Privacy Policy
Counsify is an independent tool built by a student to help community college students plan their transfer. It is not an official service of Saddleback College or the South Orange County Community College District. This page explains what we collect, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and how to get rid of it.
Effective August 26, 2026
The short version
We collect the minimum we need to help you plan. We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not let anyone train an AI model on it. You can delete your account yourself, at any time, in three taps, and when you do, your information is actually deleted. We deliberately do not collect several categories of sensitive information, and we built the app so there is no way to give them to us by accident.
What we collect
When you create an account:
- Your email address. Required. It is how you sign in and how we send you a verification code.
- Your date of birth. Required. We use it to know whether you are 18 or over, because some features are limited for younger students. See "If you are under 18" below.
- A preferred name, if you give us one. Optional. It is only so SADIE can address you naturally in conversation. If you sign in with Google we start it from the first name on your Google account, and you can change or clear it whenever you like. We do not ask for or store your legal name.
- Your Saddleback student ID, if you choose to give it. Optional, and there are exactly two uses for it, both described below. It is encrypted before it is stored. You can leave it blank and everything still works.
When you use the app:
- What you tell SADIE. Your messages and her replies are saved so your conversations are still there when you come back.
- Your transfer plans. The courses you pick, how you arrange them into semesters, the grades you record, and any notes the system attaches.
- Courses you have already completed, if you tell us about them, including the grade you earned, so your plan does not ask you to retake them and your GPA is accurate.
- Your Student Context Center profile, if you are 18 or over and you turn it on. This is a set of academic questions with fixed answers to choose from: your target school and major, your year, a GPA range, when you plan to transfer, how many units you usually take, your goals for the semester, and a few preferences about how you like information presented. There is no free text box anywhere in it, deliberately, so there is no way to put sensitive information into it even if you wanted to.
- How you use the app. Which features you open, how long things take, whether an answer cited its sources, and what a request cost us to run. This is usage information about actions, never the content of your messages.
What we deliberately do not collect
We do not collect immigration or citizenship status, sexual orientation or gender identity, or reproductive or sexual health information. Not optionally, not in a comment box, not ever. The app is built so there is no field that could hold them.
We do not collect demographic information of any kind. If someone asks us what demographic data we hold about students, the honest answer is none.
We do not collect payment information, because Counsify is free for students and there is nothing to pay for.
If you type something sensitive into a chat message, it is part of that conversation and you can delete it by deleting the conversation or your account. It never becomes part of your stored profile.
Who else sees your information
We use a small number of outside services to run Counsify. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Everything above, at rest. Your email address when a verification code is sent. | AWS hosts the application, the database, and the email delivery. Data is stored encrypted in the United States. |
| OpenAI | The text of your conversation with SADIE, and the catalog excerpts we retrieve to answer you. | OpenAI provides the AI model that generates SADIE's replies. |
| Your email address and first name, only if you choose to sign in with Google. | Google verifies who you are so you do not need a password. | |
| Formspree | Only what you type into an anonymous feedback box, if you use one. | Feedback delivery. Nothing identifying is attached. |
| Cloudflare | Your IP address, as part of ordinary web traffic. | Domain routing and protection against abuse. |
Nobody trains an AI model on your information. Our agreement with our AI provider has model training turned off, and California law is moving to require that of services like ours. We treat it as binding either way.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We do not run advertising at all.
The two things your student ID is used for
If you gave us your student ID, it is used for exactly these, and nothing else:
- The research study, if you opted in. Saddleback's institutional research office and Counsify may compare your enrollment and outcome records with how you used Counsify, to evaluate whether the tool actually helps students. This is voluntary, saying no changes nothing about what you can use, and deleting your account withdraws you from any future analysis.
- Letting a Saddleback counselor open your saved plan. A counselor at your college can look up a plan using your student ID. They see plans only. They cannot see your conversations with SADIE and they cannot see your Student Context Center profile. That boundary is built into the system, not just promised here.
If you are under 18
You must be at least 13 to use Counsify.
If you are between 13 and 17, you can use SADIE and build transfer plans, and the Student Context Center is turned off for you. That means we do not store an academic profile about you, you are not asked for a student ID, and you are not part of the research study. SADIE also will not suggest saving anything to a profile, because there is no profile to save to.
You can still record a preferred name so SADIE can address you, and you can delete your account yourself, the same as anyone else.
How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your profile, plans, conversations, and completed courses | While your account is open. Deleted when you delete your account. |
| Usage information | Kept without any link to you after your account is deleted. We keep anonymous counts so we can tell how many students used a feature. We do not keep who did. |
| Your record of accepting these terms | The version and date are kept after deletion, with the link to you removed, so we can show which version was in effect. |
| Sign-in verification codes | Ten minutes, or until you use one, whichever comes first. They are deleted shortly after they expire. |
We review these periodically. If we ever change them, the effective date at the top of this page changes and the change applies going forward.
Your rights
If you live in California, the CCPA and CPRA give you the right to know what personal information we hold, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and to not have it sold or shared. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of. The other rights are built into the app rather than being a request you have to file:
- To see what we hold: open your Student Context Center. It is a plain readout of everything stored about you.
- To correct it: edit any field, at any time.
- To delete everything: use "Delete my account" in your profile. It happens immediately and it is permanent. If you are under 18 and do not have a Context Center, the deletion control is on the same page and still works.
Before you delete, you may want to print or save any plan you care about, because deletion removes them.
Categories of personal information we collect, in the language California uses: identifiers (email address, an optional student ID, an optional preferred name), protected classification characteristics (date of birth only, used solely for age gating), education information (your plans, completed courses, and academic profile), internet activity (how you use the app), and the content of your conversations with SADIE. We collect all of it directly from you.
Notice at collection: we tell you what a field is for at the point we ask for it, and nothing is collected for a purpose not described on this page.
AI, and what it means for you
SADIE is an AI. She can be wrong. She cites the catalog pages her answers come from precisely so you can check her, and every plan she helps you build is meant to be taken to a human counselor who confirms it. Counsify is a planning aid. It is not official academic advice, it is not a degree audit, and it does not register you for anything.
If something SADIE tells you affects a real decision, verify it with your counselor before you act on it.
Questions or complaints
Email privacy@counsify.ai. If your concern is about how we use AI, we will respond within 45 days.
Changes to this policy
If we change this page, the effective date at the top changes. If the change is significant, we will tell you in the app.