you signed in after you log in; the site needs it to work. The second exists for about ten minutes when you click an emailed sign-in link: it binds that link’s confirmation page to your own browser so nobody else can complete your sign-in, then expires. The third exists only if you arrive through a friend’s referral link: it remembers their referral code for up to 30 days so they get credit if you sign up, and it is deleted the moment you do. None of the three is a tracking or advertising cookie, and none follows you around the web.

For traffic, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics. It is cookieless and counts visits in aggregate: it does not use tracking cookies, does not identify you, and does not follow you across other websites. No advertising, and nothing to opt out of.

We also record a small set of anonymous product events on our own systems so we can see which pages are read and where Rolebird’s flow loses people: which of our public pages was viewed; whether the visit came from a search engine, a social site, a link within Rolebird, or directly (as a category only, never the address of the page you came from); whether the screen was phone- or desktop-sized; and product steps such as which pricing option was chosen or that an upload failed. Pages you use while signed in are not recorded. These events are fixed labels: they do not include your name, email, account, IP address, browser details, the address of the page you came from, or anything you upload, write, or generate. They are grouped by a random identifier that lasts for your current browser session and is not linked to your account or kept in a cookie. Raw events are deleted within 30 days, leaving only daily totals. We honour your browser’s Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals by not recording these events, and the events stay on our own systems and are not sent to any outside analytics provider.

How long we keep it

Until you delete it, or until your account has been inactive for 12 months, whichever comes first. Inactivity deletion is not a trapdoor: we email you a warning a month before, another two weeks before, and signing in once at any point cancels it entirely. If it does go ahead, we confirm by email on the day, and the account and everything in it (profile, documents, captured jobs, notes) is gone.

Two lawful exceptions. First, if you have paid us, we keep a minimal, pseudonymised record of that transaction (the amount, the date, the currency, and the Stripe payment reference) because a business is required to keep records of its sales for tax purposes. It holds no name, no contact details, no documents, nothing you removed before uploading. To be precise about its limits: our own systems can no longer connect it to you once your account is gone, but the Stripe payment reference still points at Stripe’s record of the payment, which Stripe retains under its own privacy policy for its own legal obligations.

Second, we retain security events, including IP address, browser information, request path and, where applicable, an account identifier, for up to 12 months to investigate abuse and protect Rolebird and its users. A security event is only ever recorded when a request trips one of our abuse protections, never for ordinary use. These records may remain after account deletion and are not used for advertising or profiling. We may retain a specific record longer where reasonably required for an active investigation or legal obligation. Everything else about you is deleted as described above.

Unused credits expire with the account, so both warning emails tell you exactly how many you have. Signing in once keeps them, along with everything else. That is how you hold on to a balance you have not used.

One narrower rule, for captured jobs specifically. Saving a listing is free and doesn’t need a balance, so we clear listings nobody ever did anything with: after six months we delete a captured job only if all of these are true: nothing was ever generated for it, you never wrote a note on it, you never moved it past “Interest” or marked it applied, and no AI run was ever started on it. Anything you generated, annotated, or moved along is kept for as long as your account is, and you can export the personal information we hold about you at any time from your account page before it happens. Your shortlist also holds up to 200 saved jobs at once; you can delete any of them yourself whenever you like.

One honest caveat: deleted data can persist in our encrypted backups for up to three months before those age out. The backups exist so a disk failure cannot destroy everyone’s data; their keys are held offline, and nothing restores from them in normal operation.

Your data is yours

You can export the personal information we hold about you, delete all of it, or delete your account entirely, at any time from your account page (sign in first). Deletion from the live service is immediate; residual copies in our encrypted backups age out within three months, as described above.

You also have the right, under the Privacy Act 2020, to ask for access to the personal information we hold about you and to ask us to correct it. Email [email protected] and we will respond within the period the Act requires.

Keeping it safe

Your CV and cover-letter text, your notes and your revision instructions are encrypted before they are stored, and your uploaded documents are separately encrypted. The primary copy of everything we hold is stored in New Zealand, and access is limited to what is needed to run the service. No system is ever completely secure, but because you strip your identifying details before uploading, there is far less at stake if something ever did go wrong.

If something goes wrong

If we ever have a privacy breach that could cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as the Privacy Act 2020 requires.

If you have any privacy questions, requests, or complaints, contact our privacy contact at [email protected]. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. They take complaints through an online form (they no longer accept them by email), or you can call them on 0800 803 909.

Privacy Policy: how Rolebird handles your data - Rolebird