Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 12, 2026

Tangent Forge builds decision-support tools. We collect as little as we can get away with, and we tell you plainly what that is. This page covers tangentforge.com and the products hosted on it.

The short version

• We do not sell your personal information. We never have.
• We do not run advertising or retargeting pixels anywhere on this site.
• Our college-planning tools are used by families, including minors. Those pages run no browser-side tracking at all — see the section below.
• If you give us an email address, we use it for the thing you asked for.

What you give us directly

When you submit a form — a newsletter signup, a waitlist, or an enquiry — we receive what you typed into it. Form submissions are handled by Netlify Forms, our hosting provider, and are stored in our Netlify account. Depending on the form, that may include:

• your email address;
• a student's grade level, where you chose to tell us (College Radar);
• anything you write into a free-text field.

We use it only for the purpose you submitted it for. We do not add you to unrelated lists. If a product you signed up for is never built, we will tell you rather than going quiet. You can ask us to delete your submission at any time — see Contact.

Analytics on the main site

Most of tangentforge.com uses Google Analytics 4 to understand aggregate traffic — which pages people read, roughly where visitors come from. This is standard web analytics and it sets cookies. It is not used on the college-planning surfaces described below. We do not use session replay, heatmaps, advertising pixels, or cross-site retargeting anywhere on this site.

Stricter rules for our college-planning tools

The College Decision Guide and College Radar are used by high-school students and their families. Because that audience includes minors, we hold those pages to a stricter standard than the rest of the site. On /college-radar, /jackson, and /mj:

• No browser-side analytics run at all. Google Analytics is not loaded on these pages, and no behavioral events are recorded.
• No analytics cookies are set, so no cookie banner is needed.
• No session replay, heatmaps, retargeting pixels, or third-party trackers.
• Nothing about a student's situation — grades, test scores, schools, search criteria, or answers — is ever placed into analytics, URLs, or link parameters.

We still need a rough sense of how many people visit these pages. We get it from the link you arrived on: when we share a link in an ad, an email, or a community post, that link carries a campaign tag, and the service that hosted the link tells us how many people clicked it. The counting happens where the link lived, not on this page and not in your browser.

A campaign tag records which link was clicked — never who clicked it, and never anything about a student. If we later turn on our hosting provider's aggregate, cookie-free analytics (derived from server logs rather than browser code), we will say so here first. Either way the result is a count of visits, not a profile of you, and nothing that can follow you to another site.

Hosting and server logs

This site is hosted by Netlify. Like any web host, their servers process standard request data (such as IP address and browser user-agent) in order to deliver pages and protect against abuse. That is a normal part of serving a website and applies to every page.

Do Not Track and privacy controls

We honor Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals for browser-side analytics. On the college-planning surfaces the question is moot — we do not run browser-side analytics there for anyone, regardless of settings.

Children

Our tools are designed for parents and students planning for college, and we expect minors to read these pages. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13. We do not profile students or build behavioral records of their college planning. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Your choices

• Ask us what we hold about you, and we will tell you.
• Ask us to delete it, and we will.
• Unsubscribe from any email we send using the link in that email.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we will update this page and the date at the top. Material changes to how we treat the college-planning surfaces get a fresh review before they ship, not after.

Contact

Questions, access requests, or deletion requests: hello@tangentforge.com.