Privacy Policy
1What this policy covers
This policy explains what information AdmitMap collects when you use our website, funnel, account and reports (the "Service"), why we collect it, who else touches it, and what control you have over it. It applies to everyone who uses AdmitMap, wherever you are.
Using the Service is also governed by our Terms of Service.
2Who is responsible for your data
AdmitMap is operated by Arlan Nurmanov, an individual sole operator based in the Republic of Kazakhstan. For the purposes of data protection law, we are the "data controller" — meaning we decide what is collected and why, and we are the ones you hold accountable.
Contact for any privacy matter, including deletion requests: support@admitmap.com.
3What we collect
Information you give us
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Account | Email address, password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we cannot read it), the date you signed up. |
| Academic profile | Graduation year, unweighted GPA, SAT and ACT scores, AP and other coursework, intended major. |
| Activities & honors | Extracurricular activities, roles, hours, descriptions, awards and recognition levels. |
| Financial | An approximate household income band and household size, used solely to estimate net price. We do not ask for and do not want exact income, tax documents, bank details, or a Social Security number. |
| School list | The colleges you add, and the application round you are considering for each. |
| Essay | Essay text, only if you choose to submit one for grading. See section 5 — we do not keep it. |
| Support | Anything you write to us by email, and our replies. |
Please do not enter information we have not asked for — no government ID numbers, no financial account numbers, and no medical details. If an essay you submit happens to mention sensitive personal circumstances, it is processed only to grade the essay and is then discarded.
Information collected automatically
- Technical logs. Our hosting provider records standard server information for each request: IP address, browser and device type, pages requested, referring page, and timestamps. This is used for security, abuse prevention, and debugging.
- Local storage. Your progress through the funnel is saved inside your own browser so you do not lose your work. See section 6.
Information we deliberately do not collect
- Payment card details. Checkout is handled entirely by Lemon Squeezy. Your card number never reaches our servers and we never see it.
- Exact income, tax records, or financial account information.
- Government identifiers of any kind.
- Precise location. We do not request GPS or device location.
4Why we use your information
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR/UK GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Calculate your acceptance estimates and generate your report | Performance of a contract with you |
| Estimate net price and financial aid | Performance of a contract with you |
| Grade an essay you submit | Performance of a contract, at your request |
| Create and maintain your account, and give you access to what you bought | Performance of a contract with you |
| Process your purchase, issue receipts and licence keys | Performance of a contract; legal obligation for tax records |
| Security, fraud prevention, abuse and rate-limit enforcement | Legitimate interests in protecting the Service |
| Improve our models, data quality and interface using aggregated, non-identifying statistics | Legitimate interests in improving the Service |
| Build advertising audiences from hashed email addresses | Legitimate interests in marketing the Service, and consent where the law requires it |
| Send you deadline reminders, product news and offers | Legitimate interests, and consent where the law requires it — see section 8 |
We never sell your personal information, and we never share it with colleges, universities, admissions offices, recruiters, scholarship services, lead brokers, or advertisers. Your profile is not a product we sell to anyone.
5Essays and AI processing
Your essay is the most personal thing you can give us, so we handle it differently from everything else.
- Essay text is sent to us only when you ask for it to be graded.
- Our server forwards it to Anthropic's API, which scores it against our rubric and returns the result.
- Anthropic does not use API inputs to train its models.
- We do not retain your essay text on our servers after grading. It is processed in the request and discarded. We keep only the resulting numeric scores and written feedback so your report stays intact.
- No human at AdmitMap reads your essay as a matter of course. We do not review essays to improve our rubric.
Because we do not store the essay, we also cannot recover it for you. Keep your own copy.
Automated decision-making
Your estimates and scores are produced automatically by software. They have no legal effect on you and do not determine anything — no college sees them and no admission outcome depends on them. If you want a human to look at how a number was produced, email us and we will explain it.
6Data stored in your own browser
As you move through the funnel, your answers are saved in your browser's local
storage — a storage area on your own device, under keys such as
admitmap_profile. This is what stops you losing your work if you refresh or close the
tab.
Data held there stays on that device, in that browser. Clearing your browser data deletes it permanently, including for us — we cannot recover it. Once you create an account, your profile is also saved on our servers so you can return to it from another device.
7Who we share your information with
We share only what is necessary, only with the providers that run the Service:
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Website hosting and serverless functions | Technical request data, including IP address; any data in transit to the Service |
| Anthropic | AI essay grading | Essay text at the moment of grading. Not used for model training. |
| Lemon Squeezy | Payments, as Merchant of Record | Your email, billing details and payment information, handled directly by them |
| Database provider | Storing account profiles | Account and academic profile data. The specific provider is named here once accounts launch. |
| Advertising platforms | Building advertising audiences (see section 8) | Hashed email addresses only. Never your profile, scores, essays or report. |
| Email provider | Sending receipts, licence keys and updates | Your email address and message content. Named here once configured. |
We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect someone's safety or rights. If AdmitMap is ever sold or transferred, your data may transfer with it — we will tell you before that happens and this policy will continue to apply until you are told otherwise.
8Email and marketing
If you give us your email address — whether you complete a purchase or only go through the funnel — we may send you:
- Transactional email: receipts, licence keys, password resets, and messages about something you bought. You cannot unsubscribe from these while you have an account, because they are how the Service works.
- Marketing email: application deadline reminders, product news, and offers, including discounts on further reports.
Every marketing email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and we honour it promptly. You can also unsubscribe any time by emailing support@admitmap.com. Unsubscribing from marketing does not affect access to anything you have purchased.
If you are in the EU, the UK, or another region with opt-in email rules, you may withdraw consent or object to marketing at any time using the same links, and we will stop.
We do not sell or rent your email address, and we never give it to another company to use for that company's own marketing.
Advertising audiences
We advertise AdmitMap on platforms such as Meta (Instagram and Facebook), TikTok and Google. To do that, we may upload a list of email addresses to those platforms so they can:
- match existing users, so we can show you offers or, equally, stop showing you ads for something you already bought; and
- build a "lookalike" audience — the platform finds other people with broadly similar characteristics, and shows our ads to them instead.
What this means in practice:
- Email addresses are sent hashed — scrambled into an irreversible code — so the platform can match them without reading them.
- The platform is contractually permitted to use the list only to build our audience, and for nothing else of its own.
- We never upload your grades, test scores, income band, school list, essays, or report contents to an advertising platform. Only email addresses.
- We do not learn who ends up in a lookalike audience, and those people are strangers to us unless they click an ad and sign up themselves.
To opt out, email support@admitmap.com and ask us to exclude you from advertising audiences, and we will remove you from any list we upload. Unsubscribing from marketing email also removes you. You can additionally limit ad targeting inside each platform's own ad settings.
9Cookies and similar technology
We keep this deliberately minimal:
- Strictly necessary — a session cookie to keep you signed in, and local storage to hold your funnel progress. These cannot be turned off without breaking the Service.
- Payment — Lemon Squeezy may set its own cookies during checkout, governed by their policy.
We do not currently use advertising cookies, cross-site tracking pixels, session-replay recording, or third-party behavioural advertising networks on this site. We advertise AdmitMap elsewhere, as described in section 8, but that is done from an email list rather than by tracking you around the web.
If we ever add analytics or an advertising pixel to the site, we will update this section before it goes live, name the provider, and ask for your consent where the law requires it.
Do Not Track
Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no common industry standard for how to respond to one. We do not track you across other websites at all, so there is nothing for a Do Not Track signal to switch off, and we do not respond to it. If that ever changes, we will say so here.
10Aggregated and de-identified data
We may combine information across many users to produce aggregated or de-identified statistics — for example, the average profile of students applying to a given school, or how accurate our estimates turn out to be across thousands of applications. Before this is done, anything that identifies you is removed, and we do not attempt to re-identify it afterwards.
Aggregated and de-identified data is not personal information, and we may use and publish it to improve our models, check our data quality, and write about admissions trends. Nothing in it names you, quotes you, or can be traced back to you.
11How long we keep things
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Essay text | Not retained — discarded immediately after grading |
| Account and academic profile | While your account is open, and for 12 months after your last sign-in, then deleted |
| Generated reports and scores | With your account, on the same schedule |
| Purchase and tax records | As long as tax and accounting law requires, typically up to 5 years, even after account deletion |
| Server logs | Up to 90 days |
| Support email | Up to 24 months after the conversation ends |
| Marketing list | Until you unsubscribe, then a minimal suppression record so we do not email you again |
12Security
We protect your information with encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS), password hashing rather than plaintext storage, restricted access to production systems, API keys held only on the server and never exposed to the browser, and origin restrictions on our endpoints.
No system is perfectly secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your personal data and creates a real risk to you, we will notify you and any regulator we are required to notify, without undue delay.
13Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
- Access — get a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
- Correct — fix anything inaccurate;
- Delete — erase your data and close your account;
- Export — receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format;
- Object or restrict — object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to pause processing;
- Withdraw consent — where processing relies on consent, withdraw it at any time, without affecting what happened before;
- Opt out of marketing — at any time, via unsubscribe or email;
- Opt out of advertising audiences — ask us to exclude your email address from any list we upload to an advertising platform.
Email support@admitmap.com. We respond within 30 days and never charge for it. We may need to confirm your identity before acting, to make sure we are not handing your data to someone else.
If you are in the EU, UK, or Switzerland
The rights above are your GDPR / UK GDPR rights. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority. We would rather you came to us first, but that right stands either way.
If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law
You have the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to request a copy, to request deletion, to correct inaccuracies, and to not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined under the CCPA/CPRA. We do provide hashed email addresses to advertising platforms to build audiences, as described in section 8; some regulators treat that as "sharing", so to be safe we treat it as opt-out-able — email us and we will exclude you. Use the same email address to make any request.
Verification. Before we act on a request to access, correct, or delete data, we have to be reasonably sure the request is really from you — otherwise we would be handing your academic profile to a stranger. We will normally verify by asking you to send the request from the email address on the account. If we cannot verify you, we will tell you why rather than simply refusing.
Authorized agents. You may appoint someone to make a request on your behalf. We will ask for written proof that you authorised them, and we may still ask you to confirm your identity directly.
California "Shine the Light". California residents may ask, once a year and free of charge, what personal information a business disclosed to third parties for those third parties' own direct marketing. We do not disclose personal information to anyone for their own direct marketing, so there is nothing to report — but you are welcome to ask and we will confirm that in writing.
14How to delete your data
Two ways, and both work:
- Clear your browser data. This permanently removes everything held locally on that device.
- Email support@admitmap.com asking us to delete your account. We erase your account, academic profile, school list, scores and reports from our systems, and confirm when it is done.
The only things that survive a deletion request are purchase records we are legally obliged to keep for tax purposes, and the minimal suppression record that stops us emailing you again. Deleted reports cannot be restored.
15International data transfers
We operate from Kazakhstan, and our providers operate primarily in the United States and the European Union. If you use AdmitMap from outside those countries, your information will be transferred to and processed in them, and their data protection laws may differ from your own.
Where we transfer data out of the EEA or the UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards, including Standard Contractual Clauses with our providers where applicable. By using the Service you understand that this transfer is necessary in order to provide it to you.
16Links to other sites
AdmitMap links out to places we do not control: college websites, admissions offices, each school's own Net Price Calculator, and services that supply things like institution logos. A link is not an endorsement and does not mean we are affiliated with that site.
This Privacy Policy stops at our edge. Anything you give a third-party site is governed by that site's privacy policy, not ours, and we are not responsible for how they handle it. Read their policy before you hand over anything personal — especially on any site that offers to review or rewrite your essay, since many such services do use what you submit to improve their own models.
17Children
AdmitMap is available to people aged 13 and over. If you are under 18, a parent or legal guardian must agree to our Terms of Service, must be the one who makes any purchase, and is responsible for the information entered. We treat that parent or guardian as the account holder.
Parents and guardians can ask us at any time to show them what we hold about their child, to correct it, or to delete it and close the account. Email support@admitmap.com from any address and we will verify and act on it.
We do not knowingly collect any information from children under 13. If we discover that we have, we delete it immediately. If you are a parent who believes a child under 13 has given us information, email support@admitmap.com and we will remove it right away.
18Changes to this policy
We will update this policy as AdmitMap develops — in particular when accounts launch and when our database and email providers are finalised. The "Last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version.
If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you by email where we have your address, or by a notice on the site, before it takes effect.
19Contact
Any privacy question, access request, or deletion request:
- Email: support@admitmap.com
- Data controller: Arlan Nurmanov, sole operator, Republic of Kazakhstan
A real person reads every message, usually within a few days.