Privacy Policy

1. What We Collect

When you use Ascend Scholar, we collect the following categories of information:

• Account information: name, email address, grade, state
• Academic profile: GPA, extracurricular activities, interests
• Financial information: household income range (used only for scholarship matching)
• Personal narrative: story responses used to generate essay drafts
• Usage data: pages visited, features used, scholarship applications tracked
• Payment confirmation: transaction ID from Stripe (we do not store card numbers)

2. How We Use Your Information

• Match you with scholarships you are eligible for
• Generate personalized essay drafts using AI
• Send deadline reminders for scholarships you are applying to
• Improve our matching algorithm and product features
• Comply with legal obligations

3. COPPA Compliance

Ascend Scholar complies with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. If a user indicates they are under 13 during onboarding, account creation is paused and a consent request is sent to the parent or guardian's email address. The account remains locked until the parent or guardian clicks the confirmation link in that email. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child under 13 without consent, please contact us immediately at privacy@ascendscholar.co.

4. No Data Selling — Ever

We will never sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes. Period. Your data is used exclusively to provide and improve the Ascend Scholar service.

5. Data Sharing

We share data only with:

• Supabase: Secure database and authentication provider
• Stripe: Payment processing (PCI-DSS compliant)
• Anthropic: AI essay generation (prompts only, no PII sent in prompts)
• PostHog: Anonymized product analytics

6. Data Deletion

You have the right to request deletion of your account and all associated data at any time. To submit a deletion request, email privacy@ascendscholar.co with the subject line "Data Deletion Request" and your registered email address. We will process your request within 30 days and confirm deletion via email.

7. Security

We protect your data using Supabase Row Level Security (RLS), encrypted connections (TLS), and JWT-based authentication. Access to your data is restricted to your authenticated session only.

8. Contact

Privacy questions or concerns: privacy@ascendscholar.co