Friction monitoring & consent
Summary
Friction is an academic-integrity tool that makes the process of AI-assisted writing visible to your assessor. While you work on an assignment in the Friction editor, the platform records the sequence of actions you take — your prompts and responses with the built-in Task Assistant, edits to your document, paste events, and your optional dialogue with the Companion Peer. That record is synthesised into a Friction Report, which your assessor reads. You consent before any session begins, and you can stop a session at any time.
What Friction records
Friction records the following, and only the following, while you have an active session open:
- Prompts you send to the built-in Task Assistant and the responses returned to you.
- Edits to your document inside the Friction editor — the resulting text, word-count deltas, and the timing between actions.
- Paste events into the editor: the size and word count of each paste, a best-effort source domain when available, a provenance classification, a non-reversible fingerprint used to spot repeats, and a short excerpt — up to roughly 400 characters — so the Friction Report can reference what entered your draft. Friction does not claim that it can identify the originating browser tab.
- Every question and response in a Companion Peer dialogue, including whether you dismissed or ended it and whether a response was typed or spoken.
- Session-level metadata: when each session began and ended, total time in session and assignment context needed to organise the report.
- Timestamps for every recorded event.
What Friction does not record
The list above is exhaustive. Specifically, Friction does not capture:
- Browsing or activity on any website that is not the Friction editor or the AI tools permitted for your assignment.
- Keystrokes, mouse activity, or window focus events outside the Friction editor.
- Screen recordings, screenshots, microphone input, or webcam activity.
- Anything that happens before you start a session or after you submit. The session is bounded — when you pause or end, recording pauses or ends with it.
- Full clipboard history. A qualifying paste may be processed up to 2,000 characters at the moment the Companion question is written, but the event record retains only the shorter excerpt described under What Friction records.
How your data is used
The recorded events feed two things: the non-blocking Companion Peer, which may ask about a meaningful paste, and the Friction Report, which is generated when you submit. Code decides whether a Companion dialogue opens; the AI model writes only its conversational wording. Internal reuse stays quiet, Task Assistant matches may open at 30 words, and external or unknown pastes may open at 100 words. You can continue writing, use the Task Assistant, dismiss, or end the dialogue at any time. The report is produced by sending the recorded event timeline to an AI model (Anthropic Claude) operated by Anthropic under their commercial terms; the model summarises the timeline and maps it against the assessment criteria your assessor has defined. Your assessor reads the report and may also inspect the underlying event log if the report flags something they want to verify.
Records are retained for the duration of the assignment and for as long as the educational institution requires for academic-integrity audits. Once your report has been generated you can read your own copy from your assignment page. Your assessor’s copy may additionally include criteria they have chosen to assess privately, which are not shown to you.
Your rights
You may withdraw consent at any time by ending your active session and contacting your assessor. Withdrawal stops further monitoring; it does not retroactively delete events recorded before withdrawal, because those events form part of the academic-integrity record for work you have already submitted. You may request access to or correction of personal data Friction holds about you by writing to the address below; if you dispute an interpretation in your Friction Report, raise it with your assessor in the first instance.
Questions
Speak to your assessor first, or write to policy@frictionedu.com.