Privacy Policy
Undergrove · Last updated: 12 August 2026 Contact: undergrove@undergrovescholar.com
Draft for legal review. This policy is written to match what the code actually does. Where they ever disagree, the code is the bug — but check the code first before loosening this.
What we collect
To run your account: email address, password (stored hashed — we never see it), date of birth.
To find you scholarships: what you tell us in your profile — school, major, GPA, year, where you live, where you work, organisations you belong to, certifications, activities.
Only if you're 18 or over, and only if you choose to answer: background, identity, disability and household information, where a scholarship's eligibility depends on it. These questions are never shown to users under 18, and the fields are stripped on our servers even if a request contained them.
Writing samples, if you upload them. If you upload a PDF, we extract the text and discard the file — we don't keep the document, and that means we don't keep the hidden metadata inside it either.
Payments: processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. We keep a record that a purchase happened.
We never collect a Social Security number, a bank account number, or any financial account identifier. Not optionally, not ever. There is no field for it.
What we do with it
Match you to scholarships · rank them for you · draft essays when you ask · run your account and process payments · keep the service working and secure.
We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use your writing to train AI models.
AI, and who else sees your data
Undergrove's search and drafting are powered by AI. To produce your results, we send relevant parts of your profile and your prompts to Anthropic, which provides the AI models we use. Anthropic processes it to return a result to us.
We send the minimum needed. Contact details are not needed to determine eligibility and are not sent.
Other processors: Stripe (payments), our hosting and database provider, and our email provider (verification and account emails).
That's the complete list. Nobody else.
What we keep, and for how long
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account and profile | Until you delete your account |
| Writing samples | Until you delete them, or your account |
| Drafts | Until you delete them, or your account |
| Search and match history | 24 months |
| AI usage records (tokens, cost — no content) | 24 months, then anonymised |
| Purchase records | 7 years — tax and chargeback law |
| Server logs | 90 days |
| Under-13 signup attempts | Not kept at all |
Purchase records are the one thing we keep after you leave, because tax and payment-dispute rules require it. We keep the amount, the date and a hashed version of your email — enough to match a chargeback, not enough to identify you from scratch.
Our full Data Retention Policy has the detail.
Your rights
From your profile, at any time, without asking us:
- Export everything we hold about you, including your writing samples in full — it's your writing.
- Delete everything. This is a hard delete, not a flag. Profile, answers, drafts, writing samples, saved scholarships — gone. AI usage records are anonymised. Purchase records remain as above.
Or email undergrove@undergrovescholar.com and we'll do it for you.
Depending on where you live you may have additional rights (access, correction, deletion, opting out of sale — we don't sell data, so that last one is already the case). Exercise them at the same address; we don't charge and we don't require an account to ask.
Users under 18
See Protecting Younger Users. In short: no users under 13, and no questions about background, health or identity for anyone under 18.
Security
Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to production data is limited to the operator of the business. Writing you upload is encrypted before it's stored, so a stolen copy of our database wouldn't reveal it. It's used only to shape your own drafts, never shown to anyone else, and never used to train an AI model. Database backups are also encrypted, with the decryption key kept off the server entirely. Other account data — your profile, your email address — is not separately encrypted at rest; our Information Security Program describes the rest, including why.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects you, we will tell you — see our Data Breach Response Plan for exactly what we do and how quickly.
Cookies
A session cookie to keep you logged in, and a short-lived cookie recording that an age screen was completed — which contains no identifying information. No advertising or tracking cookies. [Counsel: confirm whether any analytics tool is in use before launch.]
Changes
Posted here with a new date. Material changes are emailed to you.
Contact
undergrove@undergrovescholar.com — privacy questions, data requests, and complaints.