Privacy Policy
This policy explains what Assist Scholar does with your information - your study profile, what you save, and above all the documents you keep in the vault. It is a supplement to the Ezysphere Privacy Policy, which applies to all of our products and which you should read alongside it. Where the two genuinely conflict, this supplement prevails for Assist Scholar only. It never gives you fewer rights than the main policy does.
Your documents live on your device. Transcripts, identity documents, financial statements and everything else in the vault stay in local storage on your phone, and renaming, compressing, scanning and converting all happen on the device. Nothing leaves it unless you deliberately switch on cloud backup or share a file yourself. There is no advertising in Assist Scholar, no ad SDK, and no advertising identifier is read.
Contents
1. Students and age
Assist Scholar is used by secondary-school students, undergraduates, postgraduate applicants, and by parents and counsellors helping them. That means some users are under 18, and we treat that seriously.
- You must be at least 13 to use the app, or 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, unless a parent or guardian consents where the law allows.
- If you are under 18, use the app with a parent or guardian's knowledge and consent. In particular, do not put identity documents, passports or financial statements into the vault without their agreement.
- We do not show advertising to anyone, of any age, and we do not profile users for marketing.
- We do not knowingly collect information from a child below the applicable minimum age. If you believe we have, email apps@ezysphere.com and we will delete it and close the account.
2. What we collect
| What | Where it lives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Study profile - degree level, country, fields of study, and any other preferences you set | On your device; synced to your account if you sign in | Powers "match my profile" and the relevance of your feed |
| Bookmarks and collections - the scholarships you save and how you group them | On your device; synced if you sign in | So your saved list is there next time, and readable offline |
| Checklists - items, custom entries, completion state, and which document you linked to which item | On your device; synced if you sign in | Tracks your progress and drives the nudge reminders |
| Documents in your vault | On your device only, unless you switch on cloud backup | See section 3 |
| Watch terms - the scholarship names or keywords you ask the Watcher to look for | Sent to our watcher service when the feature is on | See section 4 |
| Notification settings - which types you want, quiet hours, frequency cap | On your device; synced if you sign in | So we send what you asked for and nothing else |
| Push token | Held by our push provider against your installation | Delivers watcher hits and server-sent alerts. Only collected if you allow notifications. |
| Points, streaks and referral records | On your device; synced if you sign in | See section 6 |
| Account - email address and password hash, if you create one | With our authentication provider | Sign-in and syncing across devices. An account is optional; the app works signed out, with everything held locally. |
| Subscription entitlement - plan, status, renewal date, store receipt identifier | With the app store and our subscription provider | Unlocks premium features. We never see your card details. |
| Diagnostics - crash reports, App version, device model, OS version | With our crash-reporting provider | Fixing faults |
We do not collect your GPS location, your contacts, your call logs or your messages. We do not ask for your grades, your test scores, your income or your immigration status, and you should not send them to us.
3. Your document vault
The vault is where you keep transcripts, certificates, recommendation letters, identity documents, proofs of enrolment and financial statements. These are among the most sensitive files a student has, so the design is deliberate.
3.1 Files stay on your device
- Documents you add are written to local storage on your device. They are not uploaded to us as a matter of course, and we cannot read them.
- Every document tool runs on the device - scanning and auto-cropping, auto-renaming, compressing to hit a portal's upload limit, and converting between PDF, image and other formats. None of these send your file to a server.
- We do not run optical character recognition or content analysis on your documents for any purpose other than the on-device operation you asked for, and we do not extract, index, profile or retain their contents.
- Nothing in the vault is used to train any machine-learning model.
- When you uninstall the app, the vault goes with it. Keep your own copies of anything important.
3.2 Cloud backup is opt-in
Premium includes optional cloud backup of the vault. It is off by default, and it only ever starts because you turned it on. When it is on:
- copies of the documents you have chosen to back up are stored with our cloud provider under your account;
- they are encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest by that provider;
- they remain yours, are not read by us, are not shared with anyone, and are not used for any purpose other than restoring them to you; and
- switching backup off, or deleting your account, deletes the stored copies.
3.3 Your responsibilities
Only put documents in the vault that are yours or that you have permission to hold. A recommendation letter contains someone else's words and, often, their contact details; a family financial statement contains your parents' information. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to store what you store - see the Assist Scholar Terms.
The app offers an optional biometric or passcode lock. We recommend switching it on, along with your device's own screen lock and encryption.
4. The Scholarship Watcher
The Watcher is the premium feature that checks daily for scholarships you are waiting on.
- You give it a scholarship name or keywords. That term, and an identifier for your account, are sent to our watcher service so it knows what to look for and whom to notify.
- The service searches publicly available scholarship sources. It does not log in to any site as you, does not use your credentials, and does not carry your identity to any third party. The sites it checks learn nothing about you.
- Matches are stored against your account so they appear in your notifications and feed.
- You can delete a watch term at any time, which removes it and its stored results.
- The Watcher is best-effort. It is described further, including its limitations, in the Assist Scholar Terms.
5. Notifications
Deadline reminders, checklist nudges and streak prompts are scheduled and delivered locally by your device - they do not require us to know anything, and they work offline. Watcher hits and other server-sent alerts are delivered by push, which requires a push token tied to your installation.
You control all of it: granular toggles per notification type, quiet hours, and a frequency cap. You can also switch notifications off entirely in your device settings, and the app will keep working.
6. Points, streaks and referrals
- We record points earned and spent, your current streak, freeze tokens, and the dates you opened the app - the last of these only to the extent needed to compute the streak.
- Referral records link the code you shared to the accounts that used it, so a reward can be granted.
- Anti-fraud. To stop referral farming we validate point grants on the server and use coarse device and account signals to detect duplicate or automated sign-ups. These signals are used for fraud prevention only and never for advertising or profiling.
- Points are never bought and have no cash value - see clause 10 of the Ezysphere Terms.
7. Subscriptions
Premium is a subscription bought through Google Play, the Apple App Store or the Microsoft Store. The store takes the payment and tells our subscription provider whether your entitlement is active. We never receive your card number, and we cannot see your payment method. What we hold is the plan, the status, the renewal date and a receipt identifier. Cancellation is handled in the store - see clause 11.3 of the Ezysphere Terms.
8. Scholarship listings
Listings are information about funding opportunities gathered from publicly available sources. They are not personal information about you, and browsing them does not tell any scholarship provider that you looked. We do not pass your profile, your bookmarks or your identity to any scholarship provider, university or agent, and we do not apply on your behalf. When you apply, you leave the app and do so directly with the provider on their own site.
If you are a scholarship provider and want a listing corrected or removed, see the takedown section of our Terms.
9. Why we use it
- To show you scholarships that match the profile you set.
- To save your bookmarks, collections and checklists, and to sync them if you sign in.
- To schedule and deliver the reminders you asked for.
- To run the Watcher and tell you when it finds something.
- To operate points, streaks, referrals and your subscription entitlement.
- To detect and prevent fraud, particularly referral abuse.
- To fix faults and keep the app working.
We do not use any of it for advertising, and we do not sell or share it.
10. Legal bases
| Processing | Basis |
|---|---|
| Running the app, your account, your saved data, your subscription | Performance of a contract with you |
| Push notifications; cloud backup of your vault; any marketing email | Your consent, withdrawable at any time in the app or your device settings |
| Fraud and abuse prevention, diagnostics, keeping the service secure | Legitimate interests |
| Retaining transaction records | Legal obligation |
11. Who we share it with
| Provider | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Google Firebase | Authentication, cloud database and backup for signed-in accounts, push notification delivery, and crash reporting |
| Google Cloud Run | Hosts the Scholarship Watcher service |
| RevenueCat | Verifies store receipts and manages subscription entitlements |
| Google Play, Apple App Store, Microsoft Store | Distribution and subscription billing |
We do not sell your personal information and we do not disclose it for anyone else's marketing. No scholarship provider, university, agent, recruiter or education consultancy receives your data from us. The full provider list, our international transfer safeguards and the rest of the detail are in the Ezysphere Privacy Policy.
12. How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Documents in your vault | Until you delete them or uninstall the app. Backed-up copies, if you enabled backup, are deleted when you switch backup off or delete your account. |
| Profile, bookmarks, checklists, watch terms | Until you delete them, or until your account is deleted |
| Points, streaks and referral records | For the life of the account, then deleted with it |
| Push token | Until you disable notifications, uninstall, or the token expires |
| Subscription and transaction records | Up to 7 years, for tax and accounting, then deleted |
| Crash reports and server logs | Typically 30 to 90 days |
13. Security
- Everything that leaves your device travels over TLS.
- Data held with our cloud provider is encrypted at rest.
- Your vault is protected by your device's own encryption, and you can add an optional biometric or passcode lock inside the app.
- Passwords are stored only as a salted hash by our authentication provider.
- Point grants are validated on the server, not trusted from the client.
As set out in the Ezysphere Privacy Policy, no system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise. Keep your device locked and your account password to yourself.
14. No advertising
Assist Scholar contains no advertising of any kind. There is no ad SDK in the app, no advertising identifier is read, there is no third-party analytics or attribution SDK, and nothing about you - your studies, your documents, your bookmarks - is shared with an advertiser, an ad network or a data broker. The app is funded by its subscription, which is why it can be built this way.
15. Your rights and deletion
You have the full set of rights described in the Ezysphere Privacy Policy - access, correction, deletion, portability, restriction, objection and withdrawal of consent - and we honour them wherever you live.
You can delete any bookmark, checklist, watch term or document inside the app. To delete everything, use the Assist Scholar deletion page or email apps@ezysphere.com. We action verified requests within 30 days.
Cancel your subscription before you delete your account. Deleting your data does not cancel a subscription bought through an app store. Cancel it in that store's subscription settings first, or you will keep being charged.
16. Changes
If we change this supplement we will update the version and date above. For material changes - a new category of data, a new purpose, a new recipient, or anything that reduces your rights - we will give reasonable advance notice in the app before the change takes effect, and where the law requires consent we will ask for it. We will not start uploading your documents, or introduce advertising, without asking you first.
17. Contact
Ezysphere Limited · apps@ezysphere.com · ezysphere.com
Full company details are in the Ezysphere Privacy Policy.