Privacy Policy

GradeGuide is used by students under 18. This policy explains, in plain language, exactly what we collect, why, and what control you have over it.

Effective: 7 August 2026 · Last updated: 7 August 2026

1. Who we are

GradeGuide ("we", "us") is operated by OJ Studios. We are the organisation responsible for the personal information described in this policy. You can reach our privacy contact at privacy@gradeguide.ca.

We handle personal information in accordance with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial privacy legislation.

2. Information we collect

We only collect what the product needs to work. Specifically:

Information you give us

Account details, your first and last name, email address, grade level, and school name. Collected when you create an account, so we can identify you and tailor advice to your grade.
Academic information, your courses, marks, target career, target schools, interests, extracurricular activities, and course plan. This is the basis of every recommendation the product makes.
Advisor conversations, the questions you type to the AI Advisor and the replies it gives, kept so your conversation persists between visits.

Information created automatically

Authentication data, a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and a securely hashed version of your password. We never store your password in readable form and cannot recover it.
Usage records, for each advisor conversation, the number of tokens used and the resulting cost. We use these solely to enforce fair-use limits and to control our own operating costs.

What we do not collect

No advertising or analytics trackers, and no third-party cookies. The session cookie that keeps you signed in is the only cookie we set.
No payment card details. If paid plans launch, payments will be handled by a dedicated payment processor and card numbers will never reach our servers.
No precise location, contacts, photos, microphone, or camera access.
No social media profiles or data brokered from third parties.

3. Why we use it

We use your information only for the purposes below. We do not use it for anything else without asking you first.

To run your account, signing you in, keeping you signed in, and letting you reset your password.
To provide the product, calculating admission chances, matching scholarships and careers, building your course plan, and answering your questions through the AI Advisor.
To keep the service fair and affordable, enforcing usage limits so no single account can exhaust shared capacity.
To keep the service secure, detecting and preventing abuse, and investigating security incidents.

We do not sell your information. We do not rent it. We do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles.

4. Where your information goes

Your account and academic information are stored in our own database on servers we control.

There is one circumstance in which your information leaves our systems.

The AI Advisor sends your information to a third party. When you send a message to the AI Advisor, we transmit your question together with relevant context from your profile, your name, grade, school, marks, interests, target schools, scholarship matches, and course plan, to Anthropic PBC, which operates the Claude model that writes the reply. This is what makes the advice specific to you rather than generic. Anthropic processes this information on servers in the United States, which means it is subject to United States law, including lawful access requests by US authorities.

Anthropic acts as our service provider and is contractually restricted to processing this information for the purpose of generating your reply.

Using the AI Advisor is entirely optional. If you would prefer that your information never leaves Canada, simply do not use the Advisor, every other feature of GradeGuide works without it, and nothing you enter elsewhere is sent to Anthropic.

Other disclosures

Service providers, hosting and email delivery providers who process data strictly on our instructions.
Your school or school board, only if your school has an institutional agreement with us and you signed up through it. If you signed up on your own, your school sees nothing.
Legal requirements, if we are required to disclose information by law, court order, or to protect someone's safety.
Business transfer, if GradeGuide is acquired, information may transfer to the new owner, who would remain bound by this policy. We would notify you before that happened.

5. Students under 18

GradeGuide is designed for high-school students, so most of our users are minors. We take that seriously:

We collect the minimum necessary to provide guidance, and never more than a student volunteers.
We never show advertising to students, and never sell or share student information for marketing.
We do not use student information to train AI models.
A parent or guardian may exercise any of the rights in section 7 on a student's behalf.
The AI Advisor is instructed never to counsel students on mental health, safety, or family matters, and to direct them to a guidance counsellor or trusted adult instead.

If you are under the age of majority in your province, please read this policy with a parent, guardian, or teacher before creating an account.

6. How long we keep it

Account and academic information, for as long as your account is open.
Advisor conversations, for as long as your account is open, so your history is there when you return.
Usage records, up to 24 months, for cost accounting.
After you delete your account, we erase your personal information within 30 days, except where we are legally required to retain something longer.

7. Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law you have the right to:

Access, ask for a copy of everything we hold about you.
Correct, have inaccurate information fixed.
Delete, have your account and personal information erased.
Withdraw consent, stop using the AI Advisor at any time, or close your account entirely.
Complain, challenge how we handle your information.

Email privacy@gradeguide.ca from the address on your account. We respond within 30 days, at no charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that nobody else can request your information.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca, or to your provincial privacy commissioner.

8. How we protect it

All traffic is encrypted in transit using HTTPS.
Passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes.
Access controls prevent any student from reading another student's information.
Your conversations, marks, and personal details are never written to our application logs.
Administrative access is limited to staff who need it to operate the service.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify affected users and the Privacy Commissioner as required by law.

9. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. For any change that materially affects how we use your information, particularly any new disclosure to a third party, we will notify you in the app before it takes effect.

10. Contact us

Questions, requests, or complaints: privacy@gradeguide.ca. We read every message.