What we keep, and what we refuse to

When you upload a transcript we read it in memory, extract the handful of values the review needs, and show them to you for confirmation. The file is never written to a disk, a storage bucket, or a log. It ceases to exist when the request finishes.

What survives is only what you confirm — a GPA, a class rank, a course name. Those numbers are far less sensitive than an official record carrying a student ID, address and full course history.

Signing in with Google hands services a full name, email, profile photo and account ID. We keep the given name as a starting point, let you replace it with any nickname you like, and discard the rest on the way in.

Email is the one thing we cannot avoid: it is how signing in works and how a receipt reaches you. We don’t copy it anywhere else, and we don’t use it to market to you.

Reviews are produced using Anthropic’s API, which does not train models on data submitted through it. We don’t train anything of our own either. Your student’s record is used to produce your review and for nothing else.

If the student is under 18, a parent or guardian has to agree before we collect anything. We record which version of the wording was agreed to and when — the current version is 2026-07-26.

We don’t knowingly collect information about children under 13. A younger student is welcome to plan through a parent’s account.

A review is useful for one application cycle, so that is how long it lasts: reviews and the intake behind them are deleted automatically after twelve months. Anonymous usage counts — how many reviews ran and what they cost us — are kept longer, and carry no student information.

We keep the record that consent was given even after the data it covered is gone. That record identifies no one; it exists so we can show consent happened.

Ask, and we delete your account, your reviews and the intake behind them. There is no retention period we hold you to and nothing we keep back. Email privacy@honestodds.com and we’ll confirm when it’s done.

• We don’t sell or share student data. There is no version of this where we do.
• We don’t run advertising trackers on any page that touches student information.
• We don’t send your data to schools, or to anyone else.
• We don’t write essays for students, and we don’t keep the ones you show us beyond your review.

Admission estimates are probabilities, not predictions. They are built from published data and reasoned judgement, and no service — ours included — can tell you what an admissions committee will do. Where a figure comes from a specific published source we say so; where it doesn’t, we say that too.