Privacy Policy

The short version

• We collect your name, email and date of birth, and a record of your studying: your plan, the tasks you tick off, your focus sessions, the questions you answer and how you rate your own recall, and anything you write or draw in the notes. Each item, why we keep it and for how long is listed below. Phone number only if you book a tutoring session.
• We never see your card number. Payments go to Kashier or Apple; we get back a confirmation and an expiry date.
• We do not use cookies and there is no advertising or tracking on this site.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
• Every other company that touches your data is named in Who else sees it, all ten of them.
• You can delete your account from Profile → Security. That removes your data from our live database straight away; our nightly backups hold a copy for up to 30 days before it is gone for good, and payment records are kept because the law requires it. Exactly what is deleted and what is kept.

Who we are

USMLE Pulse is an exam-preparation service operated from Egypt. For anything in this policy, a copy of your data, a correction, a deletion, or a complaint, write to usmlepulse@gmail.com and a person will answer.

We are the controller of the personal data described here.

What we collect

Your account

Your name, email address, and the country your connection appears to be in. A profile photo if you upload one. A phone number only if you book a tutoring session, because the tutor may need to reach you. We do not ask for your gender or your address.

Your date of birth

We ask for it once, when you create an account.

• Why: for one purpose only — to know that we are not keeping an account for a child (anyone under 16), which is what the Children section promises. It is not used for anything else, never shared with anyone, and never used for advertising or to personalise anything.
• How long: for as long as your account exists. It is deleted with your account (and leaves our backups within 30 days after that).
• Changing it: you cannot change it yourself once it is saved, so that the age check means something. If you entered it wrongly, write to usmlepulse@gmail.com or message us in the app (the green chat button) and we will correct it.

What you do while studying — exactly

This is the substance of the product: without it there is no plan and no progress screen. Everything here is kept for as long as your account exists and deleted with it, unless the row says otherwise.

We do not record how long you spend on a page, what you scroll past, or anything you do outside USMLE Pulse.

Things you write

Anything you write inside the product is yours and is stored against your account only: your own edits to a card, and anything you draw or write by hand over a question or over the notes. These are private to you. Moderators can see the wording of the shared cards, which is the same for everybody; they cannot see what you have written in your own margins.

Study measurements

We record how long your focus sessions ran, which cards you reviewed and when, and how you rated your own recall, because that is what the study schedule and the progress screen are built from. There are no marks and no scores: the ratings are your own assessment of your recall, and every number we show from them is labelled as self-reported.

Payment

Whether you have an active subscription and when it expires, the amount and currency, and a reference number from whichever processor took the payment. For purchases made in the app we also store the transaction identifiers Apple gives us, so that a restored purchase can be matched to your account.

We never receive your card number, and we never store one. Card details are entered on the payment provider's own page, not ours.

Technical records

Four things, and they are the ones people are usually surprised by, so they are spelled out:

• Your IP address. Used to stop repeated failed sign-ins and abusive request volumes, and to work out which currency to show you. The currency lookup is cached against your address for a short period so the same request is not repeated on every page.
• The devices you sign in on. An account can be used on a limited number of devices, the website and the app counted together. To enforce that, each device you sign in on is recorded with the IP address and country it connected from, a short description (for example “iOS · Safari” or “USMLE Pulse app · iPhone”), whether it is the website or the app, when it was last used, and a fingerprint. The fingerprint is a one-way hash of general device characteristics — in the app, the identifier your phone gives this app; on the website, screen size, time zone, language and processor count — and it is used only to recognise your own device again, never to follow you on other sites. You can see your devices, and remove one, under Profile. Addresses are visible to our staff only, for account security.
• Error reports. When something breaks in your browser we record what broke, where in our code it happened, which page you were on, which build you were running, and your browser and device type. This is how faults get found and fixed.
• Sign-in sessions. Which devices your account is signed in on, so that you can see them and end any you do not recognise.

Notifications, in the app and in your browser

If you turn notifications on — in the app, or in your browser from the 🔔 bell — we register a notification token issued by Apple or Google for that app or browser, so a message or a reminder can reach it. It is kept until you turn notifications off, sign out, or the token stops working, and is deleted with your account. You can turn notifications off at any time in the app, in your browser's site settings, or in your phone's settings.

In the app, a chapter of the notes you open is also saved on your phone so it opens without a connection. That copy stays on your phone, is readable only by the app, and stops opening 30 days after we last confirmed your access online.

Messages

Messages you send to other students or to us are stored so that both sides can read them. If you report a conversation, the report and the messages it concerns are visible to our team so that we can act on it.

What stays on your device

Some things are kept on the phone or computer you are using rather than on our servers:

• Your sign-in session, held in the device's own secure store, the Keychain on iOS, the Android Keystore on Android, and not in ordinary browser storage.
• Work you did while offline, such as a card you graded or a focus session you finished with no connection, kept until it can be sent and then removed. It is stored against your account, so a second person signing in on the same device never sends it.
• Your preferences, including any wallpaper image you upload to the focus timer. That image is never uploaded to us.

Signing out clears the session. Clearing the app's or browser's data clears the rest.

Why we use it

• To give you the service you asked for: your plan, your notes, your progress, your subscription. This is the performance of our contract with you.
• To keep accounts safe, sign-in security, rate limiting, and finding faults. This is our legitimate interest in a service that works and is not abused, and yours in an account nobody else can take.
• To answer you when you write to us.
• To send study tips and product news, only if you have opted in, and only until you opt out. Every such email has an unsubscribe link.

We do not profile you for advertising, and nothing here is used to make an automated decision that affects you.

Who else sees it

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. These are the companies that process some of it in order to run the service. This list is complete as of the date at the top.

What our internal tools do not send

We use AI assistants internally to help us find faults and understand how the product is being used. They are given counts and grouped error messages, not your records: the tool that reads usage asks the database for a number of rows and never for the rows themselves, and the tool that reads faults groups them by message and sends the message and the page it happened on, with no account attached. No name, email or study data is sent to an AI provider.

Our own marketing accounts

We connect to Meta for statistics about our own Instagram and Facebook pages. That connection carries our page's data, not yours.

Where your data goes

We are in Egypt, and the companies above are mostly in the United States and Europe, so your data is processed outside your country and outside ours. Each of them is a company we have a contract with for that purpose. If you are in the EEA or the UK and want to know which safeguard applies to a particular one, write to us and we will tell you.

How long we keep it

Written plainly, because a vague answer here is usually a way of avoiding one.

• Your account and study data, for as long as your account exists. Deleting your account deletes them; see below. Your date of birth is part of this: it lives exactly as long as the account and goes when the account goes.
• Backups: 30 days. Every night at midnight (Cairo time) a complete copy of the database is made, so that nobody loses their progress if something goes wrong with our database provider. Each copy is kept for 30 days and then deleted — so after you delete your account, your data can survive in a backup for up to 30 days, and is then gone. Backups are protected with a password, stored outside the public website, and used only to restore the service; we never use a backup to bring back an account you deleted.
• Payment records, kept after an account is deleted, for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to be able to show that a payment happened. These are the transaction, the amount and the date, not anything about your studying.
• Messages, for as long as either side of the conversation has an account. A message you sent to someone else stays in their conversation after you delete your account, shown as coming from a deleted account. A report is kept with the messages it concerns.
• A one-line deletion record: your email and the date you deleted your account, for one year, then removed automatically. It exists so that if a paying student deletes their account by mistake, we can find out what they had paid for and help them.
• Error reports: kept for 30 days, then deleted automatically. They carry the fault, the page it happened on and your browser type, and no name or email.
• Rate-limit and currency lookups, minutes and hours respectively, and neither writes your address down. The rate limiter counts recent requests against a one-way hash of your address and forgets each one as its window passes. The currency lookup stores a two-letter country code against a hash of your address and stops trusting it after 12 hours.

Your rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, or object to it, and you can withdraw consent for emails at any time. Write to usmlepulse@gmail.com. We will answer within 30 days, and we will not charge you for it.

Deleting your data

Two ways. Open Profile → Security and delete your account yourself, or email usmlepulse@gmail.com from the address on your account with the subject “Data deletion request”. If you email, we confirm within 7 days and complete the deletion within 30 days.

What is deleted, straight away: your sign-in account, your profile and photo, your date of birth, your study plan and every record of your studying listed above, anything you wrote or drew over the notes or a question, your posts, comments and likes in Study Partners, your notifications, your notification tokens and device sessions, your email subscription record, and anything else in our database that carries your account. This is done by searching every table for your account, not only the ones we remembered to list.

What is kept, and why:

• Payment records — the transaction, the amount and the date — because tax and accounting law requires it. Purchases made in the app are also held by Apple under Apple's own terms.
• Messages you sent to other students, which stay in their conversations, shown as coming from a deleted account.
• A one-line deletion record (your email and the date) for one year, then removed.
• Our nightly backups, which may still hold a copy for up to 30 days, and then that is deleted too.

Deletion is permanent. Study progress and saved work cannot be restored afterwards — not even from a backup.

Getting a copy

Ask us by email or in Messages and we will send you a single file containing everything described on this page that we hold about your account.

Complaining

If you are in the EEA or the UK you may complain to your national data protection authority. We would rather you told us first, so that we can fix it.

Watermarking of study material

Pages containing paid study material carry a watermark identifying the account that opened them. It is deliberately faint so that it does not interfere with reading, but it is present in any screenshot or recording of those pages.

Its only purpose is to identify the source if paid material is redistributed. It records the account identity and the time the page was viewed. It does not track what you read, how long you read it, or anything you do elsewhere.

Sharing paid material outside your account is a breach of the Terms, and the watermark is how we identify where a leaked copy came from.

Cookies

We do not use cookies. Not for analytics, not for advertising, not for anything, which is why you have never been shown a cookie banner here.

We do use your browser's own local storage to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences: your theme, which module you were last working on, an unsent draft. That stays on your device, is readable only by this site, and is cleared when you sign out or clear your browser data.

Children

USMLE Pulse is built for medical students and graduates preparing for a licensing examination. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly keep an account for anyone under 16.

We ask for your date of birth when you create an account, and we refuse the account if the date you give is below that age. If you had an account before we started asking, we ask you once the next time you sign in.

We do not verify it. We have no way to, and we would rather say so than imply a check we do not carry out. What asking gives us is narrower and still worth having: the question is put before anyone can open an account, and the answer is recorded. You cannot change it yourself afterwards; if you entered it wrongly, contact us by email or in Messages and we will correct it for you. “We do not knowingly keep an account” is then a statement about something we actually asked, rather than about something we never looked at.

If you believe a child has created an account, write to usmlepulse@gmail.com and we will delete it and everything with it.

How we protect it

Specifically, rather than in general terms:

• The site and the app talk to our servers over HTTPS only.
• Passwords are handled by our sign-in provider and are never stored by us in a form we could read.
• The database enforces, row by row, that an account can only read its own data. That rule is in the database itself, not only in the app, so a fault in the app cannot hand your records to somebody else.
• Keys and credentials are held outside the public web directory, so they cannot be requested over the internet.
• Security notices: a new sign-in, a password change, cannot be switched off, because the first thing somebody who takes an account does is switch them off.

No service can promise it will never be breached, and we are not going to. If a breach affects you, we will tell you.

Changes

If we change this policy we will change the date at the top. If a change materially affects what we collect or who receives it, we will tell you in the product or by email rather than relying on you to re-read this page.

See also the Terms of Service, the Medical Disclaimer and the Refund Policy.