Privacy Notice

When you register we collect your name, email address, phone number, address, and answers to the registration questionnaire — your age band, gender, home district, education, occupation and family context. Completing an assessment adds your answers in five categories, and any aptitude test results.

Some of this is sensitive personal information: disability status, health answers and psychological answers. We ask for your explicit, separate consent before collecting any of it, and you can decline any individual question.

To match you with a counsellor and mentor, to let them understand your situation before advising you, and to build a career roadmap with you. Aggregate, de-identified figures help the Foundation report on its work; those figures never identify an individual, and we suppress any group small enough to make someone identifiable.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use it to train automated decision systems: no algorithm scores, ranks or diagnoses you, and no psychological interpretation is produced automatically.

Your assigned counsellor and mentor can see your assessment answers (except health and psychological responses, which stay encrypted and are not displayed), your SWOT, your roadmap and your sessions. Staff who are not assigned to you cannot: access follows the assignment, and it ends the moment the assignment does.

Every time a staff member opens your record, that access is written to an audit log with their identity and the time.

Messages you exchange with your counsellor or mentor are encrypted when stored and are private between the two of you.

One exception, which we want you to know about upfront: a Super Admin of the Foundation can read these conversations where there is a safeguarding concern — for example a risk to your safety or someone else's. This is oversight only: they cannot post in your conversation, and every such access is recorded in the audit log. The same notice appears on your Messages screen.

Your private notes box is different. Nobody but you can read it — not your counsellor, not your mentor, not a Super Admin.

Newsletters and announcements carry a one-click unsubscribe link, and using it stops all non-essential email to your address permanently. You can also choose what reaches you, per type and per channel, in your notification settings.

Some messages cannot be switched off: receipts, security alerts, and notices about your counselling or mentoring. These are part of your account record rather than marketing.

We keep your account and care records for as long as your account is active, and for a defined retention period afterwards so that a counselling history is not lost the moment someone logs out for the last time. Records that are no longer needed are deleted on a scheduled sweep rather than left indefinitely.

You can export everything we hold about you as a file, at any time, from your dashboard. You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong, and you can ask us to erase your data — we will tell you what we are legally required to retain and for how long.

You can withdraw a consent you gave at registration. Withdrawing consent for sensitive data means we stop using those answers; withdrawing consent to the privacy notice itself is treated as an account-deletion request.

Sensitive fields — your phone number, address, disability status, guardian contact, health and psychological answers, message bodies and meeting links — are encrypted before they are written to the database, so a copy of the database on its own does not reveal them. Staff accounts require multi-factor authentication.

Questions about any of this, or about a request you have made: reach us through the feedback form or the contact details on our website.

Student Square Foundation is registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, Bangladesh.