Privacy Policy: What SEAPHE Collects and Why

The short version

You can use every page on seaphe.org without giving us any personal information.
If you subscribe to The SEAPHE Brief, we collect your email address and nothing else.
If you take our admissions survey, we store your multiple-choice answers without your name, email or IP address, and we publish only rounded totals for groups of at least 10 people.
We don’t use analytics tools, advertising or tracking cookies, or social media pixels. The site doesn’t set cookies, and we don’t track you across other websites.
We don’t sell or share your personal information, and we never sell survey answers.

Who we are

seaphe.org is run by SEAPHE, an independent publication about nursing schools. SEAPHE is not affiliated with the California Board of Registered Nursing. “SEAPHE,” “we” and “us” in this policy mean SEAPHE.

What we collect

Newsletter email address. If you sign up for The SEAPHE Brief, we collect the email address you type in. It is stored with our email provider, Resend, on our newsletter list, along with a note that you signed up on seaphe.org. The form also has a hidden field that people never see. It catches spam bots, and any signup that fills it in is rejected. We don’t ask for your name or any other details.

Hosting logs. The site is hosted by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel automatically processes technical information when you load a page or submit a form, such as your IP address, browser type, the page you asked for, the referring page and the time. This is used to deliver the site, keep it secure and fix problems. The request logs we can view are kept for a short time (currently no more than a day). Vercel may keep some records longer for security, as described in Vercel’s privacy policy. Our newsletter and survey functions log only error types, never your email address or your survey answers.

Admissions survey answers. If you choose to take our admissions survey, we store the multiple-choice answers you give. See Admissions survey below for exactly what that covers.

What we don’t collect. We don’t run analytics or advertising tools. Fonts, styles and scripts load from seaphe.org itself, so viewing a page doesn’t send requests to outside tracking services.

Admissions survey

Our admissions survey asks people who applied to California nursing programs what happened, so we can publish admissions odds that the Board of Registered Nursing doesn’t publish for individual schools. Taking it is optional, and you can skip any question that isn’t required.

What it asks. The start term you applied for; the California RN programs you applied to (chosen from our list), whether you applied through an LVN-to-RN track, and the outcome at each; and, if you choose to answer, ranges for your prerequisite GPA and entrance exam score, how many times you had applied before, whether you had healthcare experience and your main role, how long you waited on a waitlist or lottery, whether you accepted a seat and where, and how you found the survey. The questions about program types and regions only narrow the school list on your screen. Those answers aren’t sent to us.

What it doesn’t ask. Your name, email address, exact scores, exact dates, age, or anything about your health, race, ethnicity, immigration status or other sensitive characteristics. There are no free-text boxes, and what you type in the school search box is never sent to us.

How answers are stored. Answers are stored in a database run for us by Neon, which we connect through our hosting provider, Vercel. With your answers we record the month you answered (not the day or time), which version of the form you saw and, if an entry looks like spam, a flag so we can review it. We don’t store your IP address, browser details, name, email or any account or device identifier with your answers. The survey doesn’t set cookies or save anything in your browser.

Technical details. Like any web request, your submission reaches our hosting provider with standard technical details, such as your IP address and browser type. Vercel may briefly process these in its standard server logs (see Hosting logs), but they aren’t saved in the survey database. Our database provider’s automatic backups also keep a short record of when changes were made (currently a few hours), so the database can be restored after a fault.

Spam and duplicate checks. To stop spam and duplicate entries, our server turns that day’s date, your IP address and your browser type into a scrambled code, using a secret key that only our server holds. The code is kept in a separate table, not with your answers, and is used only to limit how many times the survey can be submitted from the same connection in one day. Because the date is part of it, the code changes every day. We also keep a second scrambled code made from the answers themselves, so an exact repeat isn’t counted twice. Without the secret key, neither code can be turned back into your IP address or your answers, and we never use them to identify anyone. Both codes are deleted after two days by an automatic daily cleanup.

How we publish results. We publish totals only, in a monthly batch. A number appears only when at least 10 different people are behind it. Percentages are rounded, group sizes are shown as ranges, and where needed we hide extra numbers so that a hidden group can’t be worked out by subtraction. We never publish individual answers.

De-identified data. We keep survey answers in de-identified form. We publicly commit to keep them that way and not to try to re-identify anyone from them. Only the people who run SEAPHE can see the raw answers, and the website itself can add answers but can’t read them back. We don’t give raw answers to anyone except the service providers that store them for us, and anyone who ever receives them must agree in writing to keep them de-identified and not to try to re-identify anyone.

Never sold. We don’t sell survey answers, and we don’t share them for advertising. We use them only to publish anonymous totals and research about nursing school admissions, and to keep the survey free of spam.

The newsletter is separate. After you finish the survey, you can choose to sign up for The SEAPHE Brief. The box is unchecked unless you tick it. Your email address goes only to our newsletter list and is never stored with your survey answers. Because answers carry only the month, we can’t match the two.

You can’t change or delete answers later. Your answers aren’t stored with your name, email, IP address or any account, so we have no practical way to tell which answers are yours. That means we can’t show, correct or delete a particular person’s answers on request. Please check your answers before you submit.

Age. The survey is only for people 18 or older. You confirm this with the checkbox at the start, and we don’t store your age. If you’re under 18, please don’t take the survey.

How we use it

To send The SEAPHE Brief to people who asked for it.
To publish anonymous admissions totals from survey answers, as described above.
To answer requests you send us, including privacy requests.
To run the site, keep it secure and stop abuse such as spam signups and spam survey entries.

We don’t use your information for advertising or to build profiles of you.

We share personal information only with the service providers that run the site for us: Resend (newsletter delivery and list storage), Vercel (hosting, including handling page requests and form submissions) and Neon (the database that stores de-identified survey answers). They may use it only to provide those services. We may also disclose information if the law requires it. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Every SEAPHE Brief email has an unsubscribe link. Using it stops future emails without needing to contact us. You can also ask us to delete your address entirely.

How long we keep it

We keep your email address until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. After you unsubscribe, your address may stay on a suppression list so you aren’t emailed again by mistake. Hosting logs are kept for the periods Vercel sets.

Survey answers are kept for up to five years after the application cycle they describe, then deleted. Published totals stay on the site. The scrambled spam-check codes described above are deleted after two days, as explained in Admissions survey. Entries we reject as spam are deleted within 30 days of being rejected.

Data we delete can remain in our service providers’ short-term backups for a short time before it is gone for good.

Affiliate and outside links

SEAPHE has no affiliate links today. If we add them, they will be labeled as described in our advertising and affiliate disclosure. When you follow a link to another site, such as a school, the California Board of Registered Nursing or a retailer, that site’s own privacy policy applies, and it may set its own cookies.

Do Not Track and online tracking

We don’t track visitors over time or across other websites, and we don’t let other companies do so on seaphe.org. There are no ads, analytics, social media pixels or other third-party tracking scripts. Because there is no tracking to turn off, the site works the same way whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track signal. Our hosting provider processes technical information, such as IP addresses, only to deliver and secure the site, as described under Hosting logs.

California privacy rights

Where the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, applies, California residents have the right to:

Know what personal information we collect, use and disclose.
Access the personal information we hold about you.
Delete it.
Correct it if it’s wrong.
Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We don’t sell or share it, so there is nothing to opt out of. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a request to opt out of sale and sharing. Because we don’t do either, nothing about how the site treats you changes.
Not be treated differently for using these rights.

In the past 12 months we collected identifiers (newsletter email addresses, IP addresses in hosting logs, and short-lived scrambled codes made from IP addresses for spam control) and internet activity (pages requested, in hosting logs). We also collect admissions survey answers, such as the programs you applied to, the outcomes and ranges for your GPA and test scores. We keep these in de-identified form, not linked to any person, so we can’t locate a particular person’s answers to access, correct or delete them. This information came from you and your browser, was used for the purposes above and was disclosed only to the service providers named above. We don’t collect sensitive personal information, and we don’t disclose personal information to third parties for their direct marketing.

To make a request, email privacy@seaphe.org. We may need to confirm that you control the email address involved. You can also have an authorized agent make a request for you.

Children

SEAPHE is written for adults and older students choosing a nursing program. It isn’t directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. The admissions survey is only for people 18 or older. If you believe a child under 13 has given us an email address, email privacy@seaphe.org and we will delete it.

Security

The site is served only over HTTPS. Access to the newsletter list and to raw survey answers is limited to the people who run SEAPHE, and the website’s connection to the survey database can only add answers, not read them. No method of storage or transmission is perfectly secure, but we work to protect what we hold.

Changes

If we change this policy, we’ll post the new version here and update the dates at the top of this page. If a change is significant, such as adding analytics or advertising or using survey answers in a new way, we’ll say so clearly on this page before it takes effect. A change that weakens how survey answers are protected will apply only to answers given after the change.

Latest change (October 8, 2026): we added the Admissions survey section and the Do Not Track and online tracking section, and explained hosting logs in more detail.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests, including California privacy requests: privacy@seaphe.org. Anything else: hello@seaphe.org. To stop newsletter emails at any time, use the unsubscribe link in any issue.