Privacy Policy
How Walter Grades collects, uses, and deletes your data — including the Google account data you choose to connect.
Effective July 2026
Gmail Data Access
Connecting Gmail is optional and is used for one purpose: getting the newsletters you subscribe to into Walter Grades so we can grade them. We request two Google permissions, and we use each one narrowly.
Reading past newsletter issues
gmail.readonlyWhat we do
- We search your mailbox only for messages from the newsletter senders you have explicitly connected, within a bounded date range. Every query names those senders.
- From each matching message we keep the message body, the subject, the message ID, and the date it was sent.
- We use that content to extract the trade recommendations the newsletter made, so we can score them.
What we never do
- We never read, list, or search your inbox at large.
- We never read mail from a sender you have not connected.
- We never download attachments.
- We never send, modify, label, or delete anything in your mailbox — this permission is read-only.
Setting up newsletter forwarding
gmail.settings.basicWhat we do
- We add your private Walter ingest address as a forwarding address on your Gmail account, which triggers the confirmation email Google sends.
- We create Gmail filters whose criteria are exactly the newsletter senders you connected, with a single action: forward those messages to your own Walter address.
- We keep those filters in sync with the newsletters you are actively tracking. Stop tracking a newsletter and its sender is removed from the filters.
What we never do
- We never create a filter that is not restricted to a sender you connected.
- We never give a filter any action other than forwarding to your own Walter address.
- We never modify or delete a filter you created — we only ever touch filters we made, tracked by ID on our side.
- We never touch your vacation responder, signature, aliases, delegates, or IMAP/POP settings.
Limited Use of Google User Data
Walter Grades’ use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
- 1We do not transfer or use Google user data for serving advertisements. Walter Grades runs no advertising and transfers no Google user data to any advertising platform, data broker, or measurement network.
- 2We do not allow humans to read Google user data, except with your explicit prior consent for specific messages, where necessary for security purposes such as investigating abuse, to comply with applicable law, or where the data has been aggregated and anonymized so it is no longer attributable to you.
- 3We do not sell Google user data. Not to anyone, under any circumstances.
- 4We do not use Google user data to develop, improve, or train generalized or non-personalized AI or machine-learning models.
How we use AI to read newsletters
To pull the trade recommendations out of a newsletter, we send the text of that newsletter issue to the Google Gemini API. This is processing done on our behalf to deliver the feature you asked for — it is how the recommendations in your account get extracted.
Before we send it, we strip the HTML: tags, link URLs, and tracking parameters are removed. We do not send the subject line, the sender address, your email address, any message headers, or any Walter Grades account identifier. Only the visible body text is transmitted.
We do not keep the request or the response. We store only which model and prompt version produced a result, so we can re-run a parse later.
This content is not used to train Walter Grades models, and we do not permit it to be used to train generalized AI models.
What We Collect
Newsletter email content
Issues from the senders you connected, whether forwarded to us or imported from Gmail.
Extracted recommendations
The trades a newsletter called, including the sentence that stated the recommendation.
Modeled positions and performance
Hypothetical results computed from those recommendations under fixed assumptions.
Account information
Your email address, display name, settings, and billing status.
Google OAuth tokens
Encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored. Never held in plain text.
Personal emails
We never access mail from senders you have not connected.
Contacts, calendar, or Drive
We do not request these permissions.
Your Google password
We never see it. Authentication happens entirely on Google’s side.
Browsing activity elsewhere
We do not track you outside Walter Grades.
Retention & Deletion
Disconnecting Gmail
You can disconnect from Settings → Email at any time. We delete the forwarding filters we created in your Gmail, revoke our access token with Google, and delete the stored tokens. Newsletter issues already imported are kept in your account unless you delete the account.
Deleting your account
Deleting your account removes your profile, settings, Google tokens, filter records, scan history, and the links between your account and the newsletter issues you received.
Newsletter issues are shared across readers
A newsletter issue is the publisher’s content, and many subscribers receive the identical email. We store one copy of each issue and link it to every reader who received it. When you delete your account we remove your link to those issues, but the issue itself — and the performance record built from it — remains, because it is part of the public grade we publish for that newsletter.
How long we keep things
Account data is retained while your account is active. When you delete your account we revoke our Google access and remove our forwarding filters immediately, and the newsletter issues we read from your mailbox are purged within 30 days. The grades derived from them are de-identified — no longer attributable to you — and are retained as part of the historical record we publish.
Your rights
If you are in a jurisdiction with data access, portability, correction, or deletion rights — including the GDPR and CCPA — email privacy@waltergrades.com and we will action your request.
How we protect it
Google OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM using a per-token initialization vector, and are decrypted in memory only at the moment of use. Newsletter content is held in private storage that is not publicly readable and is served to you only over an authenticated request. Traffic is encrypted with TLS in transit.
Our Commitment
Not Financial Advice
Questions about your data, or want to exercise a privacy right?