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Privacy Policy

Last Updated: October 7, 2026

1. Introduction

Cohort1 ("we," "our," or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our public website or submit an interest form. This policy covers only those activities. Activities after interest form submission are outside its scope and are addressed by the separate Member Privacy Policy.

Our public website is intended for parents and legal guardians in the United States interested in Cohort1 for students ages 13–18. Parents and guardians are expected to complete the interest form themselves and provide any information about their child. See Section 5 for more information.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information You Provide Directly

When you submit an interest form as a parent or guardian, we collect:

  • Information About the Student: Age, grade level, current school and city, and timezone, provided by the parent or guardian
  • Parent/Guardian Information: First name, last name, email address
  • Interest and Referral Information: Your description of why the student is interested in Cohort1 and, if provided, how you heard about us

2.2 Information Collected Automatically

When you visit our website, we automatically collect:

  • Device and Network Information: IP address, approximate geolocation, browser type, operating system, device or browser signals, user agent, and request metadata
  • Usage Data: Pages viewed, time spent on pages, click patterns, request path, HTTP method, timestamps, and related interaction data
  • Referral Information: How you arrived at our website, including referrer URLs, search engines, advertisements, and campaign parameters
  • Security Event Metadata: Rate-limit events, bot-detection signals, web application firewall matches, challenge or CAPTCHA outcomes, suspicious request patterns, and infrastructure request IDs
  • Cookies and Tracking: See Section 8 for details

2.3 Information from Third Parties

We may receive information from:

  • Analytics providers
  • Advertising platforms

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

  • Respond to Interest: Review interest forms, evaluate initial program fit, and respond to parents and guardians about next steps
  • Communications: Send interest-form confirmations, respond to inquiries, and provide relevant program information to parents and guardians
  • Website Improvement: Analyze website usage and improve the website and interest-form experience
  • Marketing: Measure and optimize advertising directed at parents and guardians (see Section 4.2). We do not use advertising tools to target students
  • Legal Compliance: Comply with applicable laws and regulations
  • Safety and Security: Enforce our website Terms, prevent fraud and spam, detect scraping or unauthorized automation, rate-limit abusive traffic, investigate security events, protect users, and preserve evidence of misuse

4. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell your personal information. We do share certain information with the analytics and advertising partners described in Section 4.2, used for advertising directed at parents and guardians. We may share information with:

4.1 Service Providers

  • Cloud Infrastructure Providers: Data storage, email delivery, website hosting, web application firewall, bot detection, security logging, and abuse monitoring
  • Email Services: To deliver interest-form confirmations and responses to parents and guardians

4.2 Analytics and Advertising Partners

We use analytics and advertising technologies on our public website. These set cookies and identifiers and share information about your visit — including your IP address, device and browser information, and online identifiers — with our analytics and advertising partners. This information is not anonymous.

  • Analytics Providers: Measure how visitors use our website
  • Advertising Partners: Measure advertising results and show Cohort1 ads to parents and guardians, including interest-based advertising (for example, showing ads to people similar to those who have shown interest). This shares information about your visit with the advertising partner

These advertising tools are directed at parents and guardians. We do not use them to target students, and we do not share students' personal information with advertising partners. The contact details requested by our interest form are the parent's or guardian's, not the student's. Parents also provide the information about the student described in Section 2.1.

4.3 Legal Requirements

We may disclose information when required by law, court order, or government request, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Cohort1, our users, or others.

4.4 Security and Abuse Response

When necessary to protect Cohort1, our users, or our rights, we may share limited abuse or security evidence with infrastructure providers, security vendors, legal counsel, law enforcement, domain registrars, hosting providers, search engines, platforms, or other parties involved in investigating, stopping, or remediating misuse. We avoid sharing interest-form responses, tokens, cookies, authorization headers, or other sensitive content unless legally required or necessary for the specific response.

4.5 Business Transfers

In the event of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred to the acquiring entity.

5. Parents, Guardians, and Student Information

Cohort1 is intended for students ages 13–18. We do not collect information about children under 13 through the interest form. Do not submit information about a child under 13.

The interest form is for parents and legal guardians to complete. We collect information about eligible students from their parents or guardians, not directly from students. We do not request a student's name or email address through the interest form.

Parents and guardians may request access to, correction of, or deletion of the information they submitted about themselves or their child by contacting hello@cohort1.org. See Section 9 for details.

6. Data Security

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your information:

  • Encryption: Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and at rest
  • Access Controls: Strict employee access limitations with role-based permissions
  • Secure Storage: Data stored in managed databases with automatic backups
  • Anti-Abuse Controls: Web application firewall rules, bot detection, silent browser challenges, rate limiting, request filtering, and security event review

However, no system is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security but commit to promptly notifying you of any data breaches as required by law.

7. Data Retention

We retain website and interest-form information for as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy, including responding to your inquiry, maintaining relevant communications, and complying with legal obligations:

  • Outreach Events: Recipient-linked website event records and their tracking-link mappings expire after 30 days and are scheduled for deletion from our active measurement database. Restricted operational receipts and reports may be retained as needed to validate outreach or investigate failures, subject to the deletion rights below
  • Security Logs: Web, firewall, rate-limit, bot-detection, and abuse-monitoring logs are generally retained for up to 400 days unless a longer period is needed to investigate misuse, preserve evidence, comply with law, or protect legal rights
  • Deletion Requests: Honored within 30 days, except where retention is required by law

8. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

8.1 What We Use

  • Essential Cookies: Required for website functionality (session management, form submission)
  • Security Technologies: Cookies, local browser signals, or challenge tokens used to distinguish legitimate browser activity from automated abuse and to enforce rate limits or web application firewall rules
  • Analytics Cookies: Set by our analytics provider to measure how visitors use the site. These set identifiers and process device and IP information; they are not anonymous
  • Advertising Cookies: Set by our advertising provider to measure advertising results and support interest-based advertising directed at parents and guardians. These share information about your visit with the advertising partner

Links in our outreach emails may contain an opaque identifier that lets us associate public-website visits with the intended email recipient and email step. We record page paths, visit times, and actions such as opening or submitting the interest form to understand our outreach. A forwarded link may associate someone else's visit with the original recipient; this does not verify a visitor's identity. We do not include form contents, query strings, or browser fingerprints in these outreach events, and we remove the outreach identifier from the address before loading third-party analytics. Attribution uses browser session storage and expires after 30 minutes.

8.2 Your Choices

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Disabling cookies may limit website functionality. You can also limit interest-based advertising and analytics:

  • Outreach measurement: Exclude this browser from outreach measurement. This choice is saved in local browser storage when available. We also honor Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals for this outreach measurement. Clearing browser storage removes the saved choice.
  • Analytics: Install the analytics opt-out browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
  • Advertising: Adjust your ad preferences in your Google account (Ads Settings) and your Meta account (Ad Preferences and "Activity off Meta technologies")
  • Industry opt-outs: Network Advertising Initiative (optout.networkadvertising.org) and Digital Advertising Alliance (optout.aboutads.info)

9. Your Privacy Rights

9.1 Access and Correction

You have the right to:

  • Access the personal information we hold about you
  • Request corrections to inaccurate information
  • Request a copy of your data in a portable format

9.2 Deletion

You may request deletion of your personal information, subject to legal retention requirements.

9.3 Marketing Communications

You can opt out of marketing emails by clicking "unsubscribe" in any marketing message. You may still receive non-marketing responses concerning your inquiry or privacy requests.

9.4 California Residents (CCPA)

California residents have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act:

  • Right to know what personal information is collected
  • Right to know whether personal information is sold or shared
  • Right to opt out of the sale of personal information (note: we do not sell personal information for money)
  • Right to opt out of the sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. We share information with advertising partners for advertising directed at parents and guardians; you can opt out using the controls in Section 8.2
  • Right to deletion
  • Right to non-discrimination for exercising privacy rights

9.5 Rights Where the GDPR Applies

This website is intended for parents and legal guardians in the United States. Where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to our processing of your personal information, you may have the following rights, subject to applicable conditions and exceptions:

  • Right to access, rectification, erasure, and portability
  • Right to restrict or object to processing
  • Right to withdraw consent
  • Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority

9.6 Exercising Your Rights

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@cohort1.org with your request. We will respond within 30 days.

10. Third-Party Links

Our website may contain links to third-party websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these sites. We encourage you to read their privacy policies.

11. International Data Transfers

Your information may be transferred to and processed in the United States or other countries where our service providers operate. We ensure appropriate safeguards are in place for international transfers.

12. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy periodically. We will post updates on this page and update the "Last Updated" date above. For material changes, we will provide a prominent website notice or contact you by email if we have your address, as appropriate and as required by law.

13. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

Email: hello@cohort1.org
Website: cohort1.org

For privacy-related requests (access, deletion, etc.), please include "Privacy Request" in your email subject line and provide sufficient information to verify your identity.