Privacy

The short version

• We collect what you type in, and nothing you didn’t.
• We don’t sell your data, and there are no advertising trackers on this site.
• Our AI assistant sends parts of your profile to Google to answer your questions.
• You can download everything we hold, and you can delete your account.
• You have to be 13 to sign up. Under 16, a parent or guardian has to say yes first.

Who we are

Ascenda is a website that helps students find universities and keep track of applications. We decide what happens to the information you give us, which in data-protection language makes us the “controller” of it.

The way to reach us about anything on this page is hello@ascendaedu.com.

What we collect

When you sign up

• Your name, email address and date of birth.
• Your password, which we never see — it is stored scrambled by our login provider.
• If you sign up with Google instead of a password, Google tells us your email address and the name on your Google account.
• If you’re under 16, a parent or guardian’s email address, so we can ask them for permission.

What you tell us about yourself

This is the part that matters most, because it is a real school record. When you fill in your profile we store:

• Your first and last name, phone number, nationality, age, gender, and the country and city you live in.
• Your school’s name, country, city and type, and the language you’re taught in.
• Whether you’re doing IB or A-Levels, when you finish, your subjects and the grade you have or expect in each one.
• Your IB points, Theory of Knowledge and Extended Essay grades and titles, or your predicted A-Level grades.
• Your SAT, ACT, AP or English test scores, and whether you’ve taken them yet.
• What you write in the open questions: your career aspiration, your Extended Essay summary, your work experience, your ambitions, your activities.
• What you say you’re looking for — teaching style, city or campus, size, the things you’re into.

What you do in Ascenda

• The universities and courses you save, and the applications you track.
• Any notes you add to an application, and the outcome if you record one.
• Your tasks and deadlines, and the searches you save.
• Documents you upload — transcripts, references, certificates. PDFs and Word files, up to 20 MB each.
• Your conversations with our AI assistant, and any feedback you leave on its answers.

What we work out about you

We score your profile against the courses in our database to rank your matches. That score, the band it puts you in, and the reasons behind it are stored on your account. It is a guess about fit, not a decision anyone else makes about you, and no university sees it.

What we do with it

• Match you to courses and rank them, using your grades, subjects and preferences.
• Show you deadlines and what’s left to do on each application.
• Answer your questions in the assistant, which needs to know your situation to be useful.
• Keep your account working, and stop people getting into accounts that aren’t theirs.
• Fix bugs and understand what’s broken.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with universities, admissions offices or recruiters. We do not run advertising on Ascenda and there are no third-party advertising or analytics trackers on this site.

The AI assistant, and Google

Ascendi, our assistant, runs on Google’s Gemini models. Google’s computers do the thinking, which means the question you ask and the context we attach to it are sent to Google.

What we attach:

• Your first name, your school, when you finish, and what you’re interested in studying.
• How complete your profile is, and how many subjects you’ve entered.
• Your applications: the university, the course, the status, the next deadline and how many tasks are open.
• Your top matches, with the score we gave each one.
• The conversation so far, and the page you were on when you asked.
• If you ask it about your messages, the messages themselves. If you use the essay tools, the draft you wrote.

We deliberately never send the contents of documents you upload, or their filenames — only how many there are.

If you would rather none of this reached Google, don’t use the assistant. Everything else in Ascenda works without it.

Who else we use

• Supabase stores your account, your data and your uploaded files, and handles logging in.
• Google runs the AI assistant, and handles signing in if you chose the Google button.

That is the whole list. Nobody else receives your data.

Who can see your data

• You. Everything, any time, and you can download it.
• A parent or guardian, if you’re under 16 and they gave permission, or if you’ve linked them to your account. They see your progress and deadlines.
• Us. A small number of Ascenda staff can reach account data to fix problems and keep the service running.

Uploaded documents are stored privately and are not readable from a public address. When you open one, we make a link that works for one hour and then stops.

Cookies and what’s stored in your browser

We use a small number of cookies and all of them are needed to make Ascenda work. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers, so there is nothing to opt out of.

• Login cookies, so you stay signed in between pages.
• A cookie recording whether you have finished setting up your profile, so we don’t keep asking.
• A cookie recording that your account is cleared to use Ascenda, if you needed a guardian’s permission.

Ascenda also keeps some things in your browser’s own storage so you don’t lose work: your half-finished profile, your essay drafts, your recent assistant messages, your shortlist and your recent searches. That stays on your device. Signing out does not currently clear it, so on a shared or school computer, clear the site data when you’re done.

How long we keep it

We keep what you give us for as long as your account exists, because the whole point of it is that your record is still there next term.

When you delete your account we erase your profile, your grades, your applications, your saved courses, your documents, your assistant conversations and your login. That happens within 30 days of the request.

Two things survive, and we would rather say so than let you find out later. First, a record that a deletion happened — the date, and an internal reference number, with no name, message or contact details in it. We keep that so we can prove the deletion was done. Second, anything already sent to Google when you used the assistant, which is subject to Google’s own retention, and copies inside routine backups, which age out on their own schedule.

Your rights

• Get a copy. Go to Account & data in your profile and download it. No need to ask.
• Fix something wrong. Edit your profile. If it’s something you can’t edit, email us.
• Delete your account. Also in Account & data. We wait seven days first so you can change your mind.
• Object, or ask us to stop. Email us and tell us what you want stopped.
• Complain. If you think we’ve got this wrong, you can complain to the data-protection regulator where you live. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Email hello@ascendaedu.com for any of these. We’ll answer within a month.

Age

You have to be at least 13 to have an Ascenda account. If you’re under 16, we ask for a parent or guardian’s email address when you sign up and email them a link. Your account exists but nothing in it works until they say yes.

We use 16 everywhere rather than the lower age some countries allow, because it is the strictest of them and we would rather ask when we didn’t have to than not ask when we should have.

If you’re a parent or guardian and you want us to delete a child’s account, email us and we will.

Changes

If we change this page in a way that matters, we’ll tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top always says when it last changed.