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Privacy

Meriqen AI™ Privacy Policy

Short version: we store only what scholarship matching needs, we never ask for the sensitive financial or academic documents that scholarship scams ask for, we do not sell or rent your information, there are no advertising trackers, and you can export or delete everything yourself from your profile page. Your data is protected by the safeguards described below, but this is a beta, not a bank.

What we collect

Only what the product actually uses:

  • Account: your name, email, and date of birth. We store the full date of birth — not just a birth year — because our own age rule and several scholarships’ published age limits are evaluated against an exact date (some awards check your age on the deadline day).
  • Profile: school, city, state, residency state, graduation year and grade, GPA and its scale, test scores, PSAT/National Merit standing, intended majors, selected universities, activity and strength tags, memberships, and application-format preferences.
  • A broad eligibility status (for example “U.S. citizen” or “permanent resident”) chosen from a list. We never ask for documents proving it.
  • Optional disclosures, such as gender, are exactly that: optional, off by default, used only to evaluate awards that restrict eligibility on that basis, and removable at any time.
  • My scholarships activity: which scholarships you save, watch, or skip; application statuses, tasks, notes, hours, and any award results you record.
  • Notification preferences and your timezone, so reminders arrive on the right day.
  • Your Voice, only if you use it: writing samples you choose to import, your in-app writing exercise, and the voice profile derived from them. See the Your Voice section below for the controls that apply.
  • Assets and stories, only if you choose to share them with Meri — what they are, why she asks, and the controls you keep are all in the “What Meri asks, and why” section below.
  • North Star, only if you use it: up to three optional career goals, in your own words and as Meri restated them, and a list of the AP and dual-credit courses you have taken or are taking. They are yours only — never shown to a guardian, and never used to filter scholarships. They are included in your data export and deleted with your account, and you can remove a goal at any time.
  • Your conversations with Meri: what you type to her in Ask Meri and what she answers are stored in your account until you delete the account, so a conversation can be picked up where it left off. They are included in your data export. Meriqen’s admin tools do not show them, a guardian cannot see them, and staff do not read them in the normal running of Meriqen, with the one restricted and recorded exception described under “Who at Meriqen can see your writing” below.

What we never collect

  • Social Security numbers, bank or payment details, or passport images.
  • Exact household income, FAFSA or CSS Profile credentials, or tax documents.
  • Transcript files or recommendation letters. We may remind you to request them from your school; we do not store them.
  • Precise location. Your city and state come from what you type, nothing else.

If anyone claiming to be Meriqen asks for any of the above, it is not us — please report it to privacy@meriqen.com.

What Meri asks, and why

Meriqen is growing from a catalogue into a guide, and a guide asks questions. Every question below is optional, every one is skippable, and skipping them all costs you nothing but the matches they would have unlocked — the catalogue and everything else works the same either way. What Meri may ask, and the one-line reason each question exists:

  • Your activities and how far you have taken them — many awards pay for one specific talent, at a named level.
  • A job you hold — some funds exist just for students who work.
  • A business or project you started — entrepreneurship awards look for exactly this.
  • JROTC, scouting, or interest in a service path — service and scouting programs carry their own money, at several rungs.
  • The language spoken at home — biliteracy has awards of its own.
  • Where your parents or guardians work — many employers run funds for their employees’ children, and the employer’s name is the only way to find them. We ask for the name of the employer, nothing else about the job.
  • Family military service — branch and era can unlock specific awards. We ask for the affiliation, never records or documents.

Your answers, and the stories behind them, are used for exactly two things: matching you to awards and shaping Meri’s guidance to you. They are never sold, never rented, and never shared with sponsors or anyone else. You can see every asset and story we hold, edit it, or delete it, at any time — and deleting one removes it, the same day, not a hidden copy later.

How we use your information

  • Matching you to scholarships and explaining why each one matched or did not.
  • Shaping Meri’s guidance to you — her questions, her ordering of what to do first, and her honesty about what we have not verified yet.
  • Tracking deadlines and sending the reminders you configured.
  • Running the guardian-approval process for students under 18.
  • Fixing problems and keeping the service working.

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We do not run advertising and use no advertising trackers. We do not use your private data to train AI models.

Age rules and guardian access

  • You must be at least 16 to have an account. If someone under 16 signs up, no account is created, and any data discovered later from an under-16 user is deleted.
  • If you are 16 or 17, a parent or guardian must approve your account by email before it can be used. Until they approve, the account is inactive and no reminders are sent.
  • After approving, your guardian gets a read-only view of your scholarship matches and application statuses — and nothing else. They cannot see your essays, notes, profile answers (grades, scores, school), or any optional disclosure. This limit is enforced in the database itself, not just hidden in the app.
  • A guardian can withdraw approval at any time, which pauses the account until a guardian approves it again. Nothing is deleted when they do, and the approval they gave is marked withdrawn rather than erased.
  • A guardian can also close the account permanently, which deletes everything in it. If they do, we email you your full export first, to your own address — and if that email cannot be sent, nothing is deleted. Resend, which delivers our email, keeps a copy of that message and its attachment for 30 days, then deletes it. The notice we send your guardian contains nothing from inside the account: not a scholarship, not a count, not a word you wrote. They were never given access to it, and it ending does not change that.

The plain-words version of all of this, written for the parent or guardian themselves, is at our page for parents.

Scholarship information and sources

  • Every scholarship shown carries a link to its official sponsor page and the date it was last checked. Third-party links are labeled and leave Meriqen. Where nothing has been checked yet, the page says so instead of guessing — an honest gap over a confident blank.
  • Our monitoring system fetches public sponsor pages to detect deadline and rule changes. It reads public web pages only — it never transmits your personal information to sponsors.
  • Meriqen never submits an application, signs anything, or accepts a sponsor’s terms on your behalf. You submit your own applications on the sponsor’s official site.

North Star’s sources, and how current they are

North Star reads public pages on the schools you save (cost of attendance, credit for AP and dual-credit courses, program and contact pages) and public datasets (the College Scorecard, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, O*NET). It reads public pages only and never sends your information to a school. Every figure it shows carries its source and the date it was last read (dataset figures, the year they report); a page can change after that date, and a figure older than the product’s recheck period says so on itself. These figures describe the school and the career, not you; they are not advice, not an offer, and not a guarantee of cost, credit, admission, licensure or earnings. Scorecard figures are the U.S. Department of Education’s and Occupational Outlook Handbook figures the U.S. Department of Labor’s. Requirements for licensed careers vary by state and change; confirm them with the school and the licensing body.

Where your data lives

Service providers that process data so Meriqen can work:

  • Supabase — database and sign-in (data encrypted in transit and at rest).
  • Vercel — website hosting.
  • Resend — sending the emails you asked for (reminders, guardian approvals, account emails). Resend keeps a copy of each email we send, including its content and any attachment, for 30 days, then deletes it. One email we send carries data from inside an account: the copy of your record emailed to you if a guardian closes your account.
  • Google — only if you choose “Continue with Google”; we receive your name, your email address and a link to your Google profile picture, and nothing else. We do not display or use the picture. Your Google Drive is involved only if you separately connect the optional mirror described under “Your copy in Google Drive” below — and even then we can only see files Meriqen itself creates, never the rest of your Drive, and we never read your writing back out of it.
  • Anthropic — the AI provider behind Meri and the writing tools. Each feature sends what it needs and no more. Your Voice and Story Bank send the writing samples and stories you saved, and the prompts you submit. Ask Meri sends what Meri needs to be your guide in that conversation: the profile facts she greets you with (your first name, grade, graduation year, city and state, GPA, test scores, and intended majors), your saved-scholarship list and its statuses, the assets and household answers you chose to share with her — that is what makes her a guide instead of a stranger — your confirmed writing-voice traits if you have them, the verified facts about the scholarship page you are asking from, and the messages you write to her. What is never sent to Anthropic: your family’s finances (we never hold them), your date of birth, your guardian’s contact details, or anything belonging to any other student. Anthropic’s commercial terms of service state that Anthropic may not train its models on customer content submitted through its API (Commercial Terms, Section B, effective June 17, 2025) — your writing is used to generate the response you asked for, not to train anyone’s AI.

We promised to say so here first before adding any AI-assisted feature, and describe exactly what is sent — the Anthropic entry above is that description, added before Voice Studio’s first AI feature went live.

Your Voice

  • Writing samples you give us are stored so Your Voice can work. There are two ways to add one, and only two: text you type or paste, and a file you upload. We do not import writing from a link — a web page cannot show us who wrote it. Each import first shows you the extracted text and any personal information we spot in it, and nothing is saved until you confirm the writing is yours.
  • Your Voice data — samples, sources, and the derived voice profile — is shown to you alone. No guardian view, ever, by any route. No staff view in the normal running of Meriqen, with one restricted and recorded exception described under “Who at Meriqen can see your writing” below. The same applies to your Story Bank.
  • You can delete a raw sample, a whole source, or the derived voice profile independently of one another, at any time. Deleting the last sample supporting a derived trait triggers a review of that trait, and traits with no remaining supporting samples are deleted.
  • You can also keep a sample stored but excluded from any AI use. Every AI feature has a per-student daily budget so a bug or misuse can never run up unbounded calls.

Your copy in Google Drive (optional)

  • You can connect your own Google Drive so your work outlives Meriqen. This is optional and off until you connect it; everything works exactly the same without it, and the one-file download above is always available either way.
  • What is sent, and nothing else: a copy of each piece of writing you save here — your writing samples, your Story Bank stories, your writing exercise — and one record document holding what the download holds (your profile, saved scholarships and tasks, and your voice profile). The copies are created as Google Docs in a Meriqen folder in your own Drive, under your own Google account. They are yours.
  • We can only see files Meriqen itself creates. The permission we ask Google for does not let us list, open, or read anything else in your Drive.
  • We never read from your Drive. Nothing there — not even the copies we wrote — is ever read back into Meriqen: your word counts, your writing gates, and your voice profile are computed only from what you typed or uploaded here. If you edit a copy in Drive, Meriqen will not overwrite your edit; a newer version is saved beside it as its own file.
  • If you disconnect Drive, or delete your Meriqen account, we revoke our own access with Google and the mirrored files stay in your Drive — deleting your account here never deletes your copies there. That is the point of them.
  • A copy can fail to sync (for example, if the permission was declined or removed). When that happens your work is still saved here, the app shows you plainly that the copy did not go, and the deletion page will never tell you your Drive copy is complete without checking first.

Who at Meriqen can see your writing

No member of staff reads your essays, your Story Bank entries, your writing samples, your voice profile or your conversations with Meri in the normal running of Meriqen. Our own admin screens are built to show whether something exists, how many there are, how many words, and when it was last touched — never the words themselves. That limit is in the database as well as in the screens: the tables holding your writing are readable through your account and through no other signed-in account, including ours. It is a limit on accounts, not a physical one — the people who operate the database and the hosting can reach everything stored there directly, outside the app, and that is covered by the rule below rather than by a mechanism.

There is one restricted route past that inside Meriqen, and using it is recorded. A named administrator can reach a single student’s writing only by deliberately taking that route, and only after writing down why. Doing so creates a permanent record of who did it, when, whose account, and the reason they gave. Two things would justify it and nothing else does:

  • A safety concern. Something suggests a student is in danger, and checking is how we help or get help to them.
  • A legal obligation. A valid legal demand we are required to meet.

Curiosity, debugging, quality review and “checking whether something worked” are not on that list. We are not telling you this is technically impossible — it is not, and any company that says otherwise about its own staff is overstating it. It is a rule we hold ourselves to, written into the code so that going around it inside Meriqen is a deliberate, recorded act rather than a quiet one. Direct access to the database or the hosting by the people who operate them is outside what the app can record; the same rule covers it, and the only mechanism behind that is who holds those credentials.

Your guardian is a separate question and a stricter one: they never see any of this, by any route, including if they close your account. See “Age rules and guardian access” above.

Security

  • All traffic is encrypted with HTTPS; data is encrypted at rest.
  • Row-level security in the database means each student can read only their own records — this is enforced by the database on every query, and we test it.
  • Administrative keys are kept server-side and never reach your browser.

Your rights: edit, export, delete

  • Edit everything on your profile page at any time.
  • Export everything we hold about you as a single file, from your profile page.
  • Delete your account yourself, from your profile page. Downloading your data is offered first, on the same page — it is never required, but that file is the only copy you will have afterwards, because we keep none. Deletion removes your account, your profile, your universities and matches, your saved scholarships — including any scholarship you added yourself and everything you typed when you added it — applications, tasks and notes, your Story Bank and every expansion in it, your writing samples and sources, your writing exercise, your voice profile, your conversations with Meri, your North Star goals and courses, and your notification preferences. If you connected Google Drive, the documents we placed in your Drive belong to you and stay in your Drive. Deleting your Meriqen account does not remove them — you can delete them there yourself.
  • It is immediate and there is no recovery window. We do not hold your data for thirty days in case you change your mind, and we will not have a copy to give you later. We email you to confirm before anything is destroyed, and if that email cannot be sent, nothing is deleted. That confirmation email carries your first name and address and nothing from inside the account; Resend keeps a copy of it for 30 days, as described under “Where your data lives”. We keep one small record that a guardian approved this account — the date, and a scrambled form of the two email addresses that cannot be turned back into an address. We keep it so that if anyone ever asks whether a parent approved, we can answer honestly. We delete it three years later. Nothing else about the account is kept.
  • See something wrong — about you or about a scholarship? Use the report link or email privacy@meriqen.com and we will correct it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy at any time, and the current version applies to everyone using Meriqen. If we change it in a way that matters, we will update the version and effective date and tell active users in the app before the change applies to them.

Contact

Questions, requests, and formal or legal notices: privacy@meriqen.com, or by mail to Property Sapiens LLC, 16131 Salto Del Agua, San Antonio, TX 78255, USA.

Meriqen does not award scholarships, is not affiliated with any university or sponsor, and does not guarantee eligibility or selection.