IMS HUB INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LIMITED, a company incorporated in Hong Kong ("IMS Hub", "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: requests, uploaded files, tool results, recommendations, saved university choices, call events, voice input, transcripts, current in-app university or section context, and proposed and confirmed academic-profile changes.
- Connect information: profile photos, your bio, an optional displayed gender, an optional user-entered official English institution name and academic status, optional supporting evidence such as a student ID, admission or enrollment letter, degree certificate, or transcript, relevant academic 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 city presence; 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, Voice, and Transcripts
IMS uses OpenAI to provide AI guidance and real-time voice assistance. The mobile Advisor is a university matching feed with voice calls; it does not offer a text-chat composer. IMS Advisor is an automated AI system, not a human adviser or decision-maker. When you use Advisor, IMS may send the AI service the content you submit and the profile, conversation context, documents, or tool results needed to answer your request. Before sharing personal information with OpenAI, the app presents an AI disclosure and asks for your permission. Microphone permission is requested separately. During a live voice call, audio is transmitted to OpenAI for real-time processing. IMS stores text transcripts and related call records to maintain context, reconcile delivered voice usage, investigate faults, and recover from interruptions.
During a call, Advisor may receive the current IMS screen, selected university, visible section, and results returned by IMS tools. This is structured in-app context, not a recording of your screen or access to other apps. At your request it can navigate the feed, open university profiles, scroll supported sections, and propose changes to study goals, academic background, application readiness, funding, or mobility. A profile change requires your confirmation before it is saved. Verified legal identity fields cannot be changed through this voice flow. The updated profile is used to refresh matching results.
Matching also uses your saved academic profile and the current IMS university catalogue without requiring a call. IMS stores saved choices, match snapshots, and change or deadline events. When enabled in your notification preferences, we may continue sending limited match-update notices after Student Pro expires; paid details require renewal. You can turn off these optional notices without renewing. University information, scholarship eligibility, fees, and application dates can change; a match is guidance, not an admission decision.
Live-call audio is processed to provide the call; IMS does not intentionally store a separate raw recording of the call. The AI service may retain API data for abuse monitoring or service operation under its applicable data controls; this is not a promise of zero provider retention. OpenAI states that API content is not used to train its models by default. 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 the AI service 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 bio-topic order. If you separately enable campus matching, an approved normalized institution may be used as a direct ordering signal within the same verified-city discovery pool. You can disable campus matching independently. You can also choose neutral rotating discovery, which does not personalize the order from your bio, without losing Connect access.
You may separately type an institution's official English name, choose current student, incoming student, graduate, or former student status, and submit supporting evidence to begin optional academic approval. The document and academic dates stay private and may be reviewed only by authorized personnel for verification, fraud prevention, lifecycle administration, or an appeal. If approved, IMS derives an academic lifecycle from the verified program start and expected completion dates. You control whether the institution and color-distinguished academic status appear beneath your Connect name, and whether the normalized institution and compatible academic status are used for same-campus ordering inside your current city. An exact academic-status match is the strongest ordering signal, but it never excludes other eligible people and neutral exploration remains part of discovery. When the same normalized official English institution name is supported by at least 10 unique users with IMS-approved academic evidence, IMS may create a Connect-only institution directory entry and suggest that name while another user types. The directory stores an aggregate count and canonical name, not contributor identities, and is separate from the admissions University System. Raw typed names, repeated submissions from one account, pending evidence, and rejected evidence do not count toward publication. Initial academic evidence is not required to create a Connect profile. Once a timeline is approved, IMS sends staged reminders and requires a non-dismissible status confirmation when the verified start or expected completion date is reached. Discovery, introductions, and Go Live pause until you submit the required update; the university affiliation and campus matching remain paused until review is complete. IMS records student, system, and authorized-admin lifecycle changes in a private audit history. Authorized super-admins may recalculate a timeline, require an immediate correction, or grant a limited grace period with a recorded reason.
Connect does not require or perform a live-person or facial verification check. Camera access is optional and is used only when you choose to take a profile photo. The selected photo is uploaded only when you save it; IMS does not create facial templates, face embeddings, or head-turn and blink measurements.
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 requested AI guidance, document, and real-time voice processing as described above.
- Apple, Google, Expo, and related delivery providers for store purchases, purchase verification, 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 must be managed separately in that store: deleting IMS does not cancel an Apple subscription. IMS attempts to cancel an active Stripe subscription before deleting the account.
If you cannot access the app, use the public account-deletion page to request 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@imshublink.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 age-restricted community feature and is available only to users who are 16 or older, or the higher minimum age required in their location. 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@imshublink.com. Connect safety rules are published in the Community and Child Safety 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@imshublink.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.
University Updates and Discussions
Authorized universities can publish updates directly. Notifications are limited to current university matches with active Student Pro access and the selected app-language audience, subject to notification preferences. Still-current earlier updates may be grouped for newly eligible subscribers. Editing an update or comment does not send a second notification.
When you choose to comment or reply, your display name, comment, posting date, and edited status are visible to the university and other students who can access that discussion. University staff replies display the university name and badge. Your private academic profile, grades, application documents, and contact vault are not disclosed through discussions. Do not post sensitive documents, contact details, or another person’s private information. Likes are stored against your account to prevent duplicates; other participants see totals, not a list of people who liked the update.
IMS applies server-side text safety checks and stores reports, blocks, rate-limit records, and moderation decisions. Comments are not sent to an AI provider for these checks. If you ask Advisor about a university update after agreeing to AI data sharing, the current published announcement text for the selected matched program may be sent to OpenAI as voice context. Discussion comments and private university drafts are not included in this lookup. Authorized university publishers can hide comments on their own updates; IMS can review reported content and take action. A report preserves the reported text even if it is later edited or deleted, for safety review and disputes under the retention rules above.
You can edit or delete your own comments, remove a like, report content, and block or unblock a discussion author. Blocking hides your comments from each other. Deleting a comment removes its displayed text while replies remain in the discussion. Account deletion removes likes and blocks and removes or de-identifies comments; necessary safety and dispute records may remain as described above. Contact info@imshublink.com for access, correction, or deletion help if you cannot open a discussion.