Privacy

We store the email address you sign in with, what you post, and — only if you choose to answer them — four questions about your immigration situation. The answers to those four are encrypted, kept in a separate table from everything else, and deleted properly when you ask.

We do not store your IP address. We do not use analytics. We do not load fonts, scripts or images from anybody else’s servers, so no third party learns which pages you read here.

Your email address. It is how you sign in — there are no passwords. It is also the only way to reach you about your account.

A display name and an avatar colour. Shown next to anything you post. The colour is derived from your account id, not from anything about you.

Your timezone. So your daily brief arrives on your morning rather than a server’s. Your browser reports it; it is city-level at most.

What you post. Questions, answers, votes, bookmarks and anything you share under “Learn from others”. Posts are public and readable without an account — that is deliberate, so the answers can be found.

Your immigration answers — only if you give them. Visa stage, university, graduation month and state. These drive your deadlines and what your brief shows you. They are encrypted, in their own table, and nothing reaches the database until you tick the box on the last onboarding screen. Skipping is fully supported; the app works, just less personally.

Your IP address. Sign-up abuse is limited by counting requests against a scrambled version of the address, held in a cache for one hour and then gone. Nothing in this product stores an IP address or a browser fingerprint. This page used to say that and it was not true, twice over. Sign-in sessions recorded the address and browser they were created from — a default of the sign-in library. And the web server in front of the site wrote every visitor’s address, browser and page into its own log — a default of the server. Nothing here ever read either one, and nobody noticed either one. On 8 August 2026 both were switched off and everything already recorded was erased. We would rather tell you that than quietly correct the sentence. One narrow exception remains: while something is actively broken, the server’s error log can name the address of a failing connection so the failure can be fixed. That log is small, capped, and overwritten.

Who searched for what. Searches are logged to find gaps in the guides — with no identifier of any kind attached. Queries here look like “can I stay after being fired on H-1B”, and joining those to a person would build a record of somebody’s immigration anxieties. The counts are useful; the attribution is not.

Anything about you, anywhere else. No analytics, no advertising pixels, no third-party fonts. The typefaces are served from this site specifically so that reading a page about your visa status does not tell a font provider that you read it.

Nobody buys it and nobody is sold it. The parts of the system that involve another company are:

Email delivery. Your sign-in link has to travel over email, so whoever delivers our mail handles your address.

AI providers. Guides and summaries are written from public government documents, not from anything you wrote. Your immigration answers are never sent to a model — personal details are stripped before anything is indexed for search. When you use the assistant, your question and the public passages it retrieves are sent to the model answering it.

Sign-in providers. If you sign in with Google, Apple or LinkedIn, that provider knows you signed in here. Using the email option avoids that.

Advertisers. Advertisements on this site are sold by us and served by us. An advertiser is told how many people saw their advertisement and how many tapped it — as daily totals, never as a list of people. No advertiser learns anything about who you are, and no campaign can be aimed at a single immigration status, so a tap never tells a company what visa you hold. There is no record anywhere of which advertisements any particular person was shown.

Two separate things, and you can do either without the other.

Withdraw the immigration answers. Settings → forget what you know about me. The row is deleted, not flagged. Your account and posts stay.

Delete the account. Settings → delete account, with a typed confirmation. Everything keyed to you goes in one operation: profile, sessions, immigration answers, bookmarks, votes, notifications, reputation.

One thing deletion does not remove: your questions and answers stay, with the author shown as “a member who left”. Deleting a question would delete every answer other people wrote underneath it — somebody who spent twenty minutes explaining an OPT rule to a stranger would lose that work because the stranger closed their account. We think removing one person’s words to honour another’s request is the wrong trade. If you want a specific post gone, ask and we will remove it.

HelloStamped is for adults navigating immigration. It is not directed at anyone under 13 and we do not knowingly keep accounts for them.

If this page changes in a way that affects what we store or who sees it, we will say so rather than quietly updating a date. Questions, corrections and deletion requests all go to the same place: reply to any email from us, or write to the address on the contact page.