Privacy, in plain words

• You can take the quiz with no account, no email and no name. We do not save anything that tells us who you are.
• We do not sell or share your personal information, and the site has no ad trackers.
• Employers who pay us can show up as a Featured employer. That card is always labeled, and it shows only when the employer hires for one of your top career types.
• If you give us your email, for the newsletter or a message, we use it only for that.
• You can ask to see, correct or delete what we have about you through the contact form.

You do not need an account. We never ask for your name, email, age or school.

What we save when you finish

When you answer the last question, we save one quiz session. It holds:

• your answers to the 40 questions, and the scores we work out from them
• the career types in your results
• the employers we showed you, including a Featured employer if there was one
• the school code, if you came from a school link
• the part of the county you picked, and what you said you do now (for example, in high school or working)
• the quiz version and the date and time

What we do not save

We do not save your name, your email, your IP address (the internet address of your device), or anything about your device or browser. A quiz session is not linked to you or to any other session.

Your results link

Your results page has its own link. Anyone who has the link can open your results, so share it only with people you choose. Results pages are kept out of search engines.

Sometimes we cannot save a session, for example on a test copy of the site. Then your answers are packed into the results link itself, and we store nothing.

How we choose the employers you see

Your results show employers that hire for your top career types. If you picked a part of the county, employers with sites there come first.

One card may be a Featured employer: an employer that pays us. It is always labeled “Featured employer,” it shows only when that employer hires for one of your top five career types, and a results page never has more than one. We pick it using your top career types only. When more than one featured employer fits, they take turns. How featured results work.

When your results show an employer, we add one to that employer's count of appearances. The count is a number. It says nothing about you.

A school can give its students a link that starts with vccareer.com/s/ and ends with a short code for the school. The code names a school, never a student.

When you open a school link, we save the school code in a cookie on your device for 90 days, so a quiz you take there counts for that school. Your saved quiz session then carries the school code. The quiz start screen shows the school's name, with a link to clear it.

We use school codes to count quizzes for each school and to see the most common career types there. We look at totals only, never at one student's results.

Quizzes taken through a school link follow the same Featured employer rules as any other quiz.

VC Careers is built for high school students and older, and many people who take the quiz are under 18. That is why the quiz asks for nothing that identifies you, and why every paid card is labeled.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you are under 13, please do not sign up for the newsletter or send us a message. Ask a parent, guardian or teacher to write to us instead. If we learn that we have personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it.

When a school uses VC Careers:

• We do not sell student information.
• We share it only with the companies that run the site for us.
• We do not use it for ads from ad networks.
• We do not build profiles of students.

Parents, guardians and schools can ask us about any of this through the contact form.

The newsletter sign-up is on quiz results pages, and it is optional. If you sign up, we save:

• your email address
• the group you picked, if any: high school, college, early career, parent or counselor, or employer
• where you signed up and when you agreed

We then email you a link to confirm. You are not signed up until you open it, and the link stops working after 7 days. Your sign-up is not linked to your quiz results.

We use your address only to send VC Careers news. To stop getting it, ask us through the contact form. If you unsubscribe, we keep a note of it so we do not email you again.

When you use the contact form or the form for schools, we save what you send: your name, your email, your organization if you give one, your role on the school form, your message and the topic you picked. We also email a copy to the person at VC Careers who answers messages.

We use it to answer you and to follow up on what you asked. Please do not send passwords, card numbers or other private details.

Accounts

Employers sign in with a link we email to them. There are no passwords. We keep your email address, the listing you manage, and whether you are its owner or an editor. When an owner invites an editor, we keep the editor's email address to send the invitation.

Our sign-in provider keeps its own record of each sign-in, which can include the internet address you signed in from.

Listings and news posts

What you put in your listing and your news posts is public. We show it on VC Careers and in quiz results.

Basic listings come from public sources, like an employer's website or a chamber of commerce directory. To reach employers about joining, we may also keep a business contact's name, job title, work email and work phone, with notes on when we were in touch. Only the people who run VC Careers can see these.

Payments

Payments go through Stripe. Stripe collects and holds your card details; we never see or store card numbers. We keep what Stripe tells us about your membership: your Stripe customer and subscription numbers, your tier, its status and its dates. Stripe's own privacy policy covers what it keeps.

Stats

Members see counts for their listing: profile views, appearances in quiz results, featured appearances, clicks to their site and post views. Each count is a number with a date. We never tell an employer who looked or who took the quiz.

We do not use an analytics service on this site right now. If we add one, it will be one that does not use cookies, and we will name it here.

We also count how many quizzes are started each day, and for which school code when there is one. That count is a number and nothing else.

We do not use advertising or tracking cookies. This is everything the site stores in your browser:

vcc_school cookie

The school code from a school link, set when you open one. It lasts 90 days, or until you clear it on the quiz start screen.

vcc-quiz-v1 session storage

Your answers and your place while you take the quiz, so a refresh does not lose them. It is cleared when you finish or close the tab.

vcc_employer cookie

Only for employers who sign in. It holds the number 1, so the header can show the Dashboard link. It lasts 30 days or until you sign out.

Sign-in cookies

Only for employers and the people who run the site. They keep you signed in, and our sign-in provider, Supabase, sets them. They end when you sign out.

vcc-checkout-complete session storage

Only for employers right after they pay, so a reload does not count a purchase twice. It is cleared when you close the tab.

Stripe's checkout and billing pages are on Stripe's own site, and Stripe sets its own cookies there.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use a few companies to run the site, and they handle information only to do that work for us:

• Netlify hosts the website.
• Supabase hosts our database and runs employer sign-in.
• Stripe handles payments for memberships.
• Resend sends our emails.

Like any web host, Netlify and Supabase see the internet address of each visit while they serve it. Our own code does not save it.

To stop spam, our forms count how often they are sent from one place. We turn the internet address into a scrambled code first, so the count never holds the address itself.

Listings, news posts and the employer details on them are public. We may also give out information when the law requires it.

We have not set fixed time limits yet. Until we do, this is what happens:

• Saved quiz sessions stay, so your results link keeps working.
• Messages and school forms stay, so we can answer and follow up.
• Newsletter sign-ups stay until you ask us to take you off the list.
• Employer accounts, listings and membership records stay while you are listed or a member. Stripe keeps its own payment records.
• Spam counters hold only a scrambled code, a time window and a count.

You can ask us to delete your information at any time. See your rights.

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives you the right to:

• know what personal information we have about you and how we use it
• get a copy of it
• correct it if it is wrong
• have it deleted
• tell us not to sell or share it (we do not sell or share it anyway)
• be treated the same if you use any of these rights

To use them, open the contact form and choose Privacy request. Tell us what you want, and we will reply to the email you give. To protect you, we may ask you to confirm the request from the email address we have on file. Someone else can ask for you if you give them written permission.

We cannot tell which saved quiz results are yours, because we do not know who took the quiz. If you want saved results deleted, send us the results link.

Our database lets the public read only public things, like listings and career pages, plus a saved quiz result to anyone who has its link. Quiz sessions, messages, sign-ups and outreach notes can be read only by our own server code and the people who run VC Careers.

No system is perfect, so we keep as little about you as we can.

If we change this policy, we will post the new version here and change the date at the top.

VC Careers runs vccareer.com. For questions about this page, use the contact form and choose Privacy request.