Most of our applicants are minors preparing the most consequential file of their lives so far. That obliges us to be clearer than a normal privacy policy, and stricter than a normal company. Last updated July 2026.
We collect only what you type or attach in the student portal. Nothing you enter reaches us until you yourself export your submission file and send it. Your drafts live in your own browser, not on our servers; in the current review period we do not operate servers that store student data at all. We contact only the organizations you list, only for the claims you asked us to verify. You see your report before anyone else, and it goes nowhere without your instruction. We never sell data, run ads, or build profiles.
AttestEd is an early-stage verification service for college-admissions claims, reviewing every submission by hand against the published methodology. Contact for anything in this policy: info@attested.education.
While you fill in the portal: nothing. The portal is a static page. Your answers autosave to your own browser's local storage on your own device. We cannot see them. Clearing your browser data deletes them.
When you send a submission: exactly what is in the file. The portal produces a single file you can open and read: your details, your activity and honor entries, the claim statements you confirmed, and the evidence you attached. It reaches us only when you email it. That file is the entire collection; there is no hidden telemetry, no analytics on the portal, and no tracking pixels anywhere on this site.
The portal asks for your date of birth precisely so it can require a parent or guardian when you are a minor. We confirm guardian consent by email before verification work begins, and a guardian may exercise any right in this policy (access, deletion, withdrawal) on your behalf.
One thing: verify the claims you asked us to verify, per the published methodology. That involves examining your evidence, checking public and official sources (registries, results pages, publication records), and contacting the organizations and referees you listed. Outreach is per claim and consent-gated: no organization, school, or person is contacted about a claim unless you included them or approved it. We never contact your school or counselor without your consent, with one exception you initiate yourself: if you request a financial-aid fee waiver, your counselor is asked to attest to it, and that is the entire exchange.
You see the draft report first. You have an appeal window to add evidence or contest a finding. The report is released only where you direct. We do not send reports, or the fact that you used AttestEd, to colleges, schools, or anyone else on our own initiative.
We do not sell or rent personal data. We do not advertise or share data with advertisers. We do not scrape your social media beyond links you yourself attach as evidence. We do not build a composite score of you; tiers attach to individual claims only. We do not make automated adverse findings: any finding of contradiction involves two human reviewers and supervisor sign-off, and you are notified before any such finding is finalized.
In the current review period, submissions and reports are stored as files in access-controlled accounts used only by the review team, and evidence copies are kept only as long as needed to complete and defend your report. Default retention is the application cycle plus twelve months, after which files are deleted. You may request deletion of everything at any time, before or after a report is produced, by emailing us; we confirm within fourteen days. Reviewers work under confidentiality obligations and see files only for students they review.
Email is not an encrypted vault, and no early-stage process is invulnerable. We keep the attack surface small in the most reliable way available: by not operating student-data servers at all in the current review period, keeping files in access-controlled storage, and collecting the minimum needed to verify what you asked. As the platform grows into accounts and online submission, this policy will be revised before anything changes, and the stricter promise stays: minimum collection, student control, no third-party sharing beyond the outreach you approve.
Ask us at any time to see everything we hold about you, correct it, or delete it, and we will do so regardless of where you live rather than parsing which statute applies to whom. Withdrawing consent stops verification work immediately. If you are an international student, the same rights apply without variation.
If this policy changes in any way that affects data already submitted, we notify every affected student by email before the change applies to them. The current version always lives at this page, with the date at the top.
