What we measure, and what we never will

• We count which pages and features get used, so we know what to fix and what to build next.
• No tracking cookies, no ads, no selling or sharing data, and nothing that follows you to other websites.
• We never record your grades, test scores, income, name, email, the colleges on your lists, or anything you type.
• If your browser sends a privacy signal, we send nothing at all.
• If you have an account, you can download or delete everything we keep about you from your account page.

When you use the site, your browser tells us things like: you opened a page, you searched, you changed a filter, you opened a college, you added a college to Compare, you opened a source note or a glossary term. For colleges, we note which college (that is public information), never anything about you.

This is anonymous. Measuring visits sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser to recognize you, so there is no banner to click and nothing to clear. Because nothing is stored, one visit is one session: if you come back tomorrow, we can't tell it's you. Your approximate country or region (worked out from your connection, then the connection address is thrown away) helps us see where visits come from.

We only ever send a fixed list of named events. Pages and fields we add later can't start reporting on their own, and no typed text is collected automatically.

These never leave your device as part of our measurements, whether or not you have an account:

• Grades and test scores, including what you type into a score checker. We only note that someone used it and, at most, whether a score landed inside a college's usual range, never the score.
• Income, assets, or any money amount from you or your family.
• Names, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and your high school.
• The contents of your lists and anything you type into a search box or form. We note that a search found results, not what you searched for.
• Recordings of your screen, mouse movements, or heat maps. We don't make them.

This is enforced in the code: each event we can send has a fixed list of allowed details, and an automatic check fails the build if one is named after something personal.

Signing in is optional. When you do, our measurements carry a random account number (not your name or email) instead of being anonymous. That lets us see whether the site is useful over time, for example whether people come back to finish what they started, and whether students, parents, and counselors use it differently. We also count when an account is created, and whether you came through an invitation.

Signed-in visits are not given even a country or region. Signing in sets the cookies the site needs to remember that you are signed in; they aren't used for measuring.

What an account stores (your profile, your household, your lists) is shown on your account page, where you can download it or delete your account. You must be 13 or older to make one. See the household and access log entries in the glossary for how families share information.

We use Vercel Speed Insights to see how fast pages load and respond on phones and computers. It reports timings for a page, not anything about you, and it doesn't use cookies.

When a page breaks or a college can't be found, we count it by page address so we can fix it. We don't record who saw it or what they were doing.

• Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. If your browser or an extension sends either signal, we load nothing and send nothing, not even a page view. There's nothing to switch off on our side.
• Ad and tracker blockers. Ordinary blockers can stop our measurements. That's fine: you are simply not counted, and the site works the same.
• Signing out. Signing out returns your visits to anonymous.
• Your account. Download or delete it any time from the account page.

These companies handle data for us, only to run the site. We don't sell data to anyone.

• PostHog (servers in the United States) receives the usage events described above, and shows them to us in charts.
• Vercel hosts the site and provides Speed Insights.
• Supabase stores accounts and what an account holds.
• Supabase also sends sign-in links; Resend sends the other emails you ask for: invitations and update emails you opt into.

The college figures themselves are public data, with sources and years listed on the Data page.

Usage events are kept for 12 months, then deleted. Summaries that no longer point to any one visit (for example, how many visits a month) are kept longer. Account data stays until you delete your account.

Last updated: October 2026. If we ever want to measure something new about people, rather than about pages, we will change this page first and say what changed in the release notes.