Who we are
This privacy policy describes how College Council, accessible at college-council.com, processes your personal data.
College Council is an educational platform helping students with the application process for studying abroad — in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. We provide informational content, tools (calculators, practice tests), and the ability to get in touch about educational consulting services.
For any questions related to the protection of your personal data, please reach out via the contact form on our website.
What data we collect
We collect personal data in various situations as you use our website:
Contact form
When you fill out our contact form, we collect:
- First and last name
- Email address
- Phone number (with country code)
- Country of residence
- School type (e.g., IB, A-Level, national curriculum)
- Graduation year
- Preferred study regions (USA, UK, Europe)
- SAT/ACT test scores (if provided)
- Scholarship and budget preferences
- Personal statement status (for UK applicants)
- Role (student or parent/guardian)
Practice test forms (SAT, TOEFL)
When you take our practice tests, we collect:
- First name
- Email address
- Graduation year (optional)
- Test answers and scores
Automatically collected data
When you browse our website, we automatically collect:
- IP address
- Approximate geolocation — country, city, and region (via Vercel server headers)
- Device information — browser type and operating system (User-Agent)
- UTM parameters — source, medium, and campaign that brought you to the site
- Referring page — the URL of the website you came from
- Product analytics (PostHog): the pages you visit, your clicks, the full address of the page you came from, your browser and device details and, through your IP address, your approximate location; PostHog does not keep your IP address. Before you choose in the cookie banner, and if you decline, PostHog's script sets no cookies and leaves nothing in local or session storage (it only briefly tests that local storage works and deletes the test entry at once); it uses a random identifier that changes on every page load. Only with your consent does it keep an identifier in its cookie, which college-council.com and app.college-council.com share, together with where you first came from; the app reads from it where you first came from and records this when you create an account or pay. With your consent, PostHog's script also keeps short-lived session entries (ph_*) in session storage, which disappear when you close the tab.
- Cookies — see our Cookie Policy for details
When you follow a link from our blog to the College Council app or to Prepclass, or sign up in a mini test on the blog, we pass on where you came to the blog from: the source, medium and campaign of the link, the domain of the website that sent you, the page where you arrived and the type of ad click (the cc_at parameter, or with the sign-up). Before you accept analytics, we work this out from the current page only and store nothing in your browser. With your consent, we also keep your first visit in local storage (cc_first_touch) for at most 13 months, and we delete it on any visit without consent.
When you sign up in a mini test on the blog, the College Council app's server records the sign-up and measures it as described in the College Council app privacy policy, including your approximate location from your IP address (IP Geolocation by DB-IP, licensed under CC BY 4.0); our server does not send your IP address to PostHog.
Purpose and legal basis
We process your personal data based on the following purposes and legal grounds:
| Purpose | Legal basis (GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Responding to your inquiry submitted via the contact form | Art. 6(1)(b) — steps taken at your request prior to entering into a contract |
| Sending newsletter with educational tips | Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent (which you can withdraw at any time) |
| Analyzing website traffic (Google Analytics) | Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent given via the cookie banner |
| Measuring which channels and campaigns bring visitors (PostHog) | Art. 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in knowing how many people read the blog, from where and on which devices, without an identifier kept in your browser; for PostHog's cookie and local storage entry: Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent given via the cookie banner |
| Telling the College Council app and Prepclass which channel or partner brought you, when you follow a link or sign up in a mini test | Art. 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in knowing which channels and partners bring people to our services and in paying partners correctly; for the first visit kept in local storage (cc_first_touch): Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent given via the cookie banner |
| Displaying personalized ads (marketing cookies) | Art. 6(1)(a) — your consent given via the cookie banner |
| Qualifying and scoring inquiries (lead scoring) | Art. 6(1)(f) — our legitimate interest in efficiently handling inquiries |
| Sending practice test results to your email | Art. 6(1)(b) — performance of a service you requested |
Data recipients
Your personal data may be shared with the following third-party service providers we work with:
| Provider | Purpose | Location | Safeguards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend Inc. | Email delivery (confirmations, test results, notifications) | USA | Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) |
| Google LLC | Website analytics (Google Analytics via GTM) | USA | EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| Vercel Inc. | Website hosting, geolocation headers | USA | EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| Vercel Analytics | Website performance and traffic analysis | USA | EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| PostHog Inc. | Product analytics | USA |
International data transfers
Your personal data may be transferred to the United States, as we use service providers based in the USA (Resend, Google, Vercel and PostHog).
Transfers to Resend, Google and Vercel are protected by:
- EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) — Google and Vercel are certified under this framework, ensuring an adequate level of data protection
- Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) — contractual mechanisms approved by the European Commission to guarantee data protection
Data retention
The blog keeps no user accounts; accounts are created in the College Council app and described in its privacy policy. Form data is transmitted exclusively as email messages via the Resend service.
- Form data — stored in email systems for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected
- Cookies — consent cookie stored for 365 days; Google Analytics cookies stored according to Google's retention settings; the PostHog cookie for up to 1 year and PostHog's local storage entry until you withdraw consent (PostHog then deletes both) or clear your browser data; analytics events in PostHog for 84 months (7 years), the period PostHog applies to our plan
- Newsletter — data stored until you withdraw consent (unsubscribe)
Your rights
Under the GDPR, you have the following rights:
- Right of access — you can find out whether we process your data and obtain a copy
- Right to rectification — you can request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data
- Right to erasure — you can request deletion of your data (in certain circumstances)
- Right to restriction — you can request that we limit how we process your data
- Right to data portability — you can receive your data in a structured format
- Right to object — you can object to processing based on our legitimate interest
- Right to withdraw consent — if processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal
To exercise any of these rights, please reach out via the contact form.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.
Contact for data matters
College Council has not appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO), as this is not required given the nature and scale of our data processing (Art. 37 GDPR).
For any questions about how we process your personal data, please use the contact form on college-council.com.
Changes to this policy
College Council reserves the right to update this privacy policy. Any changes will be published on this page with an updated date.
We encourage you to check this page regularly to stay informed about our privacy practices.