How College Advisor protects your information during the college counseling process
The short version: Your counselor uses College Advisor to organize session notes, track your work together, and develop college recommendations. Your names are automatically removed before any AI processes your information. Your data is encrypted, isolated to your counselor's practice, and never sold or shared. You can request deletion of any of your information at any time.
Only what's needed for your work together: contact details, your student's academic profile (grades, test scores, activities), session notes, and any documents you share with your counselor. Everything is stored in encrypted form using AES-256 encryption, the same standard used by banks and government agencies.
Your counselor records sessions so they can stay fully present in the conversation rather than splitting attention between listening and note-taking. Here's what happens with that recording:
If you'd prefer not to have a session recorded, just let your counselor know — they can take notes manually instead.
Before any AI processes your session transcript, the system automatically scans the text and replaces every name, phone number, email address, employer name, and other identifying detail with an anonymous code.
For example, instead of seeing "Sarah Johnson is interested in engineering programs and her mom works at Google", the AI would see something like "[PERSON_A1] is interested in engineering programs and [PERSON_A1]'s mom works at [ORG_B2]."
The system uses natural language processing to catch name variations too — "Sarah," "Ms. Johnson," and "Sarah's mom" all get replaced consistently. After the AI produces draft notes, the real names are restored only within your counselor's private, encrypted account.
The AI service is Anthropic's Claude, used under commercial terms that contractually prohibit Anthropic from training on any of your data. And because of the anonymization step, Anthropic never receives identifying information in the first place — they see anonymized text about college preferences and academic discussions, with no way to connect it to your family.
| General platforms (e.g., Zoom) | College Advisor | |
|---|---|---|
| Recording storage | Full recording stored in vendor's cloud | Encrypted storage your counselor controls |
| AI processing | Full transcript with all names and details | Anonymized text only — names removed first |
| Audio sent to AI | Yes, for transcription and summaries | No — audio never leaves secure infrastructure |
| Data used for training | Terms may permit service improvement use | Contractually prohibited |
| Built for counseling | General-purpose video platform | Purpose-built for sensitive advising conversations |
Some popular college advising platforms have concerning practices in their legal terms:
College Advisor takes a fundamentally different approach: your data belongs to your counselor's practice, not to the platform. It's encrypted, isolated, anonymized before AI processing, and deletable on request.
Only your counselor (and any colleagues within their practice they specifically authorize). The platform enforces strict data isolation:
Yes, at any time. Ask your counselor to delete any specific recording, document, or your family's entire record. You can also contact us directly at privacy@keycoaching.co. Deletion is completed within 30 days and is permanent. Encrypted backups are purged within an additional 30 days.
In the unlikely event of a breach affecting your information, you would be notified within 72 hours with details about what happened, what data was affected, and what steps are being taken. The platform's encryption means that even in a worst-case scenario, your data would be unreadable without the encryption keys.
This page is a plain-language summary of our data practices for families. For the full legal policy, see our Privacy Policy.
Last updated: February 2026