Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 5, 2026

Outsette (“Outsette,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) operates the Outsette platform, including the website, daily briefings, AI Advisor, Learning Hub, Career GPS, job tracker, Showcase, employer discovery, and related features (collectively, the “Service”). This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights available to you. It applies to everyone who visits our site, subscribes to our newsletter, or creates a Outsette account. We wrote this policy to describe what Outsette actually does — if a section doesn’t apply to a feature you use, it’s because that feature genuinely doesn’t do that thing.

1. Who we are

Outsette is an early-stage, pre-launch project currently operated directly by its founder — it is not yet operated through an incorporated company (“we” refers to the founder in that capacity). For any privacy question, data request, or complaint, contact us at privacy@outsette.com. Once Outsette incorporates, this section — and our contracts with the service providers listed below — will be updated to name that entity, and we’ll notify users before relying on the change.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you provide directly

• Account information — full name, email address, password (hashed by our authentication provider, Supabase — we never see or store it in plain text), degree program, field of study, and city.
• Career profile — your target career field, career stage (exploring, recruiting, upskilling, or graduating), interests, and a LinkedIn profile URL if you choose to add one.
• CV/resume — if you upload a CV, we store the file itself and extract its text so our AI features can reference it. You can remove a CV at any time from your Profile; doing so deletes the stored file and its extracted text.
• Credentials — certificates or completions you self-report (e.g. a Coursera or Forage certificate): title, provider, field, and date.
• Application tracking — opportunities you bookmark or apply to through Outsette, and the status you set (saved, applied, interviewing, offer, or rejected).
• Interview and offer proof — if you choose to upload a screenshot or document to verify an interview or offer, we store that file and use AI plus human review to verify it (see Section 6).
• Club event registrations — if you RSVP to a club event through Outsette, your name and email are visible to the club lead or organizer running that event, the same way they would be on any event sign-up sheet.
• AI Advisor conversations — messages you send to our in-app career chat assistant, and its replies.
• Showcase/portfolio content — if you build a public Showcase page, everything you choose to put on it (headline, bio, links, projects, skills) is, by design, visible to anyone with the link.
• Payment information (Premium subscribers) — our payment processor, Lemon Squeezy, collects your card details directly; we never see or store your full card number. We keep only your subscription status, renewal date, and the card’s brand and last 4 digits.
• Anything you send us directly — support requests, feedback, survey responses.

2.2 Information collected automatically

• Activity and usage data — courses you mark started or completed, XP and activity streaks, and similar interaction data, used to power features like your Career GPS and Readiness signal.
• Device/log data — standard web server logs (IP address, browser type, request timestamps) collected by our hosting provider, Vercel, for security and reliability. We do not currently run any analytics or advertising tracking (see Section 11, Cookies).

2.3 Information from third parties

• If you sign up with Google, we receive your name and email address from Google to create your account.
• If your school partners with Outsette (Section 5.3), your affiliation may be confirmed via your university email domain.

3. How we use your information

We use your information to:

• Provide, operate, and maintain the Service — your account, news feed, job tracker, Learning Hub, and Showcase.
• Power the AI Advisor and job matching by giving our AI provider the context it needs to give a relevant answer (see Section 6).
• Verify interview/offer proof submissions and award the associated milestones.
• Send you the daily/weekly briefing and transactional emails (account confirmation, billing receipts).
• Personalize your experience — recommended courses, jobs, and content.
• Maintain the security and integrity of the Service — rate limiting, fraud and abuse prevention, and academic-integrity screening on chat messages.
• Process payments and manage your Premium subscription.
• Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.
• With your explicit opt-in only — make your profile discoverable to employers, or share your progress with your university’s staff (Section 5).

We do not use your information for any purpose incompatible with the ones above, and we do not sell your personal information.

4. Legal bases for processing (EEA/UK/Switzerland users)

If you’re located in the European Economic Area, the UK, or Switzerland, we process your personal data under the following legal bases:

• Performance of a contract — to provide the Service you signed up for.
• Consent — for optional features you explicitly opt into (employer discovery, sharing with your university, marketing emails).
• Legitimate interests — to secure the Service, prevent fraud and abuse, and improve our features, balanced against your rights.
• Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose information to comply with the law.

You can withdraw consent for any consent-based processing at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal.

5. How we share your information

5.1 Service providers (subprocessors)

We share limited data with the following providers, solely to operate the Service on our behalf. They are contractually restricted from using your data for their own purposes.

5.2 Employers (only if you opt in)

If you turn on “Discoverable” in your profile settings and make your Showcase public, employers using our talent search can see: your name, degree program, headline, showcase skills (with links to proof, if you added any), and a general readiness signal. They never see your email, CV text, LinkedIn URL, or any other private profile field — the data employers can see is built from an explicit allowlist, and nothing else can pass through it, by design. You can turn this off at any time.

5.3 Your university (only if you opt in)

If your school partners with Outsette, its staff can see anonymized, aggregate cohort statistics (never for a group smaller than 5 students, so no individual can be identified). If you separately turn on “Share my progress with my university,” staff can also see your name, email, program, and learning progress by name — this is off by default and entirely your choice. Where your university licenses Outsette for your program, Outsette and your university act as joint controllers of the data covered by that partnership (for example, confirming your enrollment to activate a license): we each remain independently responsible for our own use of it, and this Policy describes Outsette’s side. Your university’s own policies govern how it uses any data it receives from us.

This is separate from, and shouldn’t be confused with, the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which governs a school’s own education records (grades, enrollment rosters, transcripts) and how the school discloses them to a vendor acting on its behalf. Outsette doesn’t receive any such records from your university — you create your own account directly with us, your university never gives us a roster or enrollment data, and the email-domain check we use to activate a license is something we compute ourselves, not a record your school discloses. Under the current model, Outsette does not act as a “school official” under FERPA. If we ever build a feature that changes that (for example, a school-directed roster integration), we’ll update this Policy and enter into the data-privacy agreement your university requires before that data flows.

5.4 Legal and safety

We may disclose information if required by law, subpoena, or other legal process, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Outsette, our users, or the public.

5.5 Business transfers

If Outsette is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

5.6 We do not sell your data

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers. Employer discovery (Section 5.2) works only because you affirmatively turn it on — under California and similar state privacy laws, a disclosure a consumer directs us to make isn’t a “sale,” provided the recipient doesn’t sell or further disclose it, which is exactly why employers using the talent-search feature agree not to (see our Terms of Service, Section 10).

6. AI features and automated decisions

Outsette uses AI (via Groq) in three places:

• The career chat Advisor, which answers your questions using your profile context and today’s news.
• Job matching, which suggests relevant opportunities based on your profile.
• Interview/offer proof verification, which reads the text of a document you upload and returns an approve, reject, or uncertain recommendation. This affects only your XP and in-app milestones — it never affects any actual hiring decision by an employer.

The employer talent-search ranking (Section 5.2) is not AI or machine learning — it’s a fixed, published point formula (courses completed, profile completeness, applications sent) that we can fully explain on request. No Outsette feature uses AI or machine learning to screen, rank, or score you for an actual employment decision, and no feature substantially assists or replaces an employer’s hiring judgment. If that ever changes, we’ll update this Policy before the change ships and add whatever disclosures apply under laws like the EU AI Act or U.S. state automated-employment-decision laws.

The readiness signal and skills shown to employers are built only from information you directly gave us — your own completed courses, credentials, and applications — never from third-party background, credit, or character data. It is not a “consumer report” under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and we are not a consumer reporting agency.

You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you, and to request human review of any such decision. In practice, none of our AI features make a final decision about you on their own. Proof verification specifically never auto-rejects: an “uncertain” result, and any result you contest, is routed to human (admin) review, and admin decisions are logged. You can request human review of any AI-influenced outcome by emailing support@outsette.com. AI outputs — chat answers, match reasons, verification verdicts — can be wrong; treat them as assistance, not authoritative advice (see also our Terms of Service, Section 9).

7. Data retention

We keep data only as long as it’s useful for the purposes described above:

When you close your account, we deactivate it and delete or anonymize personal data within30 days, except where we’re required to retain it (for example, billing records) or where it’s already anonymized or aggregated.

8. Data security

We use industry-standard technical and organizational measures to protect your information, including encryption in transit, database-level access controls that restrict every account to its own data by default, rate limiting, and an internal audit log for administrative actions. No system is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security — but we take it seriously and will notify affected users and relevant regulators of any data breach as required by applicable law.

9. Your privacy rights

9.1 Every user, everywhere

From your Profile settings, you can at any time: view and correct your profile information, remove your CV, delete individual credentials or bookmarks, opt out of employer discovery or university sharing, and adjust your email preferences. You can request a copy of your data or deletion of your account by emailing privacy@outsette.com — we will respond within 30 days.

9.2 If you’re in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland (GDPR)

You have the right to access the personal data we hold about you; correct inaccurate data; request erasure (the “right to be forgotten”); restrict or object to certain processing; receive your data in a portable format; and lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. Where our processing relies on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

9.3 If you’re a U.S. resident (California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and similar state privacy laws)

A growing number of U.S. states — including California (CCPA/CPRA), Virginia (VCDPA), Colorado (CPA), and Connecticut (CTDPA) — give residents substantially similar rights: to know and access the personal information we hold about you, to request deletion, to correct inaccurate information, and to opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information or its use for targeted advertising. We do not sell or share personal information, or use it for targeted advertising, as those terms are defined under these laws, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights, and you can exercise them the same way as any other user (Section 9.1).

9.4 International data transfers

Our service providers (Section 5.1) are primarily based in the United States. If you access Outsette from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the U.S. and other countries that may have different data protection laws than your country of residence. Where such a transfer requires a safeguard under GDPR or UK data protection law, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, where applicable) with our service providers, or another lawful transfer mechanism.

10. Children’s privacy

Creating a Outsette account requires you to be at least 18 years old (see our Terms of Service, Section 2), and we do not knowingly let anyone under 18 create one. Our free daily-brief email newsletter is different: it doesn’t require an account, collects only an email address, and doesn’t verify age, so it may reach readers younger than 18 who are simply curious about business news — that’s the one part of Outsette not restricted to adults. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete their information. If you believe a minor has provided us information beyond a newsletter email address, contact privacy@outsette.com.

11. Cookies and similar technologies

Outsette uses only one type of cookie today: a strictly necessary authentication cookie (set by our sign-in system, Supabase) that keeps you signed in. We do not currently use any analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies, and we do not run any third-party tracking scripts. Because we only use strictly necessary cookies, we don’t show a cookie-consent banner — there is no non-essential tracking to consent to. If that ever changes (for example, if we add product analytics), we will update this Policy and add a cookie-consent mechanism before doing so.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we’ll notify you by email or with a prominent notice in the app before the change takes effect. The “Last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version.

13. Contact us

Questions, requests, or complaints about this Policy or your data: privacy@outsette.com
Outsette (an early-stage project operated by its founder; not yet incorporated)
We don’t yet have a registered business address to publish here — email is the fastest and most reliable way to reach us. A formal notice address will be added once Outsette incorporates.

This Privacy Policy works together with our Terms of Service. If there’s a conflict between the two on a privacy matter, this Policy controls.