Privacy

Last updated 28 August 2026

next4 helps high-school students find colleges that fit them. This page covers both this website and the next4 app.

The short version

The app never asks for your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, or address. Most of what you tell it — your answers and your card sort — stays on your phone, and deleting the app deletes it.

We show no ads. We sell your information to no one. We send nothing about you to any college. And nothing you tell us is used to train AI models.

This website is the one place we ask for an email address, and only if you choose to join the waitlist.

This website

If you join the waitlist we store the email address you give us, along with whether you are a student or a parent, your graduation year if you tell us, and which part of the page you signed up from. We use it to let you know when next4 opens, and for nothing else.

We also record page views and basic usage so we can see which parts of the site are working. That is not tied to your email address.

The app: what stays on your phone

Your intake answers, all 86 card placements, your saved schools, and a random identifier created the first time you open the app are stored on the device. There is no account, so there is nothing to sign into and nothing to sync. Uninstalling removes all of it.

That identifier is not your name and we cannot look you up by it, but it does stay the same on your phone until you delete the app.

The app: what we send, and what we keep

What we keep is not attached to your name or email, because the app never learns them. It is linked to a match, not to you.

How long we keep it

This is enforced by our database on a schedule, not by us remembering to do it.

Waitlist email addresses are kept until next4 opens and for twelve months after that, or until you ask us to remove you, whichever comes first. Usage analytics are kept for twelve months.

What we deliberately do not record

Twelve of the cards in the sort touch things like religion, politics, sexual orientation, race, and veteran status. They are questions about what you want in a college, not about you — but putting one in a pile can still imply something personal you never chose to tell us.

So the app does not record which of those 12 cards you place, or which pile you put them in. It records only that a card was placed. The app also does not send your grade level to our analytics, because it implies your age. Both are still used on your phone to find you schools.

Our database refuses to store those 12 cards at all. That is a rule built into the database itself rather than a promise about how our code behaves, so it holds even if something written later tries to.

Artificial intelligence

One part of next4 uses AI: the short “why this school” paragraph you see when you open a saved school. It is written by Anthropic’s Claude, from the answers you just gave — not from a profile we keep about you. Anthropic is the only AI provider next4 uses.

Your answers are not used to train AI models, by us or by Anthropic. Your card sort is never sent to any AI provider at all.

next4 does not write essays for you, and it does not try to detect whether something was written by AI.

Colleges never see you

Nothing about you is sent to any school. next4 does not generate leads, does not sell contact lists, and does not tell a college that you looked at them. Your matches, your fit scores and your saved list are planning tools for you, and they are never disclosed to an institution.

Who else handles it

None of these are advertising networks, and we sell your information to no one.

We have never received a government or law-enforcement request for information about anyone using next4. If we do, we will give up only what the law actually requires.

Young people

next4 is built for high-school students, so most of the people using it are under 18. That shapes the whole product: there is no account, we never ask who you are, and the answers that say the most about you stay on your phone.

The first time you open next4 we ask what year you were born. A year, not a date of birth, because it is the least we can ask and still know how to handle your answers. It stays on your phone and there is nowhere for us to send it.

If you are under 13, next4 still works and you get the same matches. What changes is that we keep nothing about you: no analytics, no feedback stored, and your answers are never sent to the AI service that writes the school summaries. Finding your matches still sends your answers to our own server, because that is how the matching happens, but it writes nothing down and nothing is shared with anyone outside next4.

If you are under 18, we ask that a parent or guardian read this page and agree to our terms with you.

If you live in New York, the usage tracking starts switched off. You do not have to do anything to turn it off, and next4 works the same either way. If you would like to help us improve the app you can switch it on in Settings, and you can switch it back off whenever you want.

For every person who uses next4, at every age: we do not sell or share your information, we do not use it for advertising, we do not show you ads, and we do not build a profile of you for any purpose other than helping you find colleges. Those are not commitments we make only to minors, because we do not think they should be.

A parent or guardian who has questions about what next4 holds can contact us at the address below. Because the app never learns a name or an email, we usually will not be able to look up a particular person — that is a consequence of collecting so little, and we would rather explain it than collect more.

Your choices

You can turn off the usage tracking described above.It is a single switch in the app, under Settings, labelled “Help improve next4”. Turning it off stops collection straight away — you do not have to restart anything, and nothing you have already done is used to work out anything new about you. Everything else in next4 keeps working exactly as before.

You can delete everything the app holds by uninstalling it. There is no account to close.

You can skip what you would rather not share. Household income is optional. Any card can go in the neutral pile. You can decline the feedback questions.

To be removed from the waitlist, or to ask us anything about this page, get in touch at luka@yournext4.com. Depending on where you live you may have the right to ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted. Ask us and we will do what we can, subject to the limit described above.

Keeping it safe

We use the security features our hosting and database providers give us, and we limit who on our side can reach stored information. No system is completely secure and we will not claim otherwise, which is part of why we collect as little as we do.

Changes

We will post changes on this page and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will say so plainly rather than quietly editing the text.

next4 is for people in the United States. next4 is operated by Luka Hadzic, an individual. The App Store lists the same name as the seller.