Privacy Policy

The short version

• Dorado is for students in the United States who are 13 or older.
• We collect what you type into Dorado, plus what it takes to run your account. Only your account can read it, apart from notes you send us and the optional outcome records described below.
• Every sensitive question is optional. Skipping one never locks you out of anything.
• We don’t sell your data or show ads. The Dorado assistant runs on AI models we host ourselves, so no AI company receives your assistant questions or your Dorado data. The one exception is an email you send to our support address, which is read and answered with help from Anthropic’s Claude (see Emailing support).
• Sharing your admission outcomes to help us check our estimates is optional and off unless you say yes. You can turn it off and delete every record any time. See the section below.

What we collect

When you create a Dorado account and use it, we collect:

• Account information — your email address, your password (stored by our sign-in provider only in scrambled form, never in readable form), and, if you sign in with Google (or Apple, if we offer it), the basic profile information that provider shares with us. We also record when you confirmed you’re 13 or older, and when you agreed to the Terms and this policy and which version.
• Planning data you enter — your course plans (course names, levels, status, and grades if you add them), graduation and college requirements you track, career goals and My Plans notes, plans and their steps and due dates, and events on your Roadmap and Schedule calendars. This is the data that makes Dorado useful, and it’s yours: only your account can read it.
• College and scholarship tracking — the colleges on your list with their status and the round you applied in, the programs you check at a college, the scholarships you save and where each stands, and programs you save to My Plans.
• Application profile (optional) — if you fill out the Common-App-style profile in Applications, that can include your name, date of birth, home address, phone number, gender, legal sex, pronouns, your own U.S. Armed Forces status, race and ethnicity, language, where you were born, how long you have lived in the U.S. and your citizenship, Common App fee waiver eligibility, family details (your parents’ and siblings’ names, whether each parent is living, your parents’ occupation, education and any college employment, household and marital status, whether you have children, and whether an independent-student status applies to you), your schools, counselor, grades, class rank and GPA, honors, future plans, and test scores. It only asks for what a real college application would ask for, and you can leave any of it blank.
• Activities and essays — extracurricular activities with the hours and roles you enter, and any personal statement, supplemental essay drafts, and “additional information” you write in Applications.
• Scholarship eligibility quiz (optional) — a short quiz on the Scholarships page. It can ask whether a parent or guardian is a veteran or first responder, whether you live in a rural area, whether you plan a trade program, your family’s heritage, your faith community, whether you have a disability or chronic illness, whether you have been in foster care, and whether you identify as LGBTQ+. Every question has a “prefer not to say” or “not sure” answer, and you can skip the whole quiz. See Sensitive information below.
• Career Finder result — the Career Finder is a personality-type quiz. We use your answers to work out a four-letter type and the career categories it points to, and save that type and those matches to your account. We don’t keep your individual answers.
• Career matches we infer — careers matched to you come from two places: the Career Finder result above, and, as you add courses, a handful of careers that fit your strongest subjects (a rough, rules-based heuristic off your own course data, not a personality assessment). Both show up as “Matched for you” on Browse Careers. They’re only ever used to suggest careers to you and give the assistant context — never shared, sold, or used for advertising.
• Transcript import — if you upload a transcript (a PDF or text file) on the Courses page to fill in your courses, we read the text out of it while you wait. The file and its text are not saved. Only the course rows you review and confirm are added to your plan. A built-in reader on our servers does the sorting; for subscribers, once the assistant is turned on, the text may also be read by our own AI models (see the AI assistant section) to handle more layouts.
• Admission chance estimates — the estimates on College Search, the Tracker and college pages are calculated by Dorado’s own software from your test scores, grades, course rigor, honors and activities, your home state and citizenship status, and each college’s public admissions data. They are worked out when you view the page; the AI assistant doesn’t make them. The one time a copy of an estimate is saved is if you choose to share your admission outcomes (see that section).
• Conversations with the assistant — questions you ask and the assistant’s responses, stored so your Advice threads persist between visits.
• Feedback you send us — the note you type into the feedback box and the page you sent it from, which our team reads. It stays in our database and is deleted with your account.
• Emails you send to support — the message, the name and address it came from, the names (not the contents) of any attachments, and our replies. See Emailing support below.
• Billing information — handled entirely by Stripe. Dorado never receives or stores your card number; we only store your subscription status (trialing, active, canceled, etc.) and Stripe’s customer/subscription IDs. If you give a parent or guardian’s email when starting a plan, it goes to Stripe for receipts and trial reminders; we don’t keep a copy.
• Technical information — like most websites, our hosting providers see standard request details such as your IP address and browser type when you use Dorado. We also count how many assistant messages you send each day (just the number, not the messages) so we can apply a daily limit.

Sensitive information

Some of what you can choose to enter falls into categories that many states treat as sensitive, especially for minors: date of birth, home address, race and ethnicity, legal sex, citizenship and immigration-related status, faith, disability or chronic illness, LGBTQ+ identity, foster care history, whether you have children, and military status or military and first-responder family status. All of it is optional. Here is what each is used for, and what it is not:

• Date of birth is used to check that you are 13 or older. If you enter one that shows you’re under 13, we won’t save it.
• Race and ethnicity, Hispanic or Latino/a/x, gender, and citizenship status are used to hide scholarships and programs you definitely can’t apply for (for example, ones limited to a group you have said you’re not part of). Citizenship status and your home state also feed the admission chance estimates, because some colleges treat residents and non-residents differently. If you choose to share your admission outcomes, the saved record keeps only whether you count as in-state, out-of-state or international at that college — not your address or your citizenship status.
• Quiz answers (faith, disability or chronic illness, foster care, LGBTQ+ identity, military or first-responder family, rural residence, trade plans, heritage) are used for one thing: hiding scholarships you couldn’t apply for. A “prefer not to say” or skipped answer hides nothing. They are not used in chance estimates and are not sent to the assistant.
• Parents’ education is used to work out whether you may be a first-generation college student, so scholarships for first-generation students can be matched.
• Legal sex, your own U.S. Armed Forces status, and whether you have children are stored only so they can be shown back to you as you work on your applications. We don’t use them for anything else, and they are not sent to the assistant.
• Everything else in the profile (address, phone, birthplace and years in the U.S., Common App fee waiver eligibility, independent-student status, family details) is stored so it can be shown back to you as you work on your applications. We don’t use it for anything else, apart from your home state, which feeds the admission chance estimates (in-state and out-of-state admit rates, and state admission guarantees) and the optional outcome records described below.

None of this is shared with advertisers, sold, or used to profile you. You can change or clear any answer from the page where you entered it, or delete your whole account.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell your data, and we don’t share it with advertisers. A small number of vendors process data on our behalf to run the service at all:

• Supabase — hosts our database and handles sign-in, so all the data above is stored on their infrastructure, physically located in the US West (Oregon) region.
• Vercel — hosts and runs the application itself. Your requests pass through their infrastructure to reach our code, though your data is stored with Supabase, not Vercel.
• Stripe — handles billing and holds your payment method; we never see or store your card details.
• Sentry — error monitoring, so we can catch and fix bugs. Sentry receives technical crash reports (error messages, the page you were on, device/browser info) directly from your browser or our servers — never your academic data, assistant conversations, the notes you send us, or support emails — and we scrub request bodies and cookies before anything is sent.
• Resend — email delivery. It receives the emails sent to our support address and passes them to us, and it sends our replies. It may also deliver account emails for us, such as confirmation and password-reset links. It keeps copies for a limited time under its own retention policy.
• Anthropic — the company that makes Claude, an AI model. We use it for one thing only: reading and answering emails sent to our support address, as described in Emailing support. It is not used for the Dorado assistant.
• RunPod — a GPU hosting company. When the assistant is turned on, its AI models run on servers Dorado rents from RunPod under our own account. Your questions and the summary of your record the assistant works from are processed on those servers. See the AI assistant section below.

No other company receives your academic data or your assistant conversations, and no AI company receives anything from the Dorado assistant. The one thing an AI company does see is an email you choose to send to our support address (see Emailing support). Some pages also load images directly from Wikimedia and YouTube (career photos and video thumbnails) — those requests go straight from your browser to those services, which only see your IP address and browser info, never any Dorado account data. Clicking a video link takes you to YouTube itself, subject to YouTube’s own terms.

How your data is used

Your data is used to power the parts of Dorado you’d expect: showing your course plan back to you, calculating rigor tallies and GPA, working out admission chance estimates, hiding scholarships you couldn’t apply for, populating your calendars, and — when you ask the assistant a question — giving it enough context about your own record to answer well. We do not sell your data, and we do not use it to train any AI model. If you opt in to sharing your admission outcomes, those records are also used, in groups, to check and correct the admission chance estimates — and for nothing else (see that section).

The AI assistant, specifically

Dorado’s assistant runs open AI models that we host ourselves, not a third-party AI service. We rent the servers from RunPod, run the models on them under our own account, and send them nothing but your request. That means no AI company ever receives your prompts to the assistant or your academic data. RunPod provides the computers; the models and what goes into them are ours. (The one separate place we use an outside AI service is support email, described in the next section.)

When you ask a question, the assistant is given: your question and the conversation so far; a short summary of your own record (your first name and graduation year, your course names and levels by school year, your career goals and plan notes, the careers you have favorited and the careers matched to you (from your courses or the Career Finder), your plans with their next steps and due dates, your college list and statuses, the scholarships you track, your upcoming Roadmap and Schedule items, the supplemental essay prompts for colleges on your list, and how many words you’ve drafted of each essay); and a few passages of reference material that match your question. It does not get the text of your essays unless you paste it in, and it does not get your Applications profile (date of birth, address, phone, demographics, family details), your scholarship quiz answers, or your four-letter personality type itself. Your question is also turned into numbers on the same servers to find that reference material.

The assistant is opening soon. Until it is switched on, none of this is sent anywhere.

Emailing support

Emails to support@dorado.school are read and answered with help from Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, which we reach through Anthropic’s API. When an email comes from an address our email provider has verified, Claude can answer routine questions on its own: how to do something in Dorado, help with your account, how billing works. A person at Dorado handles everything sensitive instead: requests about your data (although an automatic reply may point you to the export and delete tools on your Account page), refunds and billing disputes, legal or privacy questions, press and partnerships, messages whose sender address we cannot verify, and anything the assistant is unsure about. If a message contains wording that suggests a student may be in crisis, our system replies automatically as soon as the message reaches us with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (that message is fixed text, not written by Claude) and a person at Dorado is alerted at once. This is pattern matching on the words in a message, so it can miss one, and it is not a crisis service: if you or someone you know is in danger, call or text 988 or call 911. Automatic replies say at the bottom that they were written with AI assistance, and you can reply to ask for a person.

What is sent to Anthropic. The new text of your message (we cut off quoted earlier messages and signatures where we can detect them), its subject, your first name and the email address it came from, and the names, not the contents, of any attachments. If you write from the address on your Dorado account, the assistant can also be told whether you have an account, the month it was created, your plan status (such as trialing or active), and whether you have confirmed your age. We do not send Anthropic your academic record, your Profile, your course plan, your essays, your assistant conversations or what is inside an attachment. Please don’t put passwords, card numbers or Social Security numbers in an email to us.

What Anthropic does with it. We use Anthropic under its commercial terms, which say it may not train its models on our content (Anthropic’s Commercial Terms). Anthropic’s published policy is to delete these inputs and outputs from its systems within 30 days of receiving or generating them, except where it must keep them longer to follow the law or to enforce its usage policy; content its automated systems flag as violating that policy can be kept longer (Anthropic’s data retention policy). Those are Anthropic’s terms rather than ours, and they can change.

What we keep. Our email provider, Resend, receives each message first and passes it to us, and it sends our replies. We keep support messages and our replies in our database for 18 months and then delete them automatically; deleting your account also deletes the support emails sent from your account’s address from that database. When a message needs a person, we also email a copy of it (the text of the message and our draft reply) to a Dorado owner’s own mailbox. Those copies live in that mailbox, outside our database, so neither the 18-month deletion nor deleting your account removes them; they stay there until we delete them, and you can ask us to delete them at any time. Support emails are not part of the Account data download, so email us if you would like a copy or would like a conversation deleted sooner.

Optional: sharing your admission outcomes

Dorado’s admission chance estimates are calculated by a formula, and the only way to know how close they come to what really happens is to compare them with real decisions. If you choose to help, Dorado keeps a record of what it estimated for each college when you mark it Applied, along with the decision you later enter. We use those records, in groups, to see where our estimates run too high or too low and to correct them for the students who come after you. It is optional, it is off unless you say yes, and saying no changes nothing about how Dorado works for you.

• When you’re asked. Once, on your Tracker, the first time you have a college marked Applied. Only students who have confirmed they’re 13 or older are asked, and only seniors applying to college this year (or gap-year applicants, who graduated the year before). Dorado goes by the graduation year in your Account settings, so if that is blank you won’t be asked. Your answer is remembered and you aren’t asked again. Nothing is recorded unless you say yes, and our database refuses to save a record for a student who hasn’t.
• When a record is written. When you say yes, for each college you already have marked Applied; after that, when you move a college to Applied from Considering or Applying.
• What a record holds.
  • The college, the round you applied in (if you set one), and the date.
  • The estimate Dorado showed you, the internal figures behind it, and a copy of the college’s public admissions numbers that it used (the same for every student).
  • Facts about you that the estimate is based on: your test scores; your GPA and whether it is weighted; your class rank as a percentile; how many courses you’ve taken and how many were advanced; and the level of each honor.
  • For each activity, the hours per week, the number of grade years, and whether you lead it, as a simple level (none, officer or top leader).
  • For each honor or activity we recognize: a selectivity rating, how sure we were of the match, and about how many students receive it each year — the exact number for programs that give out 100 or more a year, only a rough size range for smaller ones.
  • The broad fields you’re heading toward (categories such as engineering), and whether you would count as in-state, out-of-state or international at that college.
• What it never holds. Your name, email, date of birth, address, essays, anything you wrote in your own words, or the name of any activity or award. Everything about you is boiled down to numbers and fixed categories before it is saved, and the database rejects any text among those facts that isn’t a short code (lowercase letters and numbers, 40 characters at most), so a sentence you wrote can’t be stored there.
• The decision. When you later change that college’s status on your Tracker to Accepted, Enrolled, Denied, Waitlisted, Deferred or Withdrawn, Dorado adds that decision, and the day you entered it, to the record. If you move the college back to Applied, Applying or Considering, the decision is cleared. A decision you never enter is a decision we never learn.
• It is not anonymous. Records stay tied to your account, so that you can see them on your Tracker, delete any of them, and so we can tell which colleges belong to the same student, which matters for judging the estimates fairly. They live in the same database as the rest of your data (see Who we share it with).
• Who can see it. You can, on your Tracker, and you can download them with the rest of your data from Account settings. When the Dorado team checks the estimates, the records are read under an ID number rather than your name or email, and we look at them in groups — we don’t report on any one student. Records are never shown to colleges or to other students, never given to the AI assistant, never sold, and never used for advertising.
• How long we keep it. A daily cleanup deletes a record once it is 36 months old, or once it is 15 months old if you never entered a decision for that college.
• Changing your mind. On your Tracker, choose “Turn off and delete everything”: every record is deleted right away and nothing more is recorded. You can also delete one record at a time, and removing a college from your Tracker deletes its record. Deleting your account deletes all of it along with everything else (see Data retention and deletion below). Dorado keeps one small note that you chose not to take part, so it doesn’t ask again. Parents and guardians can also email support@dorado.school to ask what has been recorded or to have records deleted.

Who can see your data

Your academic, application, and planning data is scoped at the database level so that only your authenticated account can read it — not other students, and not Dorado staff browsing casually. A small number of automated, trusted systems (like the Stripe billing webhook) can write specific fields like subscription status, but cannot read or modify your academic data. Notes you send through the feedback box, and emails you send to support, are the exception: our team reads those. If you opt in to sharing your admission outcomes, our team also reads those records, in groups and under an ID number rather than your name or email, when checking the estimates (see that section).

Data retention and deletion

We keep your data for as long as your account is active (the optional outcome records are the exception: they are deleted automatically after 36 months, or 15 months if you never enter a decision). You can download a copy of everything in your account, or permanently delete your account and everything in it — courses, applications, plans, calendar events, and advice history, plus any outcome records you chose to share — at any time from Account settings. Deleting your account also cancels any subscription and deletes the support emails sent from your account’s address from our database (otherwise support emails are kept for 18 months; copies emailed to a Dorado owner for handling are described under Emailing support). Deletion removes your data from our live systems immediately and cannot be undone from within the app. Like most hosted databases, our infrastructure provider keeps short-lived backups for disaster recovery, which age out on their own retention schedule. Deleting your account also deletes your customer record at Stripe, but Stripe keeps its records of payments you made (invoices and charges), as it is required to do.

Cookies and sessions

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to remember your session — not for advertising or third-party tracking.

Your rights over your data

Wherever you live, you can ask to know what data we hold on you, correct it, or delete it — in practice, the fastest way to do all three is to sign in and check the relevant page directly, since your data is always visible to you first. Downloading your data and deleting your account are both self-serve from Account settings, and deletion takes effect immediately. If your state gives you additional rights (for example, California residents have specific rights under the CCPA), those apply too — we don’t sell personal information, so there’s nothing to opt out of on that front. For anything our self-serve tools don’t cover, email us at support@dorado.school — we’ll respond within 45 days.

Children’s privacy

Dorado is built for high school students, most of whom are 13 or older, and we do not intend for children under 13 to use it. You have to confirm you’re 13 or older to create an account, and if you later enter a date of birth in your Applications Profile indicating you’re under 13, we won’t save it. Both of these rely on you telling us the truth — we don’t verify identity or age beyond that. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account or entered their information despite these checks, email support@dorado.school and we’ll delete it immediately. Parents and guardians of students under 18 can use the same address to ask what we hold about their child or to have it deleted.

Where Dorado is meant to be used

Dorado is intended for students in the United States. Our database is in the United States, and the other services listed above may also handle data in places where they operate. We don’t offer Dorado to people outside the U.S.

Security and breach notification

We take reasonable technical measures to protect your data, including scoping access at the database level so only your own account can read your academic and application data. If a security incident ever exposes your personal information, we’ll notify affected account holders without undue delay and take the steps required by applicable law.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects how your data is handled, we’ll notify account holders before the change takes effect.

Contact

Dorado is operated by Dorado Labs LLC, a California limited liability company, 2108 N St, Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816. Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to support@dorado.school, or call or text (619) 363-1938.