Privacy Policy

This policy covers northassay.com and the NorthAssay application. It describes two relationships that carry different obligations, and conflating them is the most common way a policy like this misleads people.

• Recruiters and their accounts. We decide what account data we need and why, so for that data NorthAssay is the controller. This policy is our commitment to you directly.
• Candidates and their assessments. A recruiter chooses to assess you, decides what to ask, and decides what your results mean. For assessment data the recruiter is the controller and NorthAssay is a processor acting on their instructions. We are still accountable for handling it securely and for the limits described below — but if you want your assessment withdrawn from consideration, the recruiter is the party who decides that.

If you are a candidate and you do not know who to ask, write to us at hello@northassay.com with the assessment link you were sent and we will route your request to the recruiter who issued it, and act on it ourselves where we are able to.

The table below is the complete inventory, not a summary. It is derived from the application's database schema and object storage rather than written from memory.

We do not ask for or store payment details. NorthAssay is free during early access and there is no payment processor in the product.

Some jurisdictions — Illinois under BIPA, and the EU and UK under GDPR Article 9 — treat facial images as a special category of data with its own consent requirements. We treat them that way everywhere, and the specific limits below matter more than any general assurance.

• We do not run facial recognition. No biometric template, faceprint, embedding, or other mathematical representation of your face is generated, stored, or compared. The identity photo is stored as an ordinary image file and shown to the recruiter, who looks at it. There is no matching against any database, including our own.
• The photo is never a decision. It is recorded as one of three states — photo on file, photo declined, or identity self-asserted — and shown to the recruiter as context. Declining is a supported path that does not block you from taking the assessment or from being hired.
• Consent comes first, and declining is real. The capture screen explains what the photo is for and how long it is kept before the camera is enabled, and the timestamp of that consent is recorded alongside the photo. If you decline, no image is captured or transmitted.
• Video and transcripts exist only for video interviews. No assessment records audio or video unless it is an interview-type assessment, and recording starts when you begin the interview, not when the page loads. We do not access your camera or microphone outside of an interview you have started.

Recordings and identity photos are held in private object storage with no public access. Every read is served through a short-lived signed URL issued by our server to an authenticated recruiter, or to you.

While an assessment is open, the page records a small set of events about how it was taken. This is the part of the product candidates are most entitled to know about, so here is the complete list rather than a category.

• That the browser tab was hidden or became visible again, and for how long.
• That focus moved to another window or application while the tab stayed visible.
• That text was pasted or copied, and how many characters — never the content of your clipboard.
• That full-screen mode was exited.
• A best-effort record of a screenshot key combination being pressed. We cannot and do not capture your screen.
• How long was spent on each question.
• That the assessment was reached through an open link or access code rather than a private invitation, which means identity is self-asserted, and whether a repeated or duplicate join looked automated.
• Whether an identity photo was captured or declined.

We do not read your clipboard, keystrokes, files, other browser tabs, or anything on your device beyond the events listed above. We do not install anything, and we do not use proctoring software.

• To run the product: generate assessments, deliver them, score submissions, and show results to the recruiter who requested them.
• To send transactional email: candidate invitations, submission confirmations, and recruiter notifications.
• To keep the service working and secure: error diagnosis, abuse and rate-limit enforcement on shared links, and capacity work.
• To understand product usage in aggregate.

We do not train AI models on your data

Your role descriptions, rubrics, candidate answers, transcripts, and scores are not used to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model — ours or a provider's. They are sent to a model provider only as the input to a single request whose output goes back to you, and we use those providers under terms that exclude training on submitted content.

We do not sell or share your data for advertising

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There are no advertising or marketing trackers on the application. Our analytics runs with session replay switched off, so no recording of a candidate's screen or interaction is ever captured, and anonymous visitors to the marketing site do not get a profile.

For everything else we are going to be straight with you rather than publish a schedule we do not yet enforce. Assessment answers, scores, transcripts, and video recordings are retained for as long as the recruiter's account holds them, because they are the recruiter's hiring record and only the recruiter knows when a role is closed. There is no automated expiry on them today. Invitation links themselves do expire, and an expired link cannot be used to take an assessment.

We delete on request — see §07 — and we will publish a defined retention schedule for assessment data, with automated enforcement behind it, rather than adding a clause here that nothing implements.

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete, port, restrict, or object to the processing of your personal data, and to withdraw consent you previously gave. We honour these requests regardless of whether your local law compels us to.

To make a request, email hello@northassay.com from the address the request concerns, or include the assessment link you were sent. We will confirm receipt and respond within 30 days. We do not charge for a request and we will not treat you differently for making one.

• Deleting an identity photo is something we can always do immediately, on your request alone, without asking the recruiter.
• Withdrawing an assessment from consideration is the recruiter's decision, because it is their hiring record. We will pass your request on, tell you who we passed it to, and delete our copy where we are permitted to.
• Access and portability are handled manually today: we will assemble your data and send it to you in a machine-readable format. There is no self-service export button in the product yet, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
• If you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to your local data protection authority. In the EU that is your national supervisory authority; in the UK it is the Information Commissioner's Office.

We use a small number of infrastructure providers. Each one is listed with what it actually touches, so you can assess the exposure rather than trust a count.

Our AI provider is configurable, and Anthropic and OpenAI are also supported by the application. Google is the provider in use today; if we change it we will update this table, because a change of AI provider is a change of subprocessor and you are entitled to know about it.

NorthAssay and every provider above operate in the United States, so if you are outside the US your data is transferred there. Where that transfer needs a legal basis — for personal data from the EU, UK, or Switzerland — we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses in our agreements with these providers, together with the UK Addendum where it applies. We do not currently offer an EU-resident deployment.

Encryption, access control, and the specifics of how recordings and identity photos are isolated are covered on our security page, which is written for a reader doing vendor due diligence.

NorthAssay is a tool for assessing candidates for paid work and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. If you believe a minor has been assessed through NorthAssay, tell us and we will delete the record.

The date at the top of this page is the date the text below it last changed, and it is verified automatically — a change to this policy that left the date untouched would fail our build. For a change that materially reduces your rights or expands what we collect, we will email account holders before it takes effect, and we will not apply it retroactively to data already collected under an earlier version.

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints all go to hello@northassay.com. A person reads it. NorthAssay is an early-access product operated by a small team, and we have not yet appointed a data protection officer or an EU representative; if you need a named contact for a formal request, ask and we will give you one.