Privacy policy

University4Students is operated by HELPERG LLC. The operator is responsible for the content published here and for the decisions described on this page.

It is more useful to start with the absences, because they are the substance of this policy. In this release the site does none of the following for readers of the site. Where a mechanism exists in the software but is not switched on, this page says so rather than claiming the code could not do it — the honest statement is that it is not running, not that it could never be written.

Three pages on this site let you do work that would be irritating to lose: the student cost planner, where you enter your own budget figures; the comparison view, which remembers which institutions you had lined up; and the claim form, where an institutional representative drafts a correction. All three run entirely in your browser, and two of them can save what you have done so it survives a refresh.

That saving uses your browser’s own local storage, on your own device. It is not a cookie, it is not sent with any request, and it is not visible to this site’s operator or to anyone else — the site is a set of static files and has no server that could receive it. Nothing saved this way identifies you, because nothing on this site asks who you are. Each of those pages has a button that clears what it stored, and clearing your browser’s site data removes it too.

The claim form saves nothing at all. What you type there is assembled into a request in the page itself, and it reaches U4S only if you send it yourself by email — the site transmits nothing on your behalf, and until you press send in your own email application, U4S has received nothing. A server-side claim system exists in the software and is switched off; it is described under “University representatives” below.

U4S is hosted on infrastructure operated by a third-party hosting provider. In common with essentially every website, the servers that deliver these pages process basic technical information as part of transmitting them: the requesting IP address, the time of the request, the page requested, the referring page if your browser sends one, and your browser and operating system identifiers.

This information is processed by the hosting provider for the purpose of delivering the site, keeping it available, and protecting it from abuse such as denial-of-service traffic. The operator does not use it to build a profile of you, does not combine it with other data, and does not attempt to identify individual readers from it. Retention is governed by the hosting provider’s own configuration and policies rather than by anything U4S adds.

Because content is delivered from a content delivery network, requests may be served from a location closer to you than the operator’s own jurisdiction. The hosting provider acts as a processor for this purpose.

The only route by which you can deliberately send personal data to U4S is email. If you write to info@helperg.com, the message and whatever it contains — including your email address, your name if you give it, and anything else you choose to include — is received and read by the operator.

That correspondence is processed for one purpose: replying to you and, where relevant, acting on what you have raised. A correction you report may lead to a change on a page, but your message is not published, is not passed to any third party for marketing, and is not added to any mailing list. There is no mailing list.

Email is not a confidential medium. Please do not send health information, financial details, identity documents or anything else sensitive. If you need to raise something sensitive, say so in general terms and the operator will suggest a route.

U4S has built a way to count which programmes, universities, subjects and countries people open on this site, so that it can decide what to verify next. Like the claim system, it is SWITCHED OFF: collecting requires a setting an operator has to turn on and a database to store the counts in, neither of which is configured here. Nothing is being recorded, and the endpoint that would receive events answers that it is unavailable rather than accepting them quietly.

It is described here in full anyway, because the code exists and a policy that arrives after a feature does is not a policy.

THERE IS NO IDENTIFIER. Not a cookie, not a device id, not a "short-lived anonymous session id". Counting how many times a page was opened does not require knowing that two opens were the same person, so nothing learns it. The cost is honest and U4S accepts it: there is no unique-visitor figure anywhere, and U4S does not estimate one.

An event carries a page type and canonical identifiers — which university, which programme, which country, which subject, which degree level, which scholarship — and the DATE, not the time. Nothing else fits: every field is a fixed list or an identifier from the U4S corpus, the server rejects a request containing any unrecognised field rather than trimming it, and an identifier that does not exist in the corpus is discarded rather than counted.

If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is sent at all. Both are treated as binding, and the difference between them is a legal one rather than an ethical one.

Separately from anything a reader does, U4S has built a system for people who work at a university and want to correct what U4S publishes about their institution. It is not part of reading the site, it is never offered to readers, and it is SWITCHED OFF in this release: the database and mail settings it needs are not configured in production, every one of its endpoints answers that it is unavailable, and nothing is submitted, transmitted or stored through it today. The manual route described above — assembling a request in the page and emailing it yourself — remains the only way a claim reaches U4S.

It is described here anyway, in full, because the software exists and a policy that waits until a feature is live is a policy written after the fact. If and when it is switched on, this is exactly what it does, and this page will not need rewriting for it.

What it would store: the email address a representative gives, the name and job title they type, the message they write, which institution the claim is about, the domain of their address and whether that domain matches the one the institution publishes, the dates a claim was submitted, confirmed and reviewed, and the name and notes of the U4S reviewer who decided it. For a representative who is approved, it also stores which institution they may act for, and any change they propose: what U4S currently shows, what they say it should be, the official page they cite, and their explanation.

Confirming an email address proves only that the mailbox works. It does not approve a claim and never can: every approval is made by a named person at U4S who records what they established, and an address at an institution’s domain is evidence a reviewer weighs, not proof by itself.

An approved representative cannot edit the public site. A proposal’s best outcome is that it is approved for a U4S editor to integrate against the official source; nothing submitted through this system appears on a page without passing through the same editorial checks as everything else.

Where the General Data Protection Regulation or a comparable framework applies to you, the processing described above rests on legitimate interests: operating and securing a website, and responding to people who choose to write to it. No processing here relies on consent, because nothing is done that would require it — there is no tracking to consent to.

If U4S ever introduces processing that does require consent, it will be described on this page and a consent mechanism will be presented before that processing begins, not afterwards.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to request access to personal data held about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to or restrict its processing, and to complain to a supervisory authority. You can exercise these by writing to info@helperg.com.

In practice the operator holds almost nothing about any individual reader: unless you have emailed, there is no record that identifies you beyond the hosting provider’s technical logs, which cannot reliably be tied to a person. If you have emailed, the operator can locate and delete that correspondence on request.

U4S is written for people approaching, entering or in higher education, and for the families supporting them. It is not directed at children, and it does not knowingly collect personal data from anyone. Since the site has no accounts, no forms and no tracking, there is no age-gated data collection to describe.

U4S links to other pages within the site freely. Where it links to an external site — for example when directing a reader to an official authority — that site has its own privacy practices, which U4S neither controls nor endorses. Following an external link takes you outside the scope of this policy.

The operator may in future add privacy-oriented analytics in order to understand which pages are useful. If that happens, three things will be true before any data is collected. This page will be updated to name the provider, describe exactly what is recorded, and state the retention period. The change will be dated here so that a reader can see when it happened. And the implementation will be chosen for privacy: no cross-site tracking, no advertising integration, and no attempt to identify individuals.

Until every one of those conditions is met, the site ships with analytics switched off at the source. There is a single, clearly isolated placeholder in the codebase for a future integration, and it is inert — it loads nothing, sends nothing and stores nothing.

This policy carries a review date. When it changes materially, the date changes and the substance of the change is reflected in the text rather than buried in a version note. The current version is the one on this page; U4S does not maintain a separate archive of superseded policies at this stage.