Privacy notice
COMPASS is run by the Hsu lab at Arc Institute (hsulab@arcinstitute.org). This page says what the service records about its visitors and about the agents that connect to it, and why.
Browsing the atlas
Browsing needs no account. Like any web server, ours keeps standard request logs: the requesting IP address, the time, the URL and query, the response status and the browser's user-agent string. They are kept in Google Cloud Logging and are used only to keep the service running and to understand its load. There are no analytics or advertising scripts and no third-party trackers.
Your browser stores a few preferences locally (panel widths, recently opened clusters); they never leave your device. The page loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, so your browser also requests those files from Google.
Agents and Google sign-in
Agents connect at /mcp after their user signs in with a Google account. We request Google's basic
sign-in scopes (openid, email, profile) and receive the account's email address and name; we never see the Google
password and read nothing else in the account. The email identifies the agent's requests: it is written to each
tool-call log line together with the tool name, duration and outcome, and it is the key for per-account rate limits.
Each sign-in is logged the same way. These logs are used to operate the service and to understand how it is used.
The access tokens we issue are signed tokens that live in your client, not in a database here; access tokens expire after 1 hour and refresh tokens after 30 days. Removing the server from your client ends the connection. To have an account blocked, or its log entries removed, contact us.
Downloads and sharing
Sequence and alignment downloads are served and logged the same way as pages. We do not sell personal data or share it with anyone outside the team operating the service, except that the service is hosted on Google Cloud, which processes this data on our behalf under Google Cloud's terms.
Contact and changes
Questions or requests: the Hsu lab at Arc Institute (hsulab@arcinstitute.org). If this notice changes, the new version appears here with a new date.