California Privacy Notice

1. CATEGORIES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Under the CCPA, "personal information" means information that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household. In the preceding 12 months, we have collected the following categories:

2. SOURCES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

• Directly from you: Account registration, resume creation, profile setup, application preparation, uploaded documents, communications with us.
• Automatically: Cookies, web analytics, server logs, and similar technologies when you use our website.
• Third parties: Google or Facebook when you choose to sign in with them (name, email, profile picture URL); Stripe (payment status). Job listing partners send us listings, not information about you.

3. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We use the personal information we collect for the following business and commercial purposes:

• Providing and improving our resume builder, job discovery, and application preparation services
• Creating and managing your account
• Processing payments and subscriptions
• Matching you with relevant job opportunities
• Sending service email (verification, password reset, billing) and, with your consent, product news by email
• Analyzing usage to improve our platform
• Detecting and preventing fraud and abuse
• Complying with legal obligations

4. HOW WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of third parties for business purposes:

• Service providers: Hosting, email delivery, payment processing, AI processing, our own analytics: bound by contractual obligations to protect your data.
• Service providers we use: Stripe, Google (sign-in and AI processing), Anthropic (drafting replies to support messages), Meta (sign-in), Amazon Web Services (email), Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, and the job listing partners described in our Privacy Policy.
• Job listing partners: when you click a job listing we refer your browser to the partner or employer site and the partner counts the click. We do not send them your name, email, resume or account data, and we use no advertising networks.
• Legal and regulatory: When required by law, subpoena, or government request.
• Business transfers: In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

5. DATA RETENTION

We retain each category of personal information only as long as necessary for the purposes described above:

6. YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS

As a California resident, you have the following rights under the CCPA and CPRA:

• Right to know: Request that we disclose the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, the sources, the purposes, and the third parties with whom we shared it.
• Right to delete: Request that we delete personal information we collected from you, subject to legal exceptions.
• Right to correct: Request that we correct inaccurate personal information we maintain about you.
• Right to opt out of sale or sharing: see Section 8. Untick the partner box or email us with the subject "Do Not Sell or Share".
• Right to limit use of sensitive information: We do not collect sensitive personal information as defined by the CPRA.
• Right to non-discrimination: We will not deny you services, charge you different prices, or provide a different quality of service because you exercised your privacy rights.

You may make up to two verifiable consumer requests per 12-month period. We will respond within 45 days. If we need more time (up to an additional 45 days), we will notify you in writing.

7. HOW WE VERIFY REQUESTS

To protect your privacy, we must verify your identity before fulfilling any request to access, delete, or correct your personal information:

• Account holders: We will verify your identity by confirming your email address associated with your SmoothApply account. We may ask you to re-authenticate or confirm details only you would know.
• Non-account holders: We will ask you to provide at least two pieces of identifying information that we can match against our records.
• Authorized agents: If you use an authorized agent, we may require proof of written authorization and may still verify your identity directly.

We will not fulfill a request if we cannot verify your identity or authority. Information collected for verification purposes will only be used for that purpose.

8. SALE OR SHARING OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

SmoothApply does not sell or share personal information for advertising. One disclosure may count as a "sale" or "sharing" under the CCPA: if you leave the partner box checked after downloading a resume, we may send your identifiers (name, email, phone), professional information (job title, resume) and city or ZIP to partner job sites and talent networks, and we are paid for the referral. Before October 16, 2026 we made no such disclosures. We do not sell or share the personal information of consumers we know to be under 16.

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information: untick the box when it appears, or email [email protected] with the subject "Do Not Sell or Share" from your account email. We process opt-outs within 15 business days and pass them to any partner that already received your information.

Disclosures to our service providers (hosting, payments, email, AI processing) are made under contracts that restrict their use of the data and are not sales.