Privacy policy

1. Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is Ponte Lab, 75 Avenue Thermale, 03200 Vichy, France. Publication director: Wuilmer Ponte. For any question about this policy or your data, email chamowil@outlook.com.

2. What we collect

• Account data. Your email address, the name you enter, and a password that is stored only as a salted hash by our authentication provider. We never see or store the password itself.
• Study data. The exams and drills you take, each answer you give, your scores, the topics you get wrong, your study goal and test date, and the points, streaks, and trophies the site awards. This is the product: it is what builds your study plan.
• Diagnostic taken before signing up. If you sit the free diagnostic while logged out, we keep a cookie for 30 days that links that result to the account you create next, so you do not lose it.
• Billing data. When you buy Premium, payment is handled by Stripe. We receive and store your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and the subscription status. We never receive your full card number.
• AI tutor messages. If you use the AI tutor on a question, the question, its answer choices, and what you type are sent to Anthropic to generate the reply. Do not put personal details in tutor messages; they are not needed to get help.
• Technical data. Our hosting provider records standard server logs: IP address, browser type, pages requested, and timestamps, kept briefly for security and to keep the site running.

We do not collect data from social networks, do not buy data about you, and do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

3. Why we use it, and the legal basis

• To provide the service you signed up for (performance of a contract): running exams, scoring them, building your study plan, and giving Premium subscribers what they paid for.
• To take payment and keep accounting records (contract and legal obligation): French law requires us to keep invoicing records for ten years.
• To keep the site secure and working (legitimate interest): server logs, rate limits, and abuse prevention.
• To answer you when you write to us (legitimate interest).

We do not use your data for profiling beyond your own study plan, and we do not send marketing email.

4. Who processes it for us

We use a small number of service providers, each under a data processing agreement:

• Supabase (database and authentication), hosted in Ireland, in the European Union.
• Vercel (web hosting), a US company. Our application code runs in Dublin, Ireland; static pages are served from a global network close to you.
• Stripe (payments), through Stripe Payments Europe in Ireland and Stripe Inc. in the United States.
• Anthropic (AI tutor replies), a US company, only when you use the tutor.
• GitHub (nightly encrypted database backups, kept for 30 days), a US company.

Where a provider is in the United States, transfers rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

5. How long we keep it

• Account and study data: for as long as your account exists, then deleted on request.
• Database backups: rolling 30 days, then automatically deleted.
• Billing records held by Stripe and in our accounts: ten years, as French law requires.
• Server logs: a matter of days.
• AI tutor exchanges: not stored by us beyond the reply shown to you.

6. Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation you can ask us to access, correct, delete, or export your personal data, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to withdraw consent where consent is the basis. To exercise any of these, email chamowil@outlook.com from the address on your account. We answer within one month. You can also complain to the French regulator, the CNIL, at cnil.fr.

If you live in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have equivalent rights to know, delete, and correct, and to be free from discrimination for using them. We do not sell or share personal data for advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of.

7. Cookies and browser storage

We use no advertising or analytics cookies. The site sets only what it needs to work:

• Session cookies that keep you logged in, set by our authentication provider.
• The 30-day diagnostic cookie described above, set only if you sit the diagnostic logged out.
• Browser local storage that saves an exam in progress so a refresh does not lose your answers. It never leaves your device.

Because none of these are used for tracking, no cookie banner is shown.

8. Students under 18

Ascend Prep is for students preparing for college admissions tests, many of whom are under 18. We do not knowingly allow accounts for children under 13. If you are between 13 and 17, ask a parent or guardian before creating an account and before buying Premium. A parent who believes a child under 13 has an account can email us and we will delete it.

9. Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed. Database access is restricted by row-level security so that one student can never read another's data. Backups are encrypted at rest. No system is perfectly secure, and if a breach affects your data we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

10. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we update the date at the top. For a material change we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

See also our terms of service and refund policy.