Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Path To My College ("p2mc", "we", "our") is an educational technology platform operated by P2MC Education LLC, a Virginia limited liability company. The service is operated from Virginia, United States. P2MC Education LLC is not a school or educational institution and is not subject to FERPA.

2. What we collect

When you create an account, we collect:

• A username — any name you choose. A nickname or initials is fine.
• An email address — required so you can recover a forgotten password and receive important account notices.
• A password — stored only as a one-way bcrypt hash. We cannot see or recover your password.
• A school district — you select from a list. Districts contain millions of students, so this alone does not identify you.
• Optional fields: graduation year, home school name (within your district). You may skip these.

As you use the service, you may also choose to record:

• Courses, grades, and credits
• Test scores (SAT, ACT, PSAT)
• Accomplishments and activities
• Saved colleges and finalist selections
• Personal notes and essay drafts
• Language learning progress and quiz results
• AP and SAT/PSAT drill performance

This information is yours. Only you can see it when signed in to your account.

3. What we do not collect

We deliberately avoid collecting:

• Your real legal name
• Your date of birth
• Your home address or phone number
• Your school ID, student ID, or similar identifiers
• Demographic data such as race, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation
• Precise geolocation
• Behavioral analytics from third-party trackers (no Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no third-party advertising scripts)

4. How we use what we collect

• To run the service. Your username, password hash, district, and email let you log in and use the features.
• To send transactional emails. Password reset links and occasional account-related notices.
• To personalize your experience. Your academic data powers features like college fit analysis, AI course recommendations, and personalized homework help.
• To improve the service. We may look at aggregate, anonymized usage patterns. We do not look at individual users' data for product improvement purposes.

We do not use your information to train AI models. We do not use it to target advertising. We do not sell it to anyone.

5. Who we share it with

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We share it only in these limited cases:

• Email delivery. We use a third-party SMTP provider to send transactional emails.
• AI processing. When you use AI-powered features (homework help, essay feedback, course recommendations), your query is sent to Anthropic's API for processing. Anthropic's privacy policy applies to this processing. We do not send your full profile — only the specific content needed to answer your query.
• Payment processing. If you subscribe to a paid plan, payment is processed by Stripe. We do not store your payment card information. Stripe's privacy policy applies to payment data.
• Hosting. Our servers run on AWS Lightsail. AWS may have access to data stored on those servers in the course of providing infrastructure services.
• Legal compliance. If we receive a valid legal request we may be required to provide information. We will resist overly broad requests and notify the affected user where lawfully permitted.

6. Children and the 13+ requirement

p2mc is intended for users 13 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. During account creation we ask you to confirm you are 13 or older. If we learn that we have collected information from a user under 13, we will delete it promptly.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has created an account, please contact us at hello@pathtomycollege.com so we can delete it.

7. Your rights

• Access. You can see all your stored information by signing in to the service.
• Correction. You can edit or delete any data you have entered, at any time.
• Deletion. You may delete your account at any time. Account deletion permanently removes your user record and all associated data within 30 days. There is no recovery window.
• Portability. You may request a copy of the data we hold about you by contacting hello@pathtomycollege.com.
• State-specific rights. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under state privacy laws (including the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act). To exercise any of these rights, contact us.

8. How we secure it

• All connections to the service use HTTPS (TLS encryption).
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt; we cannot recover or read them.
• Access to the production database is restricted to the operating team.
• Payment information is handled entirely by Stripe; we do not store card numbers or payment details.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a security incident affecting your personal data, we will notify affected users by email within 60 days as required by Virginia law (CDPA) and post a notice on the service.

9. How long we keep it

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we permanently delete all associated personal data within 30 days. We may retain anonymized, aggregate statistics that do not identify you.

10. Cookies

We use a small number of strictly necessary cookies and localStorage entries to keep you signed in. We do not use third-party advertising or analytics cookies.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this Privacy Policy in a material way, we will notify you by email and require you to re-accept the updated version when you next sign in.

12. Contact

For privacy questions, data requests, or to report a concern, contact us at hello@pathtomycollege.com.