Privacy Policy – College Deadline

Effective date: TODO: effective date

Overview

College Deadline, LLC (“College Deadline,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) is a Georgia limited liability company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. We are building a college-planning platform that helps students discover, compare, organize, and prepare for colleges and universities across the United States.

This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, how we use and share it, and the choices you have. It applies to our website and to the early-access waitlist forms available on it.

The platform is still in development. Most of what this policy describes is the information we collect today, which is limited to what you submit through our forms and a small amount of technical information about your visit. Sections that describe information we will only collect once the platform launches are marked as such, and we do not collect that information now.

We try to collect only what we need to provide the service. That is a commitment we hold ourselves to internally, not just language in a policy.

Information We Collect

Information you give us today

When you join the waitlist or contact us, we collect the information you enter on the form. Depending on which form you use and how you describe yourself, that may include:

Your first and last name
Your email address
Your state
The role you select, such as student, parent or guardian, counselor, educator, school administrator, college or university representative, community organizer, alumni, or investor
The name of your high school, school, district, organization, or institution
Your expected high school graduation year, or the graduation year of the student you support
Your intended major or field of interest
Whether you would be a first-generation college student
Your interest in historically Black colleges and universities
For parents and guardians, the number of students you support and the topics you are interested in
For counselors, your school district, the number of students you serve, and your interest in pilot programs
For institutional representatives, your department and the areas you are interested in
Anything else you choose to write in a message or free-text field

You decide what to submit. Only a small number of fields are required, and you can use the site without submitting any form at all.

Information collected automatically

When you visit the site, we record a limited amount of technical information:

A hashed version of your IP address. We store a one-way hash rather than the address itself. We use it to enforce submission rate limits and to detect abuse, and it cannot be reversed back into your IP address.
Your browser’s user agent string
The page or site you arrived from
The date and time of your submission
General analytics about pages visited and how the site is used, where analytics are enabled

Our use of cookies and similar technologies is described separately in our Cookies Policy.

Information we will collect when the platform launches

We do not collect the following today. It is listed here so you know what to expect, and this policy will be updated with a new effective date before any of it takes effect:

Account credentials and basic profile information
Colleges and universities you save to your list
Comparisons you run between schools
Application and scholarship deadlines and personal planning tasks you track
Scholarships you view or apply to through the platform
Planning preferences and reminder settings

How We Use Information

We use the information we collect to:

Add you to the early-access waitlist and send you launch updates
Respond to questions, partnership enquiries, and support requests
Understand which features students, families, counselors, and institutions actually need, so we build the right things
Coordinate pilot programs with participating schools and nonprofit organizations
Produce aggregate, de-identified statistics about interest in the platform, for internal planning and for sharing with partners, grant-makers, and prospective investors
Protect the site against abuse, spam, and automated submissions
Meet our legal and accounting obligations

We do not use the information you give us to build advertising profiles, and we do not use student information for targeted advertising.

We do not sell personal information. We do not sell individual student information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

We share information only in these circumstances:

Service providers. Companies that host our site, deliver our email, and run our customer relationship management system process this information on our behalf, under contract, and only to provide those services to us.
School and partner organizations. If you take part in a pilot program with your school, district, or a nonprofit organization, we share information with that organization as set out in the agreement covering the pilot. Where we act on behalf of a school, we follow that school’s instructions.
Aggregate and de-identified information. We may share statistics that do not identify any individual.
Legal reasons. We may disclose information if required by law, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others.
Business transfers. If College Deadline is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may transfer as part of that transaction. We will give notice before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Children and Student Privacy

College Deadline is built for high school students, most of whom are minors. We take that seriously.

The service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If we learn that we have collected information from a child under 13, we will delete it. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, contact us at TODO: legal contact email and we will act promptly.

If you are between 13 and 17, we ask that you review this policy with a parent or guardian before submitting information. Your school or counselor may also be involved.

A parent, legal guardian, school, or counselor may ask us to review, correct, or delete a student’s information. Write to TODO: legal contact email and tell us enough to locate the record. We will verify the request before acting on it.

Our commitments regarding student information:

We do not sell student information
We do not use student information for targeted advertising
We do not build profiles of students for any purpose other than providing college-planning services
Where we hold student information under an agreement with a school or district, we handle it under that school’s direction and use it only for the purposes that agreement allows
We delete or return student information when an agreement ends, as that agreement requires

Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights over your personal information under state law. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia, among others, have rights of this kind.

Rather than offering different rights to different people, we extend the following to everyone who contacts us, regardless of the state you live in:

Access. Ask what personal information we hold about you.
Correction. Ask us to fix information that is inaccurate.
Deletion. Ask us to delete your personal information.
Portability. Ask for a copy of your information in a portable format.
Opt out. Opt out of any sale or sharing of your personal information, and of targeted advertising. As stated above, we do not do these things — but the right stands.
Withdraw consent. Unsubscribe from our emails at any time using the link in any message we send.
No retaliation. We will not deny you service, charge you differently, or give you a lesser experience because you exercised any of these rights.

How to Exercise Your Rights

Email TODO: legal contact email with the request you want to make. Include the email address you used when you submitted information to us, so we can find the right record.

We will verify that a request genuinely comes from you, or from someone authorized to act for you, before we act on it. Verification usually means confirming control of the email address on file. For a request about a minor, we will also confirm your relationship to that student.

We aim to respond within 30 days. If a request is complex we may take longer, and we will tell you before that happens.

You may use an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf, and we may ask for proof of their authority.

Data Retention

We keep waitlist information until the platform launches and for a reasonable period afterwards, so we can invite you and follow up. If you ask us to delete your information, we delete it sooner.

Records associated with a school or nonprofit pilot are retained for the term of that agreement and handled as the agreement requires when it ends.

We keep a limited amount of information for longer where we are legally required to, such as records supporting our accounting and tax obligations. This does not apply to student planning information.

Where we no longer need information to provide the service, we delete it or remove the details that identify you.

Data Security

We protect the information we hold using measures appropriate to its sensitivity, including:

Encryption of information in transit between your browser and our servers
Storing a one-way hash of your IP address rather than the address itself
Limiting access to personal information to the people whose work requires it
Confidentiality agreements covering everyone who works with us, including contractors and interns
Rate limiting and abuse detection on our forms
Regular review of our privacy and security practices as the product develops

No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as the law requires.

Third-Party Services and Links

Our site links to college and university websites, scholarship providers, and other third-party resources. Those sites have their own privacy policies, and this policy does not cover them. A link is not an endorsement. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of any site you visit.

Changes to This Policy

We will update this policy as the platform develops and as the law changes. When we make a material change, we will update the effective date at the top of this page and give notice by email or through a prominent notice on the site before the change takes effect.

The platform launch will be a material change, and this policy will be updated before any platform account features begin collecting information.

Contact Us

Questions, requests, and concerns about this policy or about your information:

College Deadline, LLC
TODO: full mailing address, Atlanta, Georgia
Email: TODO: legal contact email