What we collect, and what we never do with it.

01Who we are

ama.college connects families with current college students for private 30-minute video conversations. We are a StudentGigs company. This policy covers this website and the booking and session platform you reach from it.

If you want something explained, corrected or deleted, write to [email protected]. We reply within one business day.

02What we collect from families

We ask for the minimum we need to run a conversation and nothing more. We do not ask for transcripts, grades, test scores, essays or application material, because mentors do not work on applications.

• —Account details. A parent or guardian name, email address and password. For a student under 18, the account is created by the parent.
• —Who you want to talk to. The colleges, majors and interests you filter on, so we can match a mentor.
• —Questions you send ahead. Anything you write in the pre-session notes is shared with the mentor you booked, and with the parent on the account.
• —Messages. Messages you exchange with a mentor between sessions, which stay on the platform.
• —Session recordings. Sessions are recorded for safety. See the recordings section below.
• —Payment. Card payments are handled by our payment processor. We receive a confirmation and the last digits of the card; we never see or store the full card number.

03What we collect from mentors

To verify that a mentor is a current student we collect a school email address at their college, a student ID, and their college, year, major and hometown. Enrollment is re-confirmed each semester. We also hold the payout details needed to pay them their share of the session fee.

A mentor profile shows only what they chose to publish: first name, college, year, major, hometown, the areas they can speak to, and what they wrote about their own first year.

04Students under 18

An account for a student under 18 is created and owned by a parent or guardian. The parent sees the same message inbox the student does, chooses at booking whether to join the call, and can request the recording of any session on their own account.

The service is not for children under 13 and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to us and we will delete it.

We do not sell information about a student or share it with colleges. We do not use account details, messages or session recordings to target advertising. Advertising measurement on this marketing website is described below.

05Session recordings

Every session is recorded, and both sides are told so before the call begins. The recording exists for one reason: so that if something goes wrong on a call, there is a record a person on our team can review.

A family can request the recording of a session on their own account. Mentors cannot download recordings of other people. We review a recording only in response to a report or a safety concern, or when a family asks us to.

06What this website measures

Every page on this site loads our own first-party analytics tag. It records which pages were viewed, which buttons were used, how long the page was engaged, how far down it was scrolled, the site you arrived from, and campaign source, medium and identifiers if the link carried them.

If a page hits a technical error, the tag also sends the error message the browser produced and the address and line of the script that failed, so we can find and fix the problem. These reports are sent as the browser wrote them, so they can occasionally include part of a web address.

Apart from those error reports, it deliberately does not send URL queries or fragments, the contents of any field, email addresses or payment details. Our collector also sees the IP address and browser user agent that every web request carries.

Where an action is about a particular college, we record which college it was, so we can see that someone compared three specific schools rather than simply that they compared three. That field can only ever hold a college from our published directory.

Two first-party cookies make this work: ama_analytics_visitor, which lasts 90 days, and ama_analytics_visit, which expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. Neither carries your name or email. They let us tell that a visit to this site and a booking are the same journey.

Analytics records are kept for 90 days and then deleted. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we do not record the visit at all.

We also use the Meta Pixel on this marketing website to measure visits from our Facebook and Instagram ads and clicks through to booking. It sends page views and booking-button clicks to Meta, which receives the page URL, browser and network information and may use advertising cookies to connect those events with its services. We do not send account details, form contents or payment details through our pixel integration. A booking-button click is not reported as a completed booking.

We do not load the Meta Pixel when your browser enables Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. Our fonts are served from our own domain.

07Who else sees your information

• —The mentor you booked sees your first name, your questions and your messages. They do not see your payment details, your address, or anything about other mentors you considered.
• —Service providers that run the platform: payment processing, video calls, email delivery, hosting and content delivery. They may process your information only to provide that service to us.
• —A counselor or school whose referral link or booking code you used sees that a code was used. They do not see who you spoke to, what you asked, or anything said on the call.
• —Meta receives the marketing website events and browser information described above for advertising measurement.
• —We do not sell personal information and we do not share it with colleges, admissions offices or data brokers.
• —We may disclose information if the law requires it, or where we believe someone is at risk of harm.

08How long we keep things

Account details stay while the account is open. Messages and written recaps stay with the account so a family can go back to them during the college search. Analytics records are deleted after 90 days. Payment records are kept as long as tax and accounting rules require.

If you save a card for a booking, our payment processor keeps it until that booking is finished, then removes it 90 days after it was last used. You can remove it sooner from the booking page once the booking is finished or cancelled.

Ask us to close your account and we will delete your personal information, except anything we are required to keep or need to resolve an open dispute or safety report.

09Your choices

Write to [email protected] for any of these. Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your personal information, and we will honour them.

• —Ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or for a correction.
• —Ask us to delete your account and your information.
• —Ask for the recording of a session on your own account.
• —Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser to stop first-party analytics and the Meta Pixel on this website. Clearing cookies resets stored identifiers but does not turn off future measurement.
• —Unsubscribe from any email we send that is not about a session you booked.

10Security

Conversations and messages happen on our platform rather than on personal phones, so no one has to hand over a phone number. Traffic to this site and the platform is encrypted in transit. Access to recordings and messages is limited to the people who need it to handle a report.

No system is perfect. If you think an account has been accessed by someone else, write to us immediately.