The fine print, unfine-printed

Privacy policy.

The short version: we never sell your data. Ever. We store as little as possible, and you can delete all of it yourself, anytime, with one button. Last updated July 17, 2026.

If you don't create an account

Everything the site remembers about you (articles you've read, quiz results, calculator inputs, your plan, badges, skill progress) lives in your own browser's storage, on your device. It never reaches our servers. Clear your browser data and it's gone.

We use privacy-respecting page analytics (Vercel Web Analytics) to see which pages get visited. It counts visits in aggregate: no cookies, no advertising identifiers, no profile of you, and no tracking across other sites. We can see that a thousand people read the FAFSA guide; we cannot see that you did.

We set no tracking cookies at all. Fonts and images are served from our own site, so reading a page here doesn't announce itself to Google Fonts or any other third party. Our host (Vercel) keeps standard, short-lived server logs to run and protect the service, as every website's host does.

If you create an account

Accounts exist to sync that same progress across your devices. When you sign up we store, on our database provider (Supabase):

  • Your email address and a securely hashed password. If you sign in with Google instead, Google shares your name and email with us and nothing else; we never see your Google password. Signing in keeps a session token in your browser's storage — not a tracking cookie.
  • Your profile, if you fill it in: a display name, an optional “where you are in life” tag (student — with an optional high school / community college / university detail — working, or retired), the goals you pick, your flairs, an optional short bio, an optional profile photo, and whether you want any of it shown publicly.
  • Your synced progress — the same data that otherwise stays on your device, mirrored so your devices agree. Concretely: reading history on this site, quiz and knowledge-check results, calculator inputs (including budget numbers you type), your plan, the student tracker (courses, GPA, scholarship applications), goal check-ins, the optional about-you answers (like how your income arrives or who you support financially), and skill-tree mastery. This can include real financial numbers, which is exactly why it's protected so each account can only ever read its own rows.

That's the whole list. No real names required, no phone numbers, no location, no browsing history beyond this site's own pages.

Your saved posts, follows, and pinned channels are personal-only: they sync so your devices agree, but no one else can see them. Likes work two ways, and we want to be precise: signed out, a like is a private bookmark on your device that nobody counts. Signed in, your like is stored with your account so it can be counted once in the public tally on that post. The tally shows a number, never a list of who liked what.

Your public presence (all of it optional)

  • Member pagesare opt-in and OFF by default. Until you flip “public profile” on, your page shows nothing personal.
  • Profile photosyou upload are stored publicly (that's what makes them displayable) but only appear to others if your public profile is on. Remove or replace yours anytime from the account page.
  • Pictures attached to posts are public once the post is published, like the post itself.

Community posts and comments

Reading the community requires nothing. Posting and commenting require an account, and your display name appears with what you write (your tag and flairs appear only if you've turned “show my tag” on). Nothing you submit is public immediately: comments are screened — first by an automated check (see the AI section below), with anything uncertain held for a human — and posts are reviewed by a human before publishing. You can ask us to take any published post, comment, or picture down at any time.

The AI features, honestly

Four features use an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic). Using them sends some of your text to Anthropic for processing; not using them sends nothing. Per Anthropic's API terms, that data is not used to train their models.

  • The Money Guide chat: your question, the last few turns of that chat, and — if you've saved profile details — a one-sentence summary of them (so answers fit your situation) are processed to write the reply. Chats aren't stored on our servers.
  • My Plan:your intake answers (goal, timeline, how your income arrives, who you support) and a list of what you've already read or used here are processed to assemble your plan from our own guides.
  • The mock interviewer: the job you pick, the difficulty, and the interview answers you type are processed to run the practice interview and write its feedback. The transcript lives only in your open tab; we store none of it, and the tool tells you not to use real personal details.
  • Comment screening:the text of a comment you submit is checked for scams, personal contact information, and similar problems before it publishes. Anything the check isn't sure about waits for a human.

Email we send and receive

  • Account emails (verification, password reset) are sent through Resend, only when you trigger them.
  • If you sign up for deadline reminder emails, we store your email address and exactly which kinds of email you agreed to; every reminder carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without signing in.
  • The contact form, the anonymous question form, and community submissions are delivered to our inbox by Web3Forms. Adding your email to the question form is optional and only used to reply to you.
  • If you email us, we keep the thread like any inbox does. We never add you to a list you didn't ask for.

What we never do

  • Sell or share your data with advertisers or brokers. Ever.
  • Run ads, ad pixels, or social-media trackers. There is no Facebook pixel, no Google advertising tag, nothing of that species here.
  • Send you marketing email you didn't ask for.
  • Use your data to train AI models, ours or anyone's.
  • Require an account for anything. Every guide, tool, and quiz works logged out, forever.

Where links lead

The scholarship finder, opportunity finder, and resources pages link out to official sites we've verified — but once you leave, their privacy practices apply, not ours. We link directly, with no tracking parameters added.

Age

The guides and tools are for everyone. Creating an account requires being 13 or older. If you're under 13, keep using the site logged out; you lose nothing except cross-device sync. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 13, we'll delete it.

Deleting everything

You can delete your account yourself, right now, no email required: the account page's Security tab has a delete button. It immediately and permanently removes everything on our servers — your sign-in, synced progress, profile, photo, likes, comments, and any reminder signup. If you'd rather a human handle it (or something goes wrong), email privacy@economicmobilityproject.org from your account's email and we'll do it by hand, normally within a few days. Community posts we curated onto the site come down on request too. Logged-out data is yours to clear anytime from your own browser (or from the Start Here page's backup tools, which also let you export everything first).

Who holds the data

The site runs on Vercel (hosting, page analytics); accounts and synced data live with Supabase (Postgres, hosted in the United States), protected so that each account can only ever read its own rows. Anthropic processes the AI features' text as described above. Form submissions are delivered by Web3Forms, and account and reminder email is sent through Resend. Each of these providers processes data only to do that one job for us; none of them may use it for anything else.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll say so plainly on this page and update the date at the top. No silent edits. (July 17, 2026: rewrote this page to cover the AI features, public like tallies, profile photos, and reminder emails in detail — practices didn't change, the writing caught up. Later the same day: account deletion became self-serve, and deleting your account now also removes your comments automatically, and the AI mock interviewer launched — its section above was added the same day it shipped.)