Your account and rooms
SideQuest uses Firebase Authentication for sign-in. We save your account ID, name, email address, and account creation and sign-in times. A session cookie keeps you signed in. We also save the rooms and company workspaces you belong to, invitations, and any company name, initials, and color you set.
Collaborative room access requires membership. An invitation lets someone join your room, so share invitation links with the people you intend to invite. Joining a company workspace does not automatically give someone access to every room. Interview rooms also support invited guests and viewers without an account, as described below.
Video, audio, and screen sharing
LiveKit carries your live audio, video, and screen share to the other participants. Your camera, microphone, and screen-sharing controls determine what you send to the call.
SideQuest does not currently record the call’s audio or video. Q listening is a separate feature: it turns speech from your microphone into text that can be saved in the conversation.
When Q listens and responds
In collaborative rooms, when Q listening is on, your browser’s speech recognition service transcribes your microphone. This may send audio to your browser vendor’s speech service. Finalized speech text and typed messages are saved and shared with invited room members.
Q’s replies use OpenAI. Your message, recent conversation, and relevant content from a result explicitly shared with the room can be sent to OpenAI to produce a reply. Q’s generated voice also uses OpenAI, and recent reply audio is saved so room members can play it.
Each participant controls Q listening and voice playback on their own device. Use Stop Q listening to stop transcribing your microphone. Hiding captions only hides text on the video; it does not stop transcription. Muting Q’s voice only stops playback on your device.
Interview guests, viewers, and Team Q
Interview guests and viewers enter a display name and wait for the host to admit them. A separate room-scoped cookie identifies their guest session. We save their display name, role, admission status, transcription preference, and hashes of invitation and session tokens. Guest links allow one enrollment and expire after one hour; interview sessions last up to eight hours.
The host and explicitly invited interviewers share a private, text-only Team Q conversation. Guests and viewers cannot access it. Typed room messages and opted-in microphone captions are saved, shared with attendees, and can be sent to OpenAI as context when an interviewer asks Q a question. Guests and viewers can read only the retained room messages from after their admission.
Microphone transcription starts off and each participant chooses whether to enable it. You can speak without transcription. Turning transcription off stops future captions; it does not erase text already shared. Viewers can watch, listen, and read, but cannot publish media or send room messages. Screen sharing exposes the window or screen you select, so keep private Team Q content out of your share.
Host removal, ending, or session expiry blocks guest access and requests media disconnection. The interview team retains its saved conversation after the session ends. Session expiry does not delete that conversation.
Research, tasks, and saved work
Starting a task sends its prompt and relevant saved-work context to OpenAI. Research can search and read public websites. Hosted computer tasks can create files and capture screenshots of the computer’s browser actions. Task requests, activity, results, and saved computer files are stored so you can return to your work. Saved files may be loaded onto a fresh computer when you continue a task.
Your personal saved results are separate from the room’s shared result. Share this result with room publishes a copy for invited members. You or the room owner can remove that shared copy. Removing it does not delete your personal original or copies another participant has already saved.
Connected agents
The MCP pilot supports manual connection tokens and a private OAuth account-linking flow. For a manual token, we store its hash, name, account owner, expiry, revocation status, and the rooms it can access. The raw token is shown once. OAuth also stores the approved client, permissions, grant, expiry, and encrypted browser interaction state. OAuth access and refresh credentials are stored under hashed identifiers.
A connection can create rooms and read or post in those rooms, subject to its approved permissions, while your account remains a member. OAuth consent shows the account and requested permissions before access is granted.
An agent’s brief and messages are saved in the room’s shared conversation and labeled as agent contributions. Reading that conversation sends recent shared messages to the connected client and its provider. Personal saved research and other rooms are excluded. The pilot does not grant camera, microphone, or live call access.
You can revoke a connection in agent settings. Connections expire after 30 days; OAuth access tokens expire after one hour and can be refreshed while the grant remains active. Revocation stops future access and refresh; it does not delete existing rooms, messages, or copies already received by the agent provider.
Browser storage and service providers
SideQuest uses browser storage for saved workspace and conversation caches, pending changes, and the last room you visited. Signed-in work is also saved on the server. Clearing browser storage does not delete server-side work.
The services involved depend on the features you use: Google/Firebase for account services and cloud infrastructure, LiveKit for calls, OpenAI for Q and tasks, and your browser’s speech service for listening. These services process the data needed for those features.
What you can control today
You can turn off your camera, microphone, screen share, Q listening, and Q voice; choose whether to share a saved result; remove a result you shared; and sign out. Signing out ends this browser’s session. It does not erase saved rooms, conversations, or work.
Self-serve account deletion is not available in the app yet. This page explains the current product behavior; it does not promise that saved data is deleted after a particular period.