Privacy policy
What Essay Clarity collects, why, who else sees it, and how to get it back or get rid of it. Written to be read rather than skimmed past.
What data does Essay Clarity collect?
An account holds your name, email address and a hashed password. Beyond that we hold only what you put in: your student profile, the essays and drafts you write, the schools and professors you add, and a record of credits bought and spent.
| What | Why we hold it |
|---|---|
| Name and email address | To identify your account, sign you in, and send transactional email such as verification and password resets. |
| Password | Stored only as a one-way hash. We cannot read it and cannot tell you what it is. |
| Student profile (six fields) | So feedback is measured against you rather than a generic applicant. It is sent to the AI provider along with the draft being scored. |
| Essays, drafts and snapshots | So you can return to your work, compare drafts and see inline feedback against the exact text it was written about. |
| Schools, professors and research briefs | So research you paid credits for is still there tomorrow. |
| Credit balance and transactions | To run the credit system, refund failed actions, and support billing questions. |
| Referral and gifting records | To run the ambassador program: who referred whom, credits earned and credits gifted. |
| Review links you create | So a teacher or parent you invited can comment on a specific draft. |
We do not ask for a home address, a phone number, a date of birth, a social security number, test scores or a transcript, and there is nowhere in the product to enter them.
Is my essay used to train an AI model?
No. Your essay and profile are sent to our AI provider only to produce the feedback you asked for, under commercial terms that do not permit training on that content. We do not train any model on student writing, and we do not licence it to anyone who would.
Feedback is generated by Anthropic’s Claude models, called from our server. When you use a feature that researches a school from the live web, that request also reaches Anthropic’s web search tool. No essay text is sent to any search engine.
Who else sees your data?
A short list of service providers, each doing one job: our AI provider for feedback, Stripe for card payments, our email provider for transactional mail, and our web host for storage. Nobody else, and we do not sell personal data or share it with advertisers.
| Provider | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | The essay or drafts being scored, your profile, and school or professor names | To generate rubric scores, feedback and research briefs |
| Stripe | Your email address and the payment details you enter on Stripe’s own checkout | To take card payments. Essay Clarity never sees or stores your card number |
| Email delivery | Your name and email address | Verification codes, password resets and account notices |
| Web hosting | Everything in the database, at rest | To run the site |
Blog and guide pages load cover photos from Unsplash’s image CDN, which will see your IP address as your browser fetches the image. No account data is involved.
What cookies does the site use?
One necessary session cookie that keeps you signed in, and one short-lived cookie that attributes a sign-up to the counselor who referred you. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics trackers and no cross-site profiling on this site.
- Session cookie (
college_selection_sess): keeps you signed in. Cleared when you log out or when the session expires. - Referral attribution cookie (
ec_outreach): records that you arrived from a counselor’s outreach link, so the referral can be credited. Expires within an hour of sign-up and is deleted the moment it is used.
What happens when you share a review link?
A review link is a secret URL that lets whoever holds it read that one draft and leave comments, without an account. Anyone with the link can open it, so treat it like a password, and delete the link when you are done with it.
You can revoke a review link at any time from the essay it belongs to, which immediately stops it working.
How long is data kept?
For as long as your account exists, so your work is there when you come back to it. When you ask us to delete the account, the account and its essays, drafts, research, review links and credit history are removed.
Records we are required to keep for financial or fraud-prevention reasons, such as the fact that a payment occurred, may be retained by Stripe under their own policy even after your Essay Clarity account is gone.
How do you export or delete your data?
Email support@essayclarity.com from the address on the account and say which you want. We do not charge for either, and we do not require a reason.
If you are in a jurisdiction with statutory data rights, such as the UK, the EEA or California, those rights apply here, and the same address is the route to exercising them.
Who can use Essay Clarity?
Essay Clarity is intended for students aged 13 and over who are applying to college, and for the adults supporting them. It is not designed for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. In the EEA and UK the minimum age is 16.
Most of our users are minors, and we treat their work accordingly: essays are private by default, nothing a student writes is published, and nothing is shown to other students. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under the minimum age has created an account, email support@essayclarity.com and we will remove it.
How is data protected?
The site is served over HTTPS only, passwords are stored as one-way hashes, database access is limited to the application, and card details never touch our servers because Stripe handles checkout on its own domain.
No system is perfect. If we discover a breach affecting your data we will tell you at the email address on your account, and we would rather hear from you than not: security reports go to support@essayclarity.com.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes and we email account holders. Small clarifications are made without notice, but the practices described here will not quietly become less protective than they are today.
Questions about any of it: support@essayclarity.com.
Frequently asked questions
Does Essay Clarity use my essay to train an AI model?
No. Your essays are sent to our AI provider only to generate the feedback you asked for, under an agreement that does not permit training on that content, and they are not used to train any model by us.
Who can read my essays?
You, anyone you deliberately share a review link with, and the small number of staff who need access to investigate a support request. Essays are not public, are not indexed by search engines, and are not shown to other students.
How do I delete my data?
Email support@essayclarity.com from the address on your account. Deletion removes your account, essays, drafts, school and professor research, review links and credit history.
Does Essay Clarity sell personal data?
No. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.