Privacy Policy

Effective Date: September 15, 2026

UniSpendz ("we," "us," "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect your personal information when you use our college budgeting application.

1. Information We Collect

Account Information: When you create an account, we collect your email address, name (optional), and an encrypted version of your password.

Financial Data You Enter: This includes semester costs, funding sources, account balances, transactions, budget categories, school bill items, and reconciliation records. This data is entirely self-reported by you — we do not connect to your bank or university systems.

Feedback Submissions: If you submit feedback, we collect the feedback type, message, and any optional name/email you provide.

Documents You Upload (Receipts & Bursar Statements): To save you typing, UniSpendz lets you photograph a receipt or upload a student-account / bursar statement so we can extract the line items for your review. These files are processed transiently to pull out amounts, dates, and merchant or charge descriptions. We do not retain the raw uploaded file after the relevant details have been extracted — the image or document is discarded once mapping is complete. Before any extracted text is stored or shown back to you, we run an automated PII-scrubbing step that redacts sensitive identifiers such as Social Security numbers, student ID / account numbers, street addresses, phone numbers, and login credentials. You always review and confirm the extracted entries before anything is saved.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information solely to: (a) provide and maintain the UniSpendz service; (b) authenticate your identity; (c) display your financial data back to you in a useful format; (d) respond to feedback and improve the service.

3. FERPA Compliance

UniSpendz does not access, store, or process any educational records as defined by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). All financial data in the app is voluntarily entered by you. We are not an institutional record keeper and do not receive data from any educational institution. Your university transcript, grades, enrollment status, and other protected education records are never collected or stored by this service.

4. Data Storage and Security

Your data is stored in a secure, encrypted database. Passwords are hashed using industry-standard algorithms (bcrypt) and are never stored in plain text. We use HTTPS for all data transmission. Access to the database is restricted to authorized systems only.

Because UniSpendz handles nonpublic personal financial information, we align our safeguards with the principles of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), including administrative, technical, and physical protections designed to secure your information and limit access to authorized purposes only. Uploaded receipts and statements are processed transiently and the raw files are not retained (see Section 1).

5. Data Sharing

We never sell, rent, trade, or share your personally identifiable financial data. We do not display ads. We do not use your data for marketing purposes.

We may generate and share anonymized, aggregate insights derived from usage patterns across our user base (for example, average spending trends by region or class year). These insights contain only percentages, deltas, and cohort-level statistics — never individual dollar amounts or information that could identify you. We enforce a minimum cohort size of 50 users before any aggregate data is produced, ensuring no individual can be singled out.

Aggregate purchase-intent insights: When you set savings goals or plan upcoming purchases, UniSpendz may derive anonymized, forward-looking "intent" signals — for example, a general category of planned spending (such as travel, electronics, or housing), a coarse bucketed price range (never an exact dollar amount), and an estimated time horizon. These signals are grouped into cohort clusters (by intent category and region) and made available to enterprise research partners only in aggregate. The same protections apply: identifiers are stripped, exact amounts are replaced with buckets, and any cluster with fewer than 50 distinct students is automatically suppressed. Intent signals are directional estimates only — they are never used to identify, target, or make decisions about any individual, and they are compiled consistent with GLBA and CCPA.

You can opt out of contributing to all anonymized analytics and intent telemetry at any time from Settings. Opting out is honored immediately and does not affect your ability to use UniSpendz. Because we do not sell personal information, California residents have no sale to opt out of; the analytics opt-out above still lets you exclude your data from aggregate insights entirely.

6. Your Rights

You have the right to: (a) access all data stored about you (via the Export Backup feature in Settings); (b) correct your data at any time through the app interface; (c) reset all of your financial data while keeping your login (via Reset All Data in Settings); (d) permanently delete your entire account and every record associated with it (via Delete My Account in Settings) — this is immediate and irreversible.

Regional rights (GDPR / CCPA): Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), including the rights to access, portability, correction, and erasure of your personal data. UniSpendz honors these rights for all users through the self-service tools described above; you never have to pay or file a special request to exercise them. Because we do not sell personal information to anyone, there is no sale for you to opt out of.

7. Cookies and Tracking

We use essential session cookies to keep you logged in. We do not use tracking cookies, analytics cookies, or third-party advertising cookies.

8. Children's Privacy

UniSpendz is designed for college-age students. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected information from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated policy within the app.

10. Contact

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please use the Feedback page to reach us.