Privacy Policy
How Orbit collects, uses, discloses, and protects information for students, advisors, and institutional deployments.
Effective June 10, 2026
This Privacy Policy describes how Orbit Infrastructure LLC ("Orbit," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, discloses, and protects information in the Orbit platform, including public demos, student planning tools, advisor workflows, pilots, and institutional deployments. If Orbit is provided under a written agreement with an institution, that agreement controls where it conflicts with this policy.
1. What We Collect
Orbit collects information needed to provide academic planning, advising, and institutional workflow features. Depending on how you use the product, this may include account information, contact details, profile details, declared programs, catalog year, courses, schedules, four-year plans, degree audit status, transcript or transfer-credit information you provide or that an institution authorizes us to receive, advising notes, exceptions, approvals, issue logs, and planner annotations.
For advisors, administrators, and other institutional users, Orbit may also collect role, department, advisor code, permission scope, workflow actions, support requests, and audit-log events.
Public demos use synthetic records only, including demo names, emails, IDs, courses, notes, and advising issues. Demo data is not intended to contain real student education records.
Orbit does not collect or store university account passwords or raw login credentials for registrar, degree audit, or student information systems.
2. How We Use Your Data
We use data to operate the Orbit platform: academic planning, schedule building, degree audit comparison, advisor workflows, exception tracking, notes, alerts, product analytics, troubleshooting, customer support, and security monitoring.
We do not sell personal data, use education records for third-party advertising, or build advertising profiles from student information.
3. FERPA and Education Records
When Orbit is used by or on behalf of a college, university, or other educational institution, some information in Orbit may constitute an education record or personally identifiable information from education records under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) or comparable student privacy laws.
In institutional deployments, the institution remains the controller of its student records. Orbit processes those records only to provide services the institution requests and, where applicable, under written agreements that define authorized purposes, confidentiality, subprocessors, retention, deletion, and security obligations.
When students use Orbit in self-service mode without an institutional data feed, most planning information is provided by the student (including optional transcript uploads). Official registrar or audit data appears only when the student imports it or when the institution authorizes an integration.
Student requests to access, amend, disclose, or delete institution-controlled education records should generally be directed to the institution. Orbit will support institutions in responding to those requests when the institution authorizes us to do so.
4. Role-Based Access and Audit Logs
Orbit is designed around least-privilege access. Student records are scoped by role and institutional context, such as assigned advisees, supported programs, department responsibilities, or administrator privileges approved by the institution.
Orbit maintains audit logs for security and institutional accountability. Depending on the deployment, logs may include sign-ins, permission changes, advisor notes, exception decisions, exports, administrative actions, data corrections, and security-relevant events.
5. Demo and Pilot Data Separation
Public demos use synthetic records with demo-only identifiers. Demo data may be reset, replayed, or modified for product demonstration purposes and must not be used for real academic, financial, enrollment, or advising decisions.
Pilot deployments should follow institution-approved data import, access, retention, and deletion rules before any real student data is loaded. Demo, pilot, and production environments should remain logically separated.
6. Security Posture
Orbit uses managed infrastructure, authentication controls, row-level access policies, operational logging, and internal least-privilege practices to reduce unauthorized access, loss, misuse, or disclosure.
Our security roadmap is mapped to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 functions: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. This mapping is a risk-management framework, not a certification or guarantee that incidents cannot occur.
7. Accessibility
Orbit aims to maintain an accessibility baseline aligned with WCAG 2.2 AA for core user workflows, including keyboard support, semantic controls, visible focus states, readable contrast, reduced-motion handling, and responsive layouts.
We welcome accessibility feedback and will prioritize issues that block access to core academic planning or advising workflows.
9. Optional Google and Microsoft Calendar Sync
If you choose to sync a schedule to Google Calendar or Outlook, Orbit requests calendar access only after you select that option. Google Calendar sync uses the Google Calendar API scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events so Orbit can create recurring class events in the calendar you select. Outlook sync uses Microsoft Graph Calendars.ReadWrite for the same purpose.
Orbit sends only the meeting details needed to create those events: course code, course title, meeting days, start and end times, location (if available), and term dates. Orbit does not read, export, or sell your broader calendar contents, contacts, or email through this feature.
OAuth access for calendar sync is initiated in your browser. Short-lived access tokens are used to call Google or Microsoft APIs directly from your session. Orbit does not store your Google or Microsoft calendar passwords, and this calendar OAuth flow is separate from Orbit account sign-in.
You can stop future syncs by revoking Orbit's access in your Google Account permissions (https://myaccount.google.com/permissions) or Microsoft account app permissions, and by deleting events you no longer want in your calendar.
10. Third-Party Providers
Orbit relies on infrastructure and service providers, such as authentication, database, hosting, email, analytics, monitoring, and support tools. These providers may process information only as needed to provide services to Orbit, subject to their own terms and data processing commitments.
Optional calendar sync also relies on Google and Microsoft APIs when you enable those integrations.
We may disclose information when required by law, to protect the security of Orbit or its users, or as directed by an institution under an applicable agreement.
11. Retention and Deletion
We retain information for as long as needed to provide Orbit, meet institutional commitments, resolve disputes, maintain audit logs, comply with legal obligations, and improve security. Retention periods may differ between public demo, student self-service, pilot, and institutional deployments.
You may request deletion of your personal account data by contacting support. If the data is controlled by an institution, we may direct the request to that institution or process it according to the institution's instructions.
12. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Continued use of Orbit after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy. We will make reasonable efforts to notify users or institutional customers of material changes.
13. Contact
Questions about this policy or institutional privacy reviews can be directed to support@orbitumd.com.