Privacy policy

Effective 2026-09-16

This policy explains what Program Payoff (“we”) collects when you use programpayoff.com, and what we do with it. The short version: the figures here are public government statistics about programs and occupations, not about you, we collect as little as we can about visitors, and we only email people who asked us to.

What we collect from visitors

• Server logs. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes your IP address, user agent and the pages you request to serve the site and protect it from abuse. We do not use these logs to identify you.
• Analytics. We run our own cookie-less measurement: the server logs each request (page, referrer, country, network, whether the visitor is a known crawler), and a small script on each page reports the page viewed and any campaign parameters in the link you arrived by, the previous page on this site, scroll depth, time on page, screen width, language, time zone, and how many pages you have viewed in this visit — a counter the script keeps in your browser's sessionStorage, which your browser clears when you close the tab. No cookies are set and nothing is kept in your browser between visits. Nothing identifies you personally, nothing is shared with advertisers, there is no cross-site tracking, and the data is kept for about three months.
• Clicks on advertising and referral links. If you click a link we have labelled as advertising or a referral, the same script records that a click happened, the label we gave that link, and where the link goes — the destination site's hostname, not a page or anything you do there. It is recorded the same cookie-less way as everything above, it is how we tell whether a placement is useful enough to keep, and it is not shared with the advertiser. Ordinary links between pages and to government sources are not recorded this way.
• What you search for. A search is handled as a normal page request, so the words you type appear in the server logs described above. We do not store searches anywhere else and we do not build a profile from them.
• Email alerts. If you subscribe to an alert, we store your email address, the alerts you chose, the time you confirmed (double opt-in) and your IP address at signup and at confirmation, which we keep to prevent abuse of the form. We use this only to send the alerts you requested and service messages about them.
• Contact. If you email us, we keep the correspondence for as long as needed to handle it.

We do not pass your details to schools

This is worth stating plainly, because it is the normal business model of sites in this subject and it is not ours. We do not sell or share enquiry details with colleges, recruiters or lead brokers, and there is no form here that hands your name to an admissions office. If that ever changes, it will be a labelled form that says exactly who receives it, before you fill it in.

Advertising

We may show advertising from third-party networks such as Google AdSense. These networks may use cookies or similar identifiers to serve and measure ads; where required, we ask for your consent before loading them. You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings and aboutads.info. Some links are referral links; if you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no cost to you. Referral relationships never change the figures we show or the order we show them in, and no school can pay to rank higher, to be added, or to have a number removed.

Your rights

You can unsubscribe from any email with one click; we honour opt-outs immediately. You can ask us to export or delete the data we hold about you by emailing privacy@programpayoff.com; we respond within 30 days. Residents of the EU/UK, California and other jurisdictions with privacy laws have the rights those laws provide, including access, correction, deletion and objection.

Data sharing and retention

We do not sell personal data. We share it only with processors that run the site for us (hosting, email delivery, analytics) under contracts that restrict use, or when the law requires. Subscriber data is kept until you unsubscribe plus 90 days for suppression; contact correspondence for two years.

Children

The site is aimed at adults choosing post-secondary training and is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

We will post changes here and update the effective date. Material changes to how we use subscriber data are announced by email.

Operator: Ospan (Nevada, USA), 1285 Baring Blvd #704, Sparks, NV 89434. Contact: privacy@programpayoff.com.