Privacy
CareerKernel runs on your computer. Your job search stays there.
This is not a marketing line, it is how the thing is built: there is no CareerKernel server that sees your searches, and there is no account to create. What follows is the detail, including the one exception.
Last updated 30 September 2026. Applies to CareerKernel 0.4.1 for Windows. The copy of this document inside the application is the authoritative one.
What never leaves your computer
All of this is written to a folder belonging to your Windows user account, and nothing sends it anywhere:
| What | Where it is kept |
|---|---|
| Your name, email, phone, address | profile.json |
| Your school, degree, major, graduation date, GPA | profile.json |
| Your resume | resumes\, a copy, so moving the original does not break it |
| Answers you give to application questions | answers.json |
| The jobs collected for you | scraped_jobs.db |
| Which applications you have prepared | applications.db |
| Your search terms, roles, country and cities | collection.json |
| Your licence key and trial state | licence.json |
On an installed copy that folder is %APPDATA%\CareerKernel.
You can open it, read it, copy it, or delete it. Deleting it removes everything the application knows about you. There is no copy anywhere else.
Your resume is never uploaded to us. It is attached to an application form on the employer's own website, by the browser on your machine, in the same way it would be if you attached it by hand.
What the application connects to
Collecting jobs means asking employers for their listings, so your computer talks directly to them:
boards-api.greenhouse.ioandboards.greenhouse.ioapi.lever.coapi.ashbyhq.com*.myworkdayjobs.com, each employer's own Workdaywww.amazon.jobsexplore.jobs.netflix.net- the employer's own careers site, when you open or apply to a job
www.uscis.gov, only if you choose to load the H-1B sponsorship data
These are the same public endpoints an employer's own careers page uses. Your computer asks them for job listings. It does not tell them who you are, and it sends nothing about you, your resume or your profile.
Those companies can see that some computer asked for their listings, in the way any website can see a visitor. We cannot see it at all.
There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting and no usage tracking.
The one exception: the free trial
The free trial lasts 7 days. To stop it being restarted indefinitely by deleting a file, the start date is also kept by us, not only on your computer.
When the trial begins, the application sends one request containing:
- a one-way fingerprint of your computer: a SHA-256 hash of the Windows installation ID, mixed with a value specific to this product
- the date this copy thinks its trial started
That is the whole request. It contains no name, no email, no hostname, no username, no IP address that we store, nothing about your searches, and nothing about your resume.
The fingerprint cannot be reversed. It is a hash, not an identifier we can read, and because it is salted per-product it cannot be matched against the same computer as seen by any other software.
If the check cannot be reached, the application carries on working. An outage never locks anybody out.
A paid licence is never checked against a server. Once you have a key, the application verifies it with arithmetic on your own machine. It keeps working offline, it keeps working if this company disappears, and it cannot be switched off remotely.
In the version currently being tested this request is not being made at all. This section describes what happens when trial enforcement is turned on, so that it is written down before it is true rather than after.
What the application does with a browser
When you apply to a job, the application opens Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, the one already on your computer, and fills in the employer's form.
- It uses its own browser profile, in
%APPDATA%\CareerKernel\.browser_apply. Your everyday browsing, history, passwords and logins are not touched and not read. - That profile keeps you signed in to employers between applications, so a Workday account is signed into once per employer rather than once per job. It therefore holds live session cookies for employers you have signed in to, which makes it as sensitive as a browser profile. Deleting the folder signs you out of all of them.
- It never types a password. Password fields are not even read.
- It never creates an account for you.
- It never presses submit. Every application is left open for you to check and send yourself.
Sharing
Nothing is shared, sold, or passed to anyone, because nothing is collected. There is no database of users to share from.
The one exception is this website. If you give us your email address to join the beta, that address is held by our form provider so that we can email you once, when your copy is ready. It is not used for anything else and it is not passed on.
Your choices
- See everything held about you: open
%APPDATA%\CareerKernel - Delete everything: delete that folder
- Stop the trial check: being offline is enough, and the application still works
- Forget a remembered answer: delete the entry from
answers.json - Sign out of employers: delete
%APPDATA%\CareerKernel\.browser_apply - Come off the beta list: email us and it is gone
The uninstaller may offer to remove your data, or may leave it so a reinstall keeps your profile and answers. Deleting the folder yourself is the way to be certain it is gone.