Privacy Policy

Last updated: February 5, 2026

College Advisor ("we," "our," or "us") provides a practice management platform for independent college counselors. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect information when you use our service.

Information We Collect

We collect information necessary to provide our college counseling management services:

• Account Information: Name, email address, and organization details when you sign up
• Student Records: Information counselors enter about their students, including names, schools, and academic details
• Session Notes: Meeting notes and documents uploaded by counselors
• Files: Documents uploaded directly or imported from connected services

Google Drive Access

When you connect your Google account, we request read-only access to Google Drive. This allows you to:

• Browse and select files from your Google Drive
• Import selected files into College Advisor for processing

We only access files you explicitly select. We do not scan, index, or access any other files in your Drive. Imported files are copied to our secure storage; we do not modify your Google Drive contents.

How We Use Information

We use collected information to:

• Provide and operate the College Advisor platform
• Process and organize uploaded documents
• Generate session notes, follow-up emails, and reports for counselors using AI processing (see "AI Processing and PII Protection" below)
• Authenticate users and maintain account security

We do not sell, rent, or share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

AI Processing and PII Protection

College Advisor uses artificial intelligence to generate session notes, follow-up emails, and college recommendations from your uploaded content. This processing is performed by Anthropic's Claude API, a third-party AI service.

Before any content is sent to the AI for processing, all personally identifiable information (PII) is removed. Student names, school names, and other identifying details are replaced with anonymous tokens. The AI processes only anonymized content. Names and identifying details are restored in your final output copy, within your account only.

Specifically:

• Session transcripts are tokenized to remove all student names, family member names, school names, and other PII before AI processing
• The AI service (Anthropic) receives only anonymized text and cannot identify individual students
• Anthropic does not use your data to train their AI models (per their usage policy)
• Original identifying information is restored only in the final output delivered to your account

AI-generated content (meeting notes, emails, recommendations) is provided as drafts for your professional review. You are responsible for reviewing and approving all AI-generated content before sharing it with students or families.

Data Storage and Security

Your data is stored securely using industry-standard practices:

• All data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest
• Files are stored in Cloudflare R2 with encryption
• Authentication is handled by Clerk, a SOC 2 compliant provider
• Google OAuth tokens are encrypted using AES-256

Data Retention

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. You may request deletion of your data at any time by contacting us. Upon account deletion, we remove all associated data within 30 days.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate information
• Request deletion of your data
• Disconnect Google Drive access at any time
• Export your data in a portable format

Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services to operate College Advisor:

• Anthropic (Claude API): AI processing for session note generation, email drafting, and college recommendations. Receives only PII-tokenized (anonymized) content. Does not use your data for model training.
• Clerk: Authentication and user management (SOC 2 certified)
• Cloudflare: Hosting, storage, and content delivery (SOC 2, ISO 27001 certified)
• Google: Optional Drive integration for file imports

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify users of significant changes via email or through the application.