IMS Scholarships Privacy Policy

IMS HUB INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LIMITED, a company incorporated in Hong Kong ("IMS Scholarships", "IMS", "we", or "us"), provides the IMS website and mobile app. This policy explains what information we process, why we process it, who may receive it, how long we keep it, and the choices available to you. We apply this policy alongside applicable privacy laws, including Hong Kong's Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance and China's Personal Information Protection Law where each applies.

1. Information We Collect

• Account and identity information: name, email address, mobile phone number, account identifiers, nationality, date of birth, gender, authentication records, and identity confirmation status.
• Academic profile and application information: education history, institutions, grades, qualifications, language ability, study preferences, budget, passport readiness, research interests, application progress, and files such as transcripts, certificates, CVs, or other documents you choose to provide.
• Premium Applicant File information: current and mailing addresses; citizenship, passport and national-ID details; education, language, employment, research, publication and award records; study preferences; financial-supporter, family and emergency contacts; budget, bank statements and financial-support evidence, including financial-account identifiers contained in uploaded documents; visa, immigration and criminal-history declarations; medical examination reports; and application notes or supporting documents.
• Advisor and AI content: prompts, messages, uploaded files, tool results, recommendations, call events, voice input, and transcripts of voice conversations.
• Connect information: profile photos, your bio, an optional displayed gender, optional student-verification evidence such as a student ID or admission letter and enrollment dates, the city in which you choose to go live, introductions, connections, profile-view totals, blocks, reports, and contact handles you choose to add or share.
• Device, notification, usage, and security information: an app installation identifier, platform, app version, locale, time zone, push token and permission status, IP address, browser or device information, login activity, feature interactions, coarse performance measurements, request identifiers, and records used to diagnose failures, prevent abuse, and protect accounts.
• Payment and membership information: subscription or purchase status, billing period, provider references, and limited transaction details. Payment providers process card or wallet credentials; IMS does not receive your full payment-card number.

2. How We Use Information

We process information as needed to:

• Create, authenticate, secure, and support your account.
• Maintain one current academic profile across Advisor, matching, recommendations, scholarships, applications, and related features.
• Personalize AI assistance and generate university or scholarship recommendations from the information available to IMS.
• Provide voice calls, save useful conversation history, and let a later conversation continue with relevant context.
• Prefill, review, prepare, submit, and manage a Premium Applicant File and authorized applications to institutions or scholarship providers.
• Operate Connect profiles and discovery, including transient server-local analysis of broad, non-sensitive topics in the public bio you write to help order otherwise eligible profiles; confirm one-time live-person and city-presence checks; enable introductions; and enforce community safety.
• Deliver requested notifications, manage membership, respond to support requests, investigate errors, prevent fraud or abuse, and meet legal obligations.
• Improve reliability and service quality using operational, diagnostic, and aggregated information.

We do not sell personal information or use IMS mobile-app information for cross-app advertising tracking.

3. AI Advisor, OpenAI, Voice, and Transcripts

IMS uses OpenAI services to provide text and voice assistance. IMS Advisor is an automated AI system, not a human adviser or decision-maker. When you use Advisor, IMS may send OpenAI the content you submit and the profile, conversation context, documents, or tool results needed to answer your request. During a live voice call, audio is transmitted from your device to OpenAI for real-time processing. IMS stores text transcripts and related call records so the conversation can appear in history, remain consistent across text and voice, and recover from interruptions.

Live-call audio is processed to provide the call; IMS does not intentionally store a separate raw recording of the call. OpenAI may process service data under its applicable API terms, security controls, and legally required retention. AI output can be incomplete, incorrect, or out of date and should be independently verified before you make an application, financial, immigration, or education decision. IMS does not guarantee admission, a scholarship or other funding, or any visa or immigration outcome.

Premium Applicant File information is not automatically added to an ordinary Advisor conversation. After you consent to the Premium Applicant File and ask Advisor to help review or update it, relevant fields and tool results may be processed by OpenAI to provide that assistance. IMS does not use Premium Applicant File information to train its own general-purpose AI model.

4. Connect Visibility, Location, Photos, and Contact Sharing

Connect is optional. When you choose to Go Live, you enable city-based visibility for up to 24 hours. The app first requests foreground location permission and sends a fresh device location to IMS to confirm a supported city and detect suspicious location changes. While that same 24-hour session remains active, IMS may silently take another one-time foreground reading when you are actively using the Connect path and enough time has passed since the previous check. A successful check may atomically move your presence to the newly verified city, but it never extends the original expiry.

IMS does not request background location for Connect and does not run continuous location tracking. Location operations stop when the session expires, you turn off visibility, you sign out, you leave the Connect path, or foreground permission is withdrawn. IMS displays the verified city, not exact coordinates or distance. IMS does not retain readable coordinates, routes, speed, travel history, or background-location samples. It retains the verified city, accuracy and timing metadata, and a one-way integrity record used for safety and verification.

Connect photos you publish, your confirmed full name, verified city, and any profile fields you elect to display may be seen by eligible Connect users. Your birth date, mobile phone number, and exact location remain private. You control which one to six photos appear and may add, replace, reorder, or remove them at any time. Connect photos are not identity evidence and are not placed in a routine administrator-approval queue. IMS may process limited integrity signals and user reports to prevent abuse without exposing ordinary profile galleries in the administration dashboard.

If you choose Bio topics, IMS may transiently analyze the public bio you wrote on IMS servers and use only broad, non-sensitive topics. IMS compares those topics only with otherwise eligible students who have also chosen Bio topics, to help order profiles shown to you and other opted-in eligible students. This analysis is not sent to OpenAI or another external AI provider and is not retained as an embedding or separate inferred profile. IMS does not use or infer religion, health or disability, sexuality, political views, ethnicity, financial information, or other sensitive traits, and does not use your age, gender, nationality, exact location, photos, verification status, contacts, profile views, or introduction outcomes to personalize this order. You can choose neutral rotating discovery, which does not personalize the order from your bio, without losing Connect access.

You may separately submit student evidence to request a "Verified student" badge. This evidence stays private and may be reviewed by authorized personnel for verification, fraud prevention, or an appeal. Submitting evidence is not required to create a Connect profile or Go Live, and a pending review does not pause Connect access. Other students see only the resulting badge status, not the document.

Before a Connect user can Go Live, IMS requires a one-time active live-person face check. The camera feed is processed on the device to detect the randomized actions shown during the check. IMS does not use this check for face matching or face recognition, and no photo, video, facial template, face embedding, or camera frame from the check is retained or uploaded. IMS retains only whether the check passed, when it passed, and minimal security evidence needed to prevent replay or fraud. A successful check adds a "Live check passed" safety mark; it does not claim that IMS verified the person's identity or student status. Withdrawing this consent removes the mark and Connect visibility; deleting the account removes the associated live-person check records.

Connect contact handles are encrypted at rest. They are disclosed only to a connection you approve and only for the contact methods you select. An approved connection can retain information they have already copied outside IMS. You can stop future access by revoking contact sharing, blocking the connection, or deleting your account.

5. Premium Applicant Files and Third-Party Information

Premium Admissions is optional and has a separate consent step. IMS uses the Premium Applicant File to assess readiness, prepare and submit applications you authorize, communicate with institutions or scholarship providers, manage the resulting case, and meet payment, audit, fraud-prevention, and legal obligations.

If you provide information about a financial supporter, family member, guardian, emergency contact, referee, or another person, you must be authorized to provide it and should tell that person how IMS will use it. IMS uses that information only as reasonably needed for the requested application service, safety, verification, or legal compliance.

6. Service Providers and Other Disclosures

We disclose information only as reasonably needed to:

• Cloud, database, authentication, storage, security, diagnostics, and communications providers that operate IMS services.
• OpenAI for AI text, document, and real-time voice processing as described above.
• Apple, Expo, and related delivery providers for notifications and mobile-platform services.
• Payment processors such as Stripe and other available payment providers for checkout, billing, refunds, and fraud controls.
• Universities, scholarship providers, agents, or application partners when you request or authorize an application or service that requires that disclosure.
• Professional advisers, regulators, courts, law enforcement, or another party when required by law or reasonably necessary to protect users, IMS, or the public.
• A successor in a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale, subject to applicable notice and protection requirements.

Providers receive only the information needed for their role and are expected to handle it under applicable contracts, platform terms, and law.

7. Retention and Deletion

We keep information while your account is active and for as long as it is reasonably needed to provide the feature for which it was collected. Retention can differ by record. For example, current profile and conversation data supports ongoing service, while transaction, consent, security, moderation, and dispute records may be kept longer where required for accounting, fraud prevention, safety, or legal claims.

Premium Applicant File information is kept while reasonably needed to prepare, submit, and manage the application service you requested and afterwards where required for transaction records, institutional queries, audits, disputes, fraud prevention, or legal compliance.

You may delete your account from the app's Settings. Account deletion removes or de-identifies account data and associated content from active systems, subject to records we must retain by law, to complete a transaction, resolve a dispute, enforce safety, or prevent fraud. Residual encrypted backups may remain until their ordinary rotation expires and are not restored for normal product use. A subscription billed through an app store may need to be cancelled separately in that store. IMS attempts to cancel an active Stripe subscription before deleting the account. If you cannot access the app, you may request deletion at https://imsscholarships.com/account-deletion.

8. Your Choices, Rights, and Consent Withdrawal

• Review and correct editable account, academic, Connect, and Premium Applicant File information.
• Turn off Connect visibility, replace or remove Connect photos, revoke shared contact methods, disconnect or block another user, and submit a safety report.
• Choose neutral rotating Connect discovery instead of bio-personalized ordering without losing access to Connect.
• Change location, camera, microphone, photo-library, and notification permissions in your device settings. A feature that needs a denied permission may no longer work.
• Stop using Advisor or voice features and delete available conversation history, or request help with access, correction, portability, restriction, objection, consent withdrawal, or deletion.
• Opt out of optional marketing communications using the unsubscribe control provided with the message.

Where processing depends on consent, withdrawing it applies to future processing and does not invalidate processing already completed. Some processing may continue under another lawful basis, such as security, contract performance, or legal compliance. To make a privacy request, email info@imsscholarships.com. We may need to verify your identity before completing a request.

9. International Processing

IMS and its providers may process information in Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States, and other locations where IMS, a provider, or a requested institution operates. Privacy protections can differ between jurisdictions. Where required, we use appropriate contractual, consent, security, or other transfer safeguards.

10. Security

We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed for the nature of the information, including access controls, encrypted transport, protected storage, scoped sharing, monitoring, and abuse controls. No internet service can guarantee absolute security. Please protect your credentials and tell us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.

11. Children

You must be at least 13 years old, or the higher minimum age required in your location, to create or use an IMS account. Connect is a separate adults-only community feature and is available only to users who are 18 or older. IMS may restrict access, request correction, or remove community visibility when age information does not satisfy these rules. If you believe a child has provided information in breach of these requirements, contact our designated child-safety contact at info@imsscholarships.com so we can investigate and take appropriate action. Connect safety rules are published at https://imsscholarships.com/community-standards.

12. Policy Updates and Contact

We may update this policy as our services or legal obligations change. The published policy shows its effective date and version. Where required, we will provide additional notice or request renewed acknowledgement before a material change applies.

Questions or privacy requests may be sent to info@imsscholarships.com. IMS HUB INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LIMITED is incorporated in Hong Kong and is located at Unit 701A, 7/F., Railway Plaza, 39 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.

Optional Connect academic affiliation and campus suggestions

You may enter an institution's official English name, select your academic relationship, and submit private supporting evidence for optional review. Academic approval never controls access to Connect or Go Live. If approved, you choose whether IMS displays the institution and status on your Connect profile and whether they may be used to order profiles within your current verified-city discovery pool.

When campus matching is enabled by both people, IMS may prioritize an approved exact institution match. Within that campus group, an exact academic-status match is the strongest ordering signal; compatible incoming/current-student or graduate/former-student relationships receive smaller ordering signals. These signals never exclude other eligible people, and Connect continues to interleave neutral exploration.

IMS keeps this system separate from the admissions University Brain. When at least 10 unique users have IMS-approved evidence for the same normalized official English institution name, IMS may publish that name in a Connect-only suggestion directory so another user can select it while typing. The directory stores the canonical name and an aggregate approved-user count, not contributor identities. A raw typed name, repeated submissions from one account, pending evidence, and rejected evidence cannot publish an institution suggestion.