Privacy at ScholarPal

What we store

• Your account: your email address, your name, and your password. The password is stored only as a one-way hash (bcrypt), never as the password itself.
• Your profile: the answers you give, which can include your nationality, where you live, displacement or refugee status, UNRWA registration, gender, date of birth, education and grades, English test scores, your field and goals, your family situation, and financial information such as financial need and household income.
• What you add: saved scholarships, your application tracker and its notes, essay drafts, feedback you send, and documents you upload (kept on our server, up to 10 MB each).
• Opportunities you tell us about ("Submit an opportunity", with or without an account): the link, your description, the groups and levels you tick, the deadline and eligibility notes if you add them, your email only if you give it, and the page you came from when you used a "Missing an award?" link — the country, field and level filters on it, never anything you typed into the search box. We store no IP address with it. A university office or organisation that sends awards through its partner link is recorded by its name, which is shown on the pages of awards we publish from its submissions. If you delete your account, your email and the link to your account are removed and the submission itself is kept.

Why

To show you scholarships whose eligibility rules you meet, to keep your plan and applications together, and to send the emails you have not turned off (for example deadline reminders). You can change most answers, or remove them, on your profile page.

How we measure use of the site

• Page views, and how fast each page loaded and responded (with the address of the page each measurement belongs to), are counted with Plausible Analytics, loaded from our own domain. It sets no cookies, and page addresses are sent without their query strings apart from campaign tags.
• We also record anonymous usage events (for example which page loaded and how fast) under a random session ID that is not linked to your account. Page-speed records also note the country your connection comes from, as a two-letter country code only — never your city, address or IP address. They are deleted after 90 days.
• When you are signed in, we also record what you do with scholarships, linked to your account: which ones you are shown, save, follow the link to apply for, start tracking an application for or mark as not relevant, and whether our emails reached you and which links in them you clicked. We use this to improve your matches and to limit how many emails we send you. The record of which scholarships you were shown is deleted after 90 days; the rest is deleted with your account.
• When you tap "Not for me" on a scholarship, we keep the reason you pick, any note you add (up to 280 characters), where the card was shown and its position, and a summary of your answers at that moment: nationality, study level, field, country of residence and site language. We use it to hide that scholarship from you and to find scholarships that are wrong for a whole group of students. If you are signed in, it is linked to your account, included in your data download and deleted with your account. If you are not, it is kept under the random session ID only, and your browser remembers which scholarships you hid. Either way it is deleted after one year, and it is never sent to Plausible or any other analytics service. "Wrong information" and "Already closed" also pass the scholarship and your note to our team to check the page.
• When you tell us whether you heard back from a scholarship (accepted, not accepted, waitlisted or no answer yet), we keep that answer on the application in your account, with the date we last asked. About three months after the deadline (or after you told us you applied, if there is no deadline) we may ask once by email, if you have not turned those emails off, and on My plan. In the admin reports, these answers appear only as totals: success rates for groups of at least five answers, and a list of scholarships that Palestinian students reported winning, without names. The answers are included in your data download and deleted with your account.

The research panel

Who else handles your data

• Railway hosts our servers and database, and Cloudflare carries traffic to the site.
• Resend sends our emails, so it receives your email address and the content of each email.
• Google, only if you choose "Sign in with Google": we receive your email address and name from it.
• When you add target universities, their names, with your field and level of study but not your name or email, are sent as web-search queries to find university funding. The search provider is currently Brave Search; if it does not answer, the query goes to our own SearXNG search server, which passes it on to public search engines, and then to DuckDuckGo.
• If error monitoring is switched on, crash reports from our server go to Sentry. It is set up to leave out personal information such as email and IP addresses, but a report can still contain part of the data that was being handled when the error happened.
• The AI assistant runs on our own server (a Qwen model we host on Railway). Your questions are not sent to an outside AI company.
• The "Submit an opportunity" form has a spam check (Cloudflare Turnstile) that is switched off. If we switch it on, that form will load it from Cloudflare, which checks your browser to tell a person from a program; we send Cloudflare only the check's answer, never your submission or your account.
• Only the person who runs ScholarPal can see your profile answers, and only to support the service. The admin list of accounts never shows the sensitive ones (displacement or refugee status, UNRWA registration, money, disability); seeing them means opening one account and writing down why. Every such opening, and every look at the list, is recorded with the date.
• ScholarPal does not sell personal data, and the site does not send your profile to scholarship providers.

How we check that ScholarPal works for every kind of student

• Short one-question checks, such as "Did you find at least one award worth applying to?", can be answered with one tap or closed, and each is asked only once. An answer is stored with your broad profile group (nationality, the level you want to study, your field, where you live, the site language and the kind of device you answered on), never with anything you type. If you are signed in, the answer is also linked to your account; deleting your account removes that link and the profile group. We read these answers only as counts per group, and a group with fewer than five people is not shown.
• When anyone, signed in or not, opens a scholarship's page or follows its link to the official site, we add one to that scholarship's count for the day. The count holds no account, session or device identifier, and it is deleted after 400 days.
• We also note, in one word, which kind of device an action came from: phone, tablet or computer. We work it out at that moment from the description your browser sends of itself, and then discard that description; we never store it. The word is kept in a separate daily count of scholarship page visits and official-site clicks per kind of device (without the scholarship), with your answers to the one-question checks, with the anonymous usage events about installing ScholarPal on your device (whether the offer to install was shown or tapped, and whether a visit was opened from the home screen), and, when you are signed in, with the actions recorded on your account, such as saving a scholarship. It lets us see whether ScholarPal works as well on a phone as on a computer. It is a kind of device, not an identifier: it cannot tell your device apart from anyone else's. It is in your data download and is deleted with your account; the daily counts are deleted after 400 days.
• When a search or a set of filters on the scholarship list shows four results or fewer, we keep the search words and the filters, with numbers and email addresses removed, in a daily count that holds no account, session or device identifier. We use it to find scholarships students look for that we do not list yet. A search is shown to us only after it has been made on at least three different days, and these counts are deleted after 90 days.
• When you create an account, we note in one word how the visit that led to it began (for example a search engine, a link someone shared, a campaign link, an AI assistant or a direct visit), never the link itself, the campaign name or the page you came from. It is stored with your account so we can see whether students who arrive in different ways come back. It is in your data download and is deleted with your account.

What is kept in your browser

Cookies for your language choice and a sign-in flag (it holds no password or token). Your sign-in token, an unfinished sign-up and some scholarship lists are kept in your browser's storage so the site works on a weak connection. Your browser also remembers how many pages you have opened here and whether you pressed "Not now" on the offer to install ScholarPal, so the offer appears once and then waits 30 days, and when your previous visit started and whether it was opened from the home screen. Only a one-word summary of that visit (for example "in the browser, within 7 days") is sent to us, with the anonymous usage events, so we can see whether students who install ScholarPal come back more often.

How long we keep it

Your account, profile and what you add are kept until you delete your account, and so is the record of what you do while signed in, apart from which scholarships you were shown, which is deleted after 90 days. Anonymous usage events are deleted after 90 days. Password-reset links expire after 60 minutes and their records are deleted 7 days later.

Deleting your account

"Delete Account" on your profile page deletes your account, your profile, your saved scholarships and applications, your tracker, your essays, your uploaded files and the record of your activity while signed in. A few records are kept without anything that links them to you, such as scholarship suggestions you submitted.

Go to your profile

Getting a copy of your data

"Download my data" on your profile page saves one file (JSON) with everything linked to your account: your account details, your profile answers, your saved scholarships and applications, your tracker and its notes, your essays, the list of documents you uploaded, the feedback you sent and the record of your activity while signed in. It leaves out your password and your sign-in links, even in their scrambled (hashed) form. The documents themselves are not in the file; each one opens from your applications page.

Download your data from your profile

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