Privacy policy

This policy explains how AspireOpen handles personal information when you browse the site, create a profile or apply for scholarships. AspireOpen is offered to students in the United States.

1. What we collect

Account details. Your email address, a password if you set one, and the one-time codes we send to confirm it’s you.

Your profile. What you tell us so we can match scholarships: name, school year, graduation year, school, field of study, state, and eligibility details such as first-generation status or community involvement. Some answers are optional; you choose what to share.

Applications. The scholarships you save, the applications you start or submit, and what you write in them, such as short answers and essays.

Activity in the app. Points you earn, your email preferences, and your choices about analytics and whether your profile is public.

Site and app usage. Pages visited, device class, a general traffic source, signup and application milestones, and time spent actively using AspireOpen. Analytics events use random browser and session identifiers rather than your name, email or account ID. These identifiers are pseudonymous, not fully anonymous. We exclude URL query strings and fragments, search text, profile answers, eligibility details, passwords, verification codes, essays and application text from analytics events. Session recordings work differently; see section 4. We do not send IP addresses in browser analytics events.

We don’t ask for government ID numbers or bank details, and we don’t need them for you to apply.

2. How we use it

To run your account and keep it secure.
To match you with scholarships and explain why each one fits.
To submit your applications to the scholarship you chose, and to tell you about their status.
To send the emails you’ve turned on, such as weekly matches and deadline reminders. You can turn them off in your account or from the link in any email.
To understand which pages and features help students, and to fix problems.
To prevent fraud, duplicate accounts and misuse, and to meet legal obligations.

Scholarship providers. When you apply for a scholarship run by AspireOpen, the people reviewing it see your application and the profile details it needs. Some listings come from partner scholarship providers; for those, you apply on the provider’s own site, and what you share there is covered by their privacy policy.

Your public profile. Each profile has a public page at aspireopen.com/students/ followed by your name. It shows your name, education level, graduation year, study interests, experiences and the month you joined. It doesn’t show your email, your other answers or your applications, and we ask search engines not to list it. You can make your profile private at any time from your profile page.

Partners. We don’t share your profile with partners. If we ever offer that, we’ll ask you first, separately for each partner.

Service providers. Companies that run parts of AspireOpen for us and may use your information only to provide that service: Cloudflare (hosting and security), Supabase (accounts and database), Resend (email delivery) and PostHog (product analytics, in the United States).

Legal reasons. When the law requires it, to protect the safety or rights of students and others, or as part of a merger or sale of the service, in which case this policy continues to apply to your information.

We do not sell your personal information, and we don’t share it for cross-site advertising.

4. Cookies and analytics

We use cookies and local storage to keep you signed in and remember your settings. PostHog helps us understand how students move from public pages through signup and use the student app. Basic analytics starts by default unless you turn it off or your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track. You do not need to accept an analytics prompt to use AspireOpen.

Visits, progress and time. We measure page visits, signup starts and successful profile creation, sign-ins and actions such as saving or submitting an application. Session identifiers group activity from the same browser so we can understand navigation and session duration. Active-time measurements count time while a page is visible and focused and stop counting after 60 seconds without interaction. Detailed questionnaire screen names and completed or skipped steps are measured only after an explicit Analytics acceptance; we never include your answers.

Session recordings. When enabled, recordings can cover every page where analytics runs, including signup, sign-in, your profile, account and application pages, and scholarship pages. They help us find problems in the site and app. A recording shows what appears on the page, which can include your name, email address, saved profile answers, application status and essay or application text shown on the page. What you type into fields, including passwords, is hidden. Contact, partnership inquiry and unsubscribe pages are not recorded. Console logs, network bodies and headers, clipboard and canvas contents are not recorded. We do not use recordings for advertising or share them with scholarship partners.

Your choice. Turn Analytics off below to stop future analytics and recordings in this browser and clear its analytics identifiers. We honor saved opt-outs across pages and tabs, including older saved opt-outs. Repeat the choice in each browser or device; clearing site data can reset it. Choosing Analytics does not grant Terms, email or partner-sharing consent.

Opting out does not erase events already collected. Because browser analytics is not linked to your account ID, an account download or deletion does not automatically locate that browser’s historical analytics. Contact us through the Contact page to ask about access or deletion of those records; do not send passwords or verification codes.

5. How long we keep it

Analytics attribution in your browser expires after 30 days. Random analytics identifiers remain until you opt out or clear browser storage. Recorded sessions use the PostHog project’s configured retention; event retention is controlled separately. Contact us for the current event and recording retention periods. We do not promise that opting out deletes historical events.

We keep your account and profile while your account is open. When you delete your account, we delete your profile, saved scholarships and draft applications, and remove your details from active systems within 30 days. Copies in backups are overwritten within a further 30 days. Submitted applications may be kept for as long as the scholarship provider needs them to complete the award, and records we must keep by law are kept only for that purpose.

6. Your choices and rights

In your account you can:

see and correct your profile,
turn emails on or off, and make your profile public or private,
download a copy of your information,
delete your account and the information connected to it.

You can also ask us to correct or delete something you can’t change yourself, through the Contact page. We’ll respond within 30 days. Depending on your state, you may have further rights under its privacy law; we honor those requests the same way and won’t treat you differently for using them.

7. Students under 18

AspireOpen is for students aged 16 and older. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If we learn that we have, we delete it. A parent or guardian who believes their child under 16 has signed up can reach us through the Contact page.

8. Security

Information is encrypted in transit, and access to student data is limited to the people and services that need it. Your applications and the private parts of your profile are only available to your own account and to the scholarships you apply to. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong password and keep it to yourself.

9. Changes to this policy

If we make a meaningful change, we’ll update the date above and tell signed-in students by email or in the app before it takes effect.