Privacy Policy
Effective 1 January 2026. This Privacy Policy describes how StepUp collects, uses, stores, and protects personal information across our educational career-planning platform.
1. Our Commitment to Privacy
StepUp is an educational technology platform that helps students discover career pathways through assessments, academic tracking, and personalized roadmap recommendations. We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of students, counselors, educators, schools, colleges, and institutional partners. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard personal information when you access or use the StepUp platform.
2. Information We Collect
We may collect account information such as your name, email address, role, school affiliation, and login credentials; academic information including grades, GPA, coursework, and educational level; assessment responses and scores such as Holland RIASEC and related career-planning inventories; career pathway selections, saved roadmaps, milestones, and platform activity; counselor notes, intervention records, and educational support interactions; and technical information including browser type, device information, IP address, usage analytics, and security logs required to operate and protect the platform.
3. How We Use Information
We use information to generate personalized career recommendations and educational roadmaps, support counselors and educators in providing student guidance, improve the accuracy and effectiveness of our recommendation algorithms, maintain platform security and reliability, communicate important service updates, and develop analytics that help schools and educational institutions better support student outcomes. We do not sell personal information and we do not use student data for advertising or unrelated commercial profiling.
4. AI-Assisted Features
StepUp incorporates AI-assisted features and machine-learning systems to help generate career recommendations, pathway suggestions, summaries, and educational insights. These technologies are designed to support educational decision-making and improve recommendation quality over time through aggregated and privacy-protected learning patterns. AI-generated content should be considered a decision-support tool and should not replace professional academic advising or career counseling.
5. Data Sharing and Institutional Access
We may share information with educational institutions, school boards, colleges, universities, and authorized counselors or administrators that use StepUp as part of their educational services. Information may also be shared with trusted service providers that help us operate, secure, and improve the platform, and with regulatory or legal authorities where required by applicable law. We never sell personal information to third parties.
6. Student and Educational Data
When StepUp is provided through a school, college, district, or educational organization, student information may be processed on behalf of that institution. Educational records remain subject to applicable institutional agreements and relevant educational privacy legislation. StepUp is designed to support the privacy and security obligations of educational institutions and their students.
7. Data Security
We implement commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards to protect personal and educational information. These safeguards include encryption in transit and at rest, secure authentication mechanisms, role-based access controls, audit logging, monitoring, and infrastructure security practices designed to protect against unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction of data.
8. Data Retention
We retain personal information only for as long as necessary to provide our services, support educational operations, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, or fulfill institutional retention requirements. When information is no longer required, it is securely deleted or irreversibly anonymized in accordance with our data retention practices.
9. International Data Transfers and Compliance
StepUp is designed to support compliance with applicable privacy and educational data protection frameworks, including PIPEDA and relevant provincial privacy legislation in Canada, FERPA in the United States, and GDPR where applicable. Where personal information is transferred across jurisdictions, we implement appropriate contractual, technical, and organizational safeguards to protect that information.
10. Your Rights and Choices
Depending on your jurisdiction and relationship with StepUp, you may have rights to access, correct, update, export, restrict, or request deletion of your personal information. Students, parents or guardians, educators, and institutional representatives may submit privacy-related requests through their educational institution or directly through StepUp where applicable.
11. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our services, technology, legal requirements, or privacy practices. Material changes will be posted on this page with an updated effective date, and where appropriate, we will provide additional notice to institutional customers or account holders.
12. Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact StepUp through our Contact page or email us at privacy@stepup.app.
Questions about this policy? Contact us.