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Harvard College students hunting for a break from dining hall food now have a new tool at their disposal: Veritasty, an online map of events on campus with free food.

The student-run platform, which pulls data from undergraduate email lists, was originally open to the public. But after College officials voiced privacy concerns, Veritasty’s creators restricted the platform to current undergraduates.

Veritasty scrapes details like the location, date, time, type of food, and the original email listing for each event featured on the website. The site also invites users to submit additional free-food events.

But just a day after the site’s launch on Nov. 8, student creators Anmay Gupta ’27 and Heorhii Ambartsumov ’27 said they temporarily took the site offline when Harvard officials asked them to “remove private information” and restrict access to Harvard affiliates.

Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo confirmed that the College, which is not affiliated with Veritasty, had requested modifications over email, pointing to publicizing the location of student-run events as particularly concerning.

Gupta and Ambartsumov temporarily disabled the website to implement HarvardKey authentication — the University’s secure login platform — before relaunching on Sunday.

“Their main concern was that the website was wide open to the public — to any person who is not a member of the Harvard College community — and that’s reasonable,” Ambartsumov said.

In the week that the site was offline, its homepage displayed a message attributing the shutdown to the concerns voiced by administrators.

Veritasty works by instructing users to set up a Gmail forwarding filter that scrapes events sent on email lists and forwards the information to Veritasty, according to Ambartsumov. Veritasty then uses automated tools to confirm that food will be offered before parsing the details into a searchable interface.

Though Gupta and Ambartsumov have restricted access to undergraduates for now, they hope to allow graduate students to access the site in the future.

“We want to expand it more into doing other events as well, so that we can actually get more into the ecosystem,” Gupta said. “There’s so much going on at Harvard — there’s always something that’s the right fit for you there.”

Gupta and Ambartsumov said they hope the website can also serve as a “feedback loop” for organizations to gauge the popularity of their events.

“We’re thinking about adding analytics and stuff, and adding view counts, for example,” Gupta said. “That would allow people to actually gauge ‘Oh, is my event going to do well? Do I start hyping it up more? Do I need to start pubbing?’”

“Harvard lacks this feedback loop of events. You just push it out and then people show up,” he added. “We want to hasten that feedback loop, and we think it’ll be pretty valuable to people to actually see how popular an event is.”

Gupta estimated that the site had received nearly a thousand individual users as of Tuesday.

“It’s been pretty successful overall,” Gupta said. “It’s nice building something that people want.”

—Staff writer Bianca G. Ciubancan can be reached at bianca.ciubancan@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Chantel A. De Jesus can be reached at chantel.dejesus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @c_a_dejesus.