Effective October 30, 2026
OTTER (Outreach Targeting, Tracking & Engagement Router) is the internal tool that organizers of SB Hacks, a student-run hackathon at UC Santa Barbara, use to manage sponsorship outreach. This policy explains what OTTER collects and how it's used.
Who this covers
- Organizers who sign in to OTTER and connect a Gmail account.
- Contacts: people at companies we may approach about sponsoring SB Hacks.
Information we collect
About organizers: sign-in email address and name from Google; Discord ID (only for organizers who choose to link their Discord account so the Discord bot recognises them); LinkedIn profile URL; timezone; and Google OAuth tokens for connected mailboxes, which are encrypted when stored.
About contacts: name, job title, company, work email address and LinkedIn profile URL, gathered from business data providers and imported lists; the emails we exchange with them; LinkedIn messages that organizers log; and internal notes, labels and a priority score.
Gmail data
OTTER requests two Google permissions for each connected mailbox:
gmail.send, to send outreach emails from that mailbox.gmail.modify, to read campaign threads and apply an "SB Outreach" label.
OTTER only opens threads that it started or emails from tracked contacts. For anything else in the mailbox, it sees only message and thread IDs, which it uses to check whether a message belongs to a campaign, and it doesn't fetch the content. Each message it fetches is recorded in an access log.
OTTER's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We use Gmail data only to run outreach for SB Hacks. We don't sell it, use it for advertising, or use it to train AI models.
How we use information
- Finding, prioritizing and contacting potential sponsors, and sending follow-ups.
- Detecting and sorting replies, and stopping outreach when someone replies or asks us to stop.
- Showing organizers lead activity, drafts and reminders.
- Keeping the system secure and working correctly.
Who we share it with
We don't sell personal information. We share it only with services that help run OTTER, and only as needed for the purposes above:
- Google Cloud for hosting and backups, and Google Workspace or Gmail for sending and receiving email.
- Anthropic, whose AI models draft emails, score leads and sort replies. They receive contact details and, for reply sorting and drafting, the relevant message text.
- Discord, where organizers receive alerts that can include contact details and reply summaries.
- Hunter and Airscale, to find and verify work email addresses.
- Smartlead, while we finish moving existing campaigns off it, and Unipile, only if we enable its optional LinkedIn integration.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it.
Retention
We keep outreach records while they're useful for current and future SB Hacks sponsorship work, and we keep a list of people who asked not to be contacted so that we can honor the request. Database backups are normally deleted after 30 days, and monthly backups after one year.
Your choices
- Contacts: reply to any of our emails asking us to stop, and we'll stop contacting you. You can also ask to see, correct or delete your information by replying to one of our emails.
- Organizers: you can remove OTTER's access at any time in your Google Account permissions. Sending from that mailbox then stops.
Security
Data is sent over HTTPS, OAuth tokens are encrypted when stored, and only organizers signing in with an SB Hacks Google account can sign in. No system is perfectly secure, but we limit access to what's needed.
Changes
If we change this policy, we'll update this page and its effective date.
Contact
For questions, reply to any email you received from us.