Security and data

Alta Council is built for leadership decisions, not for student data. Advisors reason about enrollment counts, budgets, staffing, and strategy. None of that requires a single student’s name.

Please do not enter personally identifiable student information, individual student records, or anything covered by FERPA. The product does not need it, and Alta Council is not offered as a school official under FERPA or as a party to a student data privacy agreement.

This applies with particular force to the notes you type during a session, because those are the notes a durable fact can be filed from and kept.

Every account belongs to a school, and every query for a session, a message, or a school profile is scoped to that school before it runs. There is no shared view and no cross-school search.

This is the one property that must never regress, so it is tested rather than trusted. An automated check creates two schools, writes a session to each, asserts that every cross-school read comes back empty, and deletes its own fixtures. It runs before changes ship.

When you use Alta Council, the database holds:

• Your name, email address, and a hashed password. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored in readable form.
• Your school profile: school name, state, model, grade span, enrollment, and the optional context you choose to add, such as months of cash on hand or renewal date.
• Your sessions: the question you asked, the notes you typed during the session, what each advisor replied, and the record you closed with.
• A small set of durable facts about your school, filed from your own session notes. What these are and how they get there is the next section.
• A log of account activity such as sign-ins and password changes.

Signing in sets one cookie. It is HTTP-only, sent only over HTTPS, restricted to this site, and expires after thirty days.

While you are writing the record of a session, the unsaved draft is held in your browser tab so that a reload does not lose it. It stays on your device, is never sent anywhere until you press save, and is discarded when you save or when you close the tab.

This is the one thing on this page that is not obvious from using the product, so it is set out in full.

When you close a session, Alta Council reads the notes you typed in it and files up to three durable facts about your school — the kind of thing no advisor could know and you should not have to retype every time. That the business manager leaves in March. That the county will not move on facilities until the legislative session ends. Those facts are then put in front of every advisor in your later sessions.

The rules it works under, which are enforced in the code:

• It files only things you said. Not what the advisors concluded, not what anything inferred. If it is not close to your own words it does not go in.
• At most three from any one session, and most sessions produce none.
• It is instructed never to file anything about a named student. It is also told to skip anything that will be false in a month.
• Every fact carries where it came from and when it was true, and both are shown to you and to the advisors. Nothing is presented as more certain than its source.
• Nothing is overwritten. A newer value supersedes an older one, so the record of what you believed in March survives.

You can see everything filed about your school on the council page, and remove any of it in one click. A removed fact stops being shown to you and stops being sent to any advisor. The row itself is marked removed rather than erased, and goes when the account does.

Your closed decision records travel the same way: when you bring a related question later, the records of decisions you already made are put in front of the advisors, so the council can be consistent with what your school has already committed to.

Four companies, each for one job. No data is sold, and none is shared with anyone else.

Advisor responses are generated through Anthropic’s API. Anthropic states that it does not train its models on inputs or outputs sent through that API. Alta Council does not train any model of its own on your sessions, and does not use one school’s sessions to answer another school’s questions.

This site runs no analytics, no advertising pixels, and no third-party tracking scripts of any kind. Nobody is following you around the internet on our account. The hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, as every host does.

Your sessions are kept for as long as your account is open, because the written record months later is the point of the product.

Facts filed about your school are kept until you remove them or the account is deleted. There is no automatic expiry: a fact from a year ago is still shown to the advisors, marked as a year old, rather than quietly dropped. You decide what is no longer true.

There is no automated deletion schedule today. If you want your account and everything in it removed, write to martez@altacouncil.com and it will be deleted within thirty days. You can ask for a copy of your sessions at any time.

Alta Council is a new, founder-led product. It has no SOC 2 report, no ISO certification, and no third-party penetration test. If your district or authorizer requires any of those before you can use a vendor, it does not have them yet, and you should say so rather than find out later.

If you find a security problem, write to martez@altacouncil.com. You will get a reply from the founder, not a ticketing system.

See also the privacy policy and the terms of service.