DebtDefy
Privacy policy
Not yet in effect.
The short version
- DebtDefy is a planning tool for high-school students. It is used through a school, and the school stays in charge of its students' information.
- If you join with a class link, we do not ask for your name or your email. You get a made-up username.
- Your teacher can see which students finished a class task. Your teacher cannot see your plans, your numbers, or your survey answers.
- We do not sell student information, show ads, or build advertising profiles. We do not send student information to any AI service.
- We keep your account for 90 days after your school's access ends, then we delete it. Your school can ask us to delete it sooner.
Who this policy covers
This policy explains what information DebtDefy collects, why, who can see it, how long we keep it, and how a school, student, or family can ask us to change or delete it. It covers the DebtDefy website and everything you can do in it, including the College Plan, the Financial Life Plan, class tasks, the survey, the feedback button, and the family conversation guide.
DebtDefy is used through schools. For student information, the school decides how DebtDefy is used and we act as the school's service provider. We use student information only to run DebtDefy for that school's educational purposes, and only under the school's direction. Schools that use DebtDefy are responsible for the notices and permissions they owe students and families under laws such as FERPA.
What we collect
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Your login | A username. If you joined with a class link, we made it up (for example, maple-otter-417), and it is not your name. Your password is held by our sign-in service in scrambled form. DebtDefy staff cannot read it. Some older accounts also have the email address and name the student gave when the account was made. |
| Your school and class | Which school and class you belong to, whether your seat is active, when you joined or were removed, and any request to join a class with the teacher's decision on it. |
| Your plans | What you type or choose in the College Plan and the Financial Life Plan: schools, majors, careers, where you want to work, how you might pay, savings, loans, goals, and similar. You choose what to enter. The tools work with estimates, and we suggest you use estimates instead of your family's real account numbers. |
| Class tasks | When a finished plan meets a task your teacher set, we save a record with a receipt number. The record names no plan figures. |
| Survey answers | Ratings from 1 to 5 about how well you understand your financial future, asked before your first plan and after your Life Plan, and your rating of the experience. An optional comment is limited to 1,000 characters. |
| Feedback you send | The message and your answers to the short questions, the page you were on, the type of account, and technical details: screen size, browser and device type, the last few DebtDefy pages you opened, and any error the page showed. Feedback is not shown with your name. |
| Activity | When you last signed in, and when plans and records were created or changed. |
| Connection details | Whenever you connect, your device's internet address and browser type reach our servers and our sign-in service. They appear in ordinary server and security logs, and are used to keep DebtDefy running, to slow down repeated guessing of passwords or codes, and to find misuse. We do not use them to follow you to other websites. |
| Administrative records | A log of some actions that matter for security, such as a teacher resetting a password or a staff member opening a student summary. These records name the account involved and the kind of action. They do not contain plan figures. |
Teachers, counselors, and administrators also have an account with a name, an email address, a role, and the school they work in, plus the classes and student lists they manage.
A visitor who tries the guest College Plan has no account. Guest work is not saved on our servers, and we only set a small cookie so the page remembers your choice.
We do not collect: a class-link student's real name or email, a phone number, a home address, a birth date, a Social Security number or other government ID, a bank, card, or loan account number, photos or other files (DebtDefy has no upload feature), your device's location, your contacts, or an advertising identifier.
How we use information
- To give you the plans, comparisons, and tools, and to save your work.
- To let a teacher set class tasks and see how many students finished them.
- To tell a school how the pilot is going, in counts and group averages (see Reports for schools).
- To keep DebtDefy secure, to find and fix problems, and to answer a school's support request.
- To make DebtDefy clearer and more useful, using combined results and the feedback students send.
We do not sell student information. We do not show advertising. We do not build advertising profiles of students or use student information for marketing. We do not use student information to train AI models.
Who can see what
| Who | What they can see |
|---|---|
| You | Everything in your own account, including all of your plans. |
| Your teacher | The usernames of students in their class, so they can manage seats and reset a forgotten password, and how many students finished each class task (a count, plus a check of a receipt number you show them). Your teacher cannot see your plans, your numbers, or your survey answers. |
| A counselor or teacher assigned to you | If your school assigns you to a staff member, a short summary of where your plans stand, such as whether a plan is started or finished and when it last changed. Not your dollar figures. Each time a staff member opens this summary, it is recorded in the school's activity log. |
| Your school's administrators | The school's people and classes, class and access settings, the activity log, and the school's pilot results as counts and group averages. Not an individual student's plans or answers. |
| Your district's administrators | The same kind of counts and settings for the schools in their district. |
| DebtDefy administrators | Usage totals, survey results as group averages, feedback messages (shown with the date and kind of account, not a name), and the school pilot reports. They also set up schools and people. |
| DebtDefy technical staff | A small number of people who run the system can reach stored records. They use that access only to run and secure DebtDefy, fix a problem, or help a school that asks, and they are required to keep the information confidential. |
Reports for schools
A school can see a pilot report about its own students: how many joined, how many started and finished plans, how many finished class tasks, and how survey ratings changed for the same students before and after. Reports use counts and group averages only.
- No student's name, username, plan, or individual answer appears in a report.
- A group smaller than 5 students is shown as "Fewer than 5" instead of a number, and a number is also hidden when the students left over would be a group that small.
- A school that has fewer than 5 students gets no results at all.
- Written comments are never shown in a school's report.
We may describe combined results from many students to explain how DebtDefy works. We do not name a school, and we do not share one school's results with another school, unless that school agrees.
Artificial intelligence
DebtDefy does not currently send student information to any artificial intelligence service. If we add an AI feature, we will update this policy and tell schools before it starts. We will not use student information to train AI models.
How we protect information
- Every request is checked on the server for who you are and what you may see. Hiding a button is never the only protection.
- Each school's information is kept apart from other schools' information.
- Passwords are held by the sign-in service in scrambled form, and repeated wrong passwords lock sign-in for a time.
- Teacher, counselor, and administrator accounts, which can reach other people's information, require a second step at sign-in: a code from an authenticator app.
- Connections to DebtDefy use HTTPS.
- Reports and administrator views use counts and group averages, with the small-group rule described above.
- Actions that matter for security are recorded in an activity log.
No system is perfectly secure. If we learn that student information was accessed or disclosed in a way we did not intend, we will tell the affected school without unreasonable delay and help it meet any notice duties it has.
How long we keep information and how it is deleted
- Student accounts and everything in them are deleted 90 days after the school's access to DebtDefy ends, or sooner if the school asks.
- A school administrator can delete a student's account at any time from the Student data page. Deleting takes effect immediately and cannot be undone: it removes the sign-in login, the plans, the class records, the survey answers, and the feedback the student sent.
- When a school asks us to do something it cannot do itself, such as exporting a student's information or deleting an account that belongs to more than one school, we complete it within 30 days.
- When a teacher removes a student from a class, that student's seat is released and the link-made account's school membership ends.
- Feedback messages are kept until we have dealt with them, and then deleted.
- Server and security logs are kept only as long as needed to run and protect DebtDefy, and are not used to build profiles of students.
- The activity log is kept for security and accountability. When an account is deleted, the log keeps that a deletion happened, and every link in it to that account is removed.
- Copies kept for backup are deleted when those backups expire. Deleted student records are not restored from a backup.
Seeing, correcting, or deleting information
The school is the point of contact. A parent or guardian who wants information about a student, or wants it corrected or deleted, should ask the student's school. A school administrator can delete a student's account themselves. To see or export what we hold about a student, or to correct it, the school asks us. We act on a request that comes from a verified school administrator. We do not act on a request from someone we cannot verify, because many student accounts have no email address to check.
A student can see and change their own plans at any time, can delete a plan from their plan library, and can download a copy of their own information from their Account page. A student cannot delete their own account, because the account belongs to the school's class; they ask their teacher or school.
Who DebtDefy is for
DebtDefy is for students who are 13 or older, and it is offered through schools. It is not meant for children under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we will work with the school to delete it.
Families and the family conversation guide
The family conversation guide helps a student talk through a plan with the people who help them decide. It is made on the student's own screen from the student's plan, and the student prints it or saves it. DebtDefy does not email it, post it to a link anyone else can open, or keep a separate copy.
About the estimates
DebtDefy is an educational planning tool. Every figure is an estimate based on assumptions and what you enter. It is not individualized financial, legal, tax, or investment advice.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell schools before the change takes effect, and we will not use student information already collected in a materially different way without the school's agreement. The effective date is shown at the top of this page.
Contact
Ask your school administrator, who can reach us. This page will list a direct contact when the policy takes effect.