Privacy policy, in full

1. Who this policy is for

This policy covers plannedquest.com and the PlannedQuest platform. Two different things are happening on it, and the difference matters for your rights.

If your school or district gave you an account, your school decides what happens to your information. We hold it for them and act on their instructions. Requests about that information go through your school, because the record is theirs.

If you are visiting this website, or you use PlannedQuest without a school, you are dealing with us directly and the California rights described in section 11 apply to you.

2. What we collect

Two kinds of information: what you or your school give us, and what the site records as you use it.

What we do not collect

We never ask for a Social Security number, a government ID, a bank account, or a card number. If you type something that looks like a Social Security number into a free-text box, the software refuses it.

We do not ask whether you are undocumented, and we do not ask whether you are an English learner. Both were removed from the product and are now blocked in the software itself, on the server, on the way in and on the way out. No school setting turns them back on.

Things you choose to tell us about your situation

The platform asks whether anything might get in the way of your plans, and offers a checklist. Some items on it are sensitive: a disability or accommodation need, a health condition, mental health, being pregnant or parenting, being in or having been in foster care, having been involved with the justice system, housing or food insecurity, being first-generation, or being military-connected.

You choose whether to tick any of them. Nothing on that list is required, and skipping all of it does not reduce what the platform will do for you.

Be clear about who sees it: staff at your school who are assigned to you can see what you ticked and any note you added, they can list the students who ticked a particular item, and they can download that list. It exists so someone can help. It is not private from your school.

Information your school sends us

When a district connects its student information system, the file it sends can contain demographic fields such as race, ethnicity, sex, date of birth and place of birth. We do not ask for these and the platform does not use them for anything.

Location

If you press a button that offers to find things near you, your browser asks your permission and then gives us your location. If you save that search, the location is saved with it. We never take your location without you pressing something first.

3. Cookies, browser storage, and tracking

We use first-party cookies and browser storage only for things the product cannot work without: signing you in, keeping you signed in across tabs, remembering your settings, holding an in-progress assessment so you do not lose it, and security diagnostics. The sign-in cookies are named __session, auth_token, authState and session_indicator.

No advertising or analytics trackers

The platform loads no advertising pixel, no session recorder, and no third-party marketing analytics. Concretely: no Meta Pixel, no Google Analytics, no TikTok tracking, no Hotjar, no PostHog, no Mixpanel, no LinkedIn Insight. The browser is instructed to refuse them, so one could not be added quietly.

We use one privacy-preserving tool that counts page views in aggregate. It does not follow you between sites and does not build a profile of you.

Do other companies watch you across the web from here?

No. Nothing on this service lets another company follow what you do here over time and across other websites.

Do Not Track

Some browsers send a Do Not Track signal. We do not respond to it, because there is no cross-site tracking here for it to switch off. California law asks us to tell you that plainly, so we are.

Why there is no cookie banner

A banner exists to get your consent for optional tracking. We do not set any, so there is nothing to ask you about. If that ever changes we will update this page and ask before turning anything on.

4. How we use it

To run the platform and keep it working, to show you what you asked for, to keep your work where you left it, and to let your school see the progress they asked us to show them.

We also use it to fix and improve PlannedQuest itself. That means this product, for the schools that bought it. It does not mean building something else out of your information, and it does not mean training a model on it.

We never use student information to advertise to you, and we never build a profile of you for anything other than the schoolwork you are here to do.

5. Who else touches your information

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16. There is no advertising business here to sell it to.

Inside your school

Staff see students they are responsible for. A teacher sees their classes; a counsellor sees their caseload and the classes they staff; a school or district administrator sees their school or their district. A parent or guardian, once your school has linked and verified them, sees their own child.

Some things a parent cannot see, deliberately: the reflections you write about why a career interests you or what worries you, counsellor notes, and your assignment answers. Those are yours or your school’s.

Our own staff can reach accounts to support and repair the platform. That access is logged with who, when, and why.

Companies that process data for us

These are the companies that run parts of the service. They may only do what we tell them to, and they may not use your information for anything of their own.

Everyone else

We share information outside those two groups only when the law requires it, in response to legal process, or to protect someone’s safety. If PlannedQuest is ever sold or merged, any new owner is bound by the commitments on this page.

6. How long we keep it

What has a fixed deletion date today:

• Sign-in records: 30 days.
• Records of how you used the site: 18 months.
• What you searched for: 90 days.
• Staff-access and support records: 90 days to a year, depending on the record.
• Generated reports: 30 days.

Your account and your work

Your school decides. We keep your work while your school wants it kept, and we delete it when your school asks us to. Nothing expires on its own, so if you want your work removed, ask your school and they will ask us.

Some records a school is legally required to keep permanently are excluded from any deletion, and we will tell the school which ones those are.

7. Automated decisions, scores, and AI

No AI touches your information

Your work is never sent to an outside AI service, for any reason. It is not used to train a model. No feature answers you using a model that has read your information. Where the site shows career or college matches, that is arithmetic on rules we can show you, not a model forming an opinion about you.

The engagement score

The platform calculates a score from 0 to 100 based only on how you have used it: how often you sign in, how many activities you finish, how many careers and programmes you look at, and how many things you save. It groups you as active, moderate, at risk, or disengaged, using fixed cut-offs.

Staff assigned to you can see that grouping, so they know who might want a check-in. Three things it is not: it uses no grades, no assessment results and nothing about who you are; nothing is decided automatically because of it; and it never limits what the platform will let you do. A person looks at it and decides whether to talk to you.

8. Students, families, and schools

Your school is in charge of the record

For a school-provided account we act as a school official with a legitimate educational interest, under the district’s direct control, and we use education records only for what the district authorises. We do not pass information on to anyone else without the district’s instruction.

Your school’s own annual privacy notice explains your rights to see and correct your education record, and how to use them. Those requests go through your school. We give schools what they need to answer you, and we do not answer directly, because we cannot verify who you are and your school can.

Students under 13

PlannedQuest is used from grade six, so some of our students are under 13. Where that is the case your school gives permission on your family’s behalf, for the schoolwork the school assigned and nothing else. Complying with children’s privacy law is our responsibility, not your school’s.

A school can ask us at any time what we hold about their students, have it deleted, and stop us collecting more.

What we never do with student information

• We never sell it.
• We never use it to advertise to a student, here or anywhere else.
• We never build a profile of a student for anything other than their schoolwork.
• We never use it to train an AI model.

Your own work belongs to you

The plans, portfolio entries and writing you create here are yours. You can export them, and leaving a school does not erase them from your own account.

Surveys and questionnaires

Some of what the platform asks — interest inventories, career assessments, and the considerations checklist — is the kind of questioning that federal law gives families the right to review and opt out of through their school. We make every instrument available to your school for that purpose, and we never use what you answer to market anything to you or to sell anything.

9. Your rights, and how to use them

If your account came from a school, ask your school. The record is theirs, they can verify who you are, and we act on their instruction. We answer schools quickly so they can answer you.

If you deal with us directly, write to privacy@plannedquest.com and put "Privacy Request" in the subject line, or call us on 949 685 7029. We will ask you to confirm who you are before we act, so that nobody else can ask for your information. You may also use an authorised agent.

You can ask us what we hold, get a copy, have it corrected, or have it deleted. You will never be treated differently for asking.

A parent or guardian, an education rights holder, or a student aged 18 or over may ask us to delete a former pupil’s information once the student has not been enrolled for 60 days. We will ask for proof of enrolment status first. A small number of records that schools are legally required to keep permanently are excluded.

10. How we protect it

Everything travels encrypted between your browser and us, on every page, enforced rather than optional.

Stored information sits in Google Cloud SQL and MongoDB Atlas and is encrypted at rest by those providers. We want to be precise about that: the protection is theirs, not a second layer we have added on top.

Who can reach what is decided by role and re-checked on the server on every request, against your live role rather than anything your browser claims.

After five failed sign-in attempts an account is locked for fifteen minutes, which is what actually stops someone guessing a password. We block abusive addresses. We keep records of sign-ins, administrative actions, exports and staff access to accounts.

Your browser is told to refuse any script we did not send, which is what makes the no-tracker commitment in section 3 enforceable rather than a promise.

Our code is scanned automatically for leaked secrets and known-vulnerable dependencies on every change.

If something goes wrong

If your information is exposed we will tell your school and the people affected, in plain language, saying what happened, what was involved, what we are doing, and what you can do.

11. California privacy rights

PlannedQuest is a California company. If you deal with us directly rather than through a school, you have the right to know what we collect and why, to get a copy, to correct it, to have it deleted, to limit how we use sensitive information, and not to be treated differently for asking.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is no "Do Not Sell or Share" choice to offer you. If that ever changes, the link will appear here and we will ask first.

Some of what students choose to tell us — about health, a disability, or their circumstances — is sensitive information under California law. We use it only to help your school support you. We never use it to advertise and never sell it.

Where we describe information as de-identified, we publicly commit to keeping it that way, to never attempting to re-identify it, and to requiring anyone who receives it to do the same and to pass it no further.

12. When this page changes

We tell districts before a material change takes effect, rather than after. We do not change how we collect, use or share student information without telling the district first.

Every revision is listed below with its date and what moved, so you can see what you agreed to and when it changed.

13. Contact us

Call us on 949 685 7029.

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@plannedquest.com, subject line "Privacy Request".

Security concerns or a vulnerability to report: security@plannedquest.com.

Accessibility feedback: accessibility@plannedquest.com.

Anything else: support@plannedquest.com.