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What leaves this browser

Privacy

There is no account and no database behind this site. Most of what you do stays in this browser. This page lists everything that does not, and the service that receives it.

Last updated 30 September 2026

In short

There is nothing to sign up for, and the site sets no cookies of its own.

No account

There is nothing to sign up for, and the site sets no cookies of its own.

What stays in this browser

Your progress and streak, the marks you give interview answers, your mock interview history, your boards, your code drafts and run history, and your settings, such as the theme, the font, the text size and the narrator’s voice. They are kept in this browser’s local storage. None of it is sent anywhere, except that the narrator’s voice, speed and pitch go with the text it reads, as described below. They do not follow you to another browser or device, and clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.

What leaves it

  • Page analytics Vercel Web Analytics counts page views. For each one it receives the page’s address, including its query string, and the referrer, and works out your country, device type, browser and operating system from the request. Vercel Speed Insights records how fast pages load. Neither sets a cookie.
  • The narrator When a chapter is read aloud, the text being read is sent to this site’s /api/tts a few paragraphs at a time, with your chosen voice, speed and pitch, and the server asks Microsoft’s Edge read-aloud service for the audio. It is the chapter’s own text, never anything you typed.
  • Error reports When something breaks, the error message, the stack trace, the page address and your browser’s user agent go to /api/client-error and into the host’s logs. If error tracking with Sentry is switched on, the report goes to Sentry instead, with Sentry’s option to send personal data turned off. Sentry then also receives timing traces for about one in ten page loads and page changes, and an error report sent to it can include the addresses of recent requests and page changes.
  • Language runtimes Running Python, SQL, Lua, Ruby, PHP, C or C++ in the playground downloads that language’s runtime from jsDelivr, a public CDN. Your code runs in your browser and is not sent with the download.
  • Hosting Vercel serves every page and keeps standard request logs: the address requested, your IP address and your browser’s user agent. The dev joke on the progress page is fetched by the server from JokeAPI, and nothing of yours goes with it.

What never leaves

Your code and your answers. A share link from the playground or the whiteboard carries the code or the board after the # in its address, and browsers do not send that part to a server when they open a page. The page removes it from the address as soon as it has read it. An error in the moment before that can still carry it, in a report to /api/client-error or, if it is switched on, to Sentry.

Who runs this site

Groundwork is run by AustinCoders, at groundwork.austincoders.com. For questions about privacy or your data, write to help@austincoders.com. That is also the address to ask for anything held in the host’s logs or in Sentry to be removed.