Privacy

What we collect

Only what the forms need, plus an email address so you can get back into your account.

• Highly sensitive: SEVIS ID, EAD or receipt number, A-Number, passport number, I-94 number, date of birth, home address, and your signature image.
• Sensitive: your name, email, school, degree, employer, salary and immigration status.
• Ordinary: which step you are on, when you saved, which form you are filling.

How the sensitive parts are protected

• Everything in the first group is encrypted before it is stored, and the encryption key is not kept with the database. Access to the database alone does not reveal your SEVIS ID.
• Those values never appear in a web address, a log file, an email, an error report, or any analytics tool.
• They are never sent to an AI model — with one exception you choose yourself, below. The drafting assistant sees your job description and your goals, never your identifiers.
• One thing you can choose to do is different, so here it is plainly. If you upload your I-20 or your EAD card so we can fill the form in for you — the PDF you already have, or a photo — that file goes to our AI provider to be read. It has your SEVIS ID or your EAD number on it. We do not keep the file — it is read once and gone — we do not put it in any log or report, and nothing it says goes on your form until you have checked each value and said yes. A PDF is turned into a picture of its first page in memory so it can be read; no copy of it is written to our storage, our database, or a temporary file. This is entirely optional: you can fill in every field by typing, and nothing about the product is worse if you do.
• On a shared or library computer, sensitive fields are never saved to the browser. Only your own account holds them.

Who else sees your data

Nobody, unless you decide otherwise. When you send your employer a link, they see only the sections you shared with them — not your SEVIS ID or passport number. You can revoke that link at any time.

We use a small number of service providers to run the product: hosting, database and file storage, payments, email delivery, and an AI provider for the drafting assistant and — only if you ask for it — for reading your I-20 or EAD card. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising.

Analytics

Our marketing pages record that a page was viewed, not who viewed it. We never sell this or share it with advertisers.

Inside the app we record which steps you reach and how long things take, so we can find where people get stuck. Those records hold the name of the step, the date and time, whether you were on a phone or a computer, and which form you are filling. They never hold your name, your SEVIS ID, or anything else from your form.

To join those steps into one journey, we set a single cookie called op_anon. It holds a random number and nothing else — not your name, not your email, nothing that says who you are. It lets us see that one person took four minutes and another took forty, which is the only way we can tell whether the product is getting faster. It is first-party and ours alone: no advertiser and no other website can read it, and we never use it for advertising. The companies that run our servers and database, listed above, hold it the way they hold everything else we store. Clear your cookies and it is gone.

How long we keep things

• Documents you have finished are kept indefinitely. We said saved forever, and we mean it.
• A draft you never finished and have not opened for twelve months is deleted, after we email you first.
• Delete your account and we remove your documents and files. A record that a deletion happened is kept, without your personal details in it.

Your choices

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — email hello@optprep.com. If you are in the EU or UK, or in California, you have specific rights under local law and we will honour them regardless of where you are.

If something goes wrong

If your data is ever exposed, we will tell you what happened, what was affected, and what to do — quickly and in plain language. One thing worth knowing now: we will never contact you asking for payment or for your immigration details. Anyone who does is not us.