Privacy Policy

Your Anonymous Identifier

The first time you visit UGuide, your browser creates a random identifier and keeps it on your device. That identifier is what connects your quiz results, saved majors, and saved careers across visits on the same device, and it says nothing about who you are. If you clear your browsing data, switch browsers, or use a different device, you start fresh with a new identifier, and nothing links the two.

What We Store on Your Device

UGuide saves your progress in your browser so you can pick up where you left off without signing in. This includes:

• Your anonymous identifier
• Your quiz answers and the recommendations they produced
• Your saved majors and saved careers
• An AI-generated personality summary based on your quiz answers
• Copies of major and career pages you have visited, so they load faster next time

A small cookie also remembers, for up to seven days, that you have quiz results, so the home page can send you to the right starting point when you return.

What We Store on Our Servers

To support research into how students explore majors and careers, and to improve UGuide over time, we keep the following in our database, tied only to your anonymous identifier:

• Quiz results: your archetype, interests, personality traits, values, career rankings, long-term goals, and your written response to the final open-ended question, along with the underlying scores
• Saved majors: the current list of majors in your Top Picks

We do not store your name, email, IP address, or anything else that could connect these records back to you. Each record is just a row tagged with the random identifier described above.

AI Interactions

Several parts of UGuide use AI: the quiz recommendations, the AI exploration page, the page assistant, the add-by-name search on Top Picks, the comparison tool, and written descriptions on major and career pages. When you send a message or ask for AI-generated content, the request goes to third-party AI providers, currently routed through OpenRouter, to produce the response. These conversations are not used to train public AI models, and they are not stored in our database alongside your session. You can read more about how we use AI on our Sources & AI page.

Third-Party Services

UGuide loads two services on every page to help us understand how the site is being used overall:

• Microsoft Clarity records session replays, heatmaps, and interactions like clicks and scrolls. Clarity sets its own cookies and is governed by the Microsoft Privacy Statement.
• Vercel Web Analytics counts page views and visitors for the team that hosts and maintains UGuide. It is governed by the Vercel Privacy Policy.

Both services collect behavioral data, not personal information. We do not sell, trade, or rent any data collected through UGuide.

How We Use This Information

The data we collect is used to run UGuide and remember your progress, to understand which features students find useful, to improve the quiz, recommendations, and content, and to support academic research about how students navigate major and career exploration. Research findings are reported in aggregate and never identify individual sessions.

Your Choices

Because UGuide is anonymous, there is no account for us to look up, so we cannot retrieve or delete your data on request. You can clear everything tied to your browser at any time by clearing your browser's site data for this domain. That removes your identifier, your quiz results, your saved majors and careers, and the cookies set by Microsoft Clarity. Your next visit starts fresh.

University Policy

As an official University of Utah application, UGuide operates in accordance with the University of Utah Privacy Policy.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this privacy statement or anything else on this site, contact the Academic Innovation + Intelligence Lab at uguide@utah.edu.