Privacy Policy

GradConnect AI helps you find academics whose research matches yours, write to them, and keep track of your applications. This policy explains what we hold to do that.

Your account. Your email address and name, through our authentication provider.

Your academic profile. Field of study, university, degrees, research interests, and skills — everything you enter, or approve after we read it from a document.

Documents you upload. Your CV and supporting files. We scan them for malware, extract their text, and turn that text into a searchable form so the Research Assistant can answer questions about them.

Your outreach. The drafts you generate, edit, and approve, and the delivery record of anything you send — recipient, subject, timestamps, and status.

Mailbox access. If you connect Gmail or Outlook, we store an encrypted access token so we can send the messages you approve.

Usage. Which features you use and how often, so we can enforce plan limits and keep the service running.

We use your profile and documents to rank professors against your research, to explain why each match was made, and to draft outreach grounded in evidence you can check. We use your usage records to apply your plan's limits and to bill you.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it to advertise to you.

Parts of GradConnect AI send text to OpenAI to do their work: reading your CV, answering Research Assistant questions, and drafting outreach. What is sent is limited to what the task needs — the relevant parts of your profile, the relevant excerpts of your own documents, and the professor evidence already stored in GradConnect AI.

We ask that this content not be used to train models, and we do not ask the provider to retain it. We cannot make promises on the provider's behalf beyond that.

GradConnect AI only ever asks for permission to send mail. We do not request or hold permission to read your inbox, and we cannot see replies you receive — which is why the product asks you to tell it when a professor has replied.

Nothing is sent without you approving that specific message. Disconnecting your mailbox in Settings revokes our access immediately.

We use service providers to run GradConnect AI: our hosting and database provider, our authentication and file-storage provider, OpenAI for the AI features above, Stripe for payments, and Google or Microsoft when you choose to connect a mailbox. Each receives only what it needs to perform its function.

Your professors never receive anything about you except the message you wrote and approved. Other students cannot see any of your data.

For as long as your account exists. When you delete your account we remove your profile, documents and their extracted text, Research Assistant conversations, shortlist, outreach drafts and delivery records, saved opportunities, application records, and mailbox credentials.

Two things survive, and only in a form that is not about you personally: aggregate counts used to operate the service, and the professor corpus itself, which is public academic data and was never yours.

You can edit or clear your profile at any time, delete individual documents, disconnect your mailbox, and delete your entire account from Settings. Deleting your account is immediate and cannot be undone.

If you want a copy of your data, or want us to correct something, ask us through the support page and we will help.

Mailbox tokens are encrypted at rest. Uploaded files are isolated in private quarantine storage and scanned for malware before they are processed or promoted into approved private storage. Access to your data is scoped to your account at the database level.

No service can promise perfect security, and we do not claim any certification we have not obtained. If something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you.

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will say so in the product rather than quietly updating this page.