Privacy Policy

Ember (“Ember,” “we,” “us”) is an NCLEX-RN preparation service operated by JME & Associates, LLC in the United States. This policy covers the Ember website at emberprep.com, the Ember web app, and the emails we send you.

Ember is offered only to users in the United States, and the database holding your account and study history is hosted there. Some providers work elsewhere — our email service sends from European infrastructure, so the emails we send you pass through it. We don’t offer the service in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland — see the Terms.

If you have a question about anything here, or want to exercise any of the rights in this policy, email support@emberprep.com. A real person reads that address.

We collect only what the service needs to work. Specifically:

Account information

When you create an account, our authentication provider (Clerk) collects your email address, your name if you choose to provide one, and your sign-in credentials. Ember itself stores your Clerk user ID and reads your email and first name when we need to send you an email. We never see or store your password.

Waitlist information

If you join the waitlist before creating an account, we store the email address you submitted and which page you submitted it from, so we can invite you when we open.

Study activity

When you use Ember, we record what you studied and how you did, because that record is the product — it drives your progress charts, your spaced-repetition flashcard schedule, and which questions you get next. This includes:

• which questions were drawn for each practice session, and in what order
• the answers you submitted, whether they were correct, and how long each one took
• any difficulty rating you give a flashcard
• your practice history and derived progress statistics

AI tutor conversations

If you use the AI tutor, we store your messages and the tutor’s replies, linked to your account. When the tutor produces an answer that isn’t fully grounded in nurse-reviewed content, that exchange is also flagged for our clinical reviewer to check — so a question you typed may be read by a human reviewer for the purpose of correcting the answer.

Email records

We log which notification emails we sent you and when, so we don’t send duplicates or nag you, plus your opt-out preference if you unsubscribe.

Technical information

Our hosting and authentication providers process ordinary technical data — IP address, browser type, timestamps — to serve pages, keep you signed in, and block abuse. We do not build advertising or behavioral profiles from it.

Just as importantly:

• No advertising or analytics trackers. Ember runs no third-party advertising pixels, no ad networks, and no cross-site tracking scripts.
• No payment information. Ember is free during early access. If we introduce paid plans, payment details will be handled by a payment processor and this policy will be updated before that happens.
• No health information about you. Ember is a study tool, not a healthcare service.
• No sale of your data, ever. See section 6.

Please don’t enter real patient information into Ember. The AI tutor is a free-text box, and it is tempting to paste in a real case from clinical. Don’t. Ember is not a HIPAA-covered entity and has no business associate agreement with you or your school; anything you type is stored as ordinary account data and may be read by our reviewer. Keep patient identifiers out of it — describe scenarios generically instead.

We use the information above to:

• run your account and keep you signed in
• deliver the service — serve practice questions, grade answers, schedule flashcard reviews, show your progress, and answer tutor questions
• send you the emails described in section 7
• review and improve content quality — including having our clinical reviewer check flagged tutor answers, and looking at aggregate answer statistics to find questions that are unclear or miswritten
• keep the service secure, debug problems, and prevent abuse
• comply with the law

We do not use your study data or tutor conversations to train AI models. We don’t do it ourselves, and we don’t let our providers do it either: Anthropic’s commercial terms bar training on what we send their API, and we have exercised Voyage AI’s opt-out, so your tutor questions aren’t retained by them or used to improve their models. Section 5 names every provider that touches your data. If any of this changes, this section changes with it — and we’ll tell you before it does.

Ember is a small operation built on third-party infrastructure. These providers process data on our behalf, only to provide their service to us — all but one under a data processing agreement that forms part of our contract with them, and that exception is called out below:

• Clerk — account creation, sign-in, and credential storage.
• Supabase — the database that holds your account record, study history, and tutor conversations.
• Vercel — hosting for the web app and API.
• Resend — delivery of the emails we send you.
• Anthropic — the AI model that generates tutor answers. When you send a tutor message, that message and the relevant reviewed content are sent to Anthropic’s API to produce the reply.
• Voyage AI — converts your tutor question into a numeric vector so we can find the relevant reviewed content. Your question text is sent to this provider for that purpose. They are the one provider here we don’t have a data processing agreement with, because they don’t offer one; instead we have opted out of their use of your questions to train or improve their models.
• Qdrant — the search index over our nurse-reviewed content. Only the numeric vector of your question is sent, not your account information.
• Cloudflare — DNS for emberprep.com, and routing for mail sent to our support address.
• Google — the mailbox that receives support and privacy requests. If you email us, that message and whatever you put in it are stored there.

Beyond these providers, we share personal information only when the law requires it (for example, a valid legal process), to protect the safety or rights of someone, or if Ember is ever acquired or merged — in which case we will tell you before your information moves to a new owner.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising or targeted advertising — as those terms are defined under U.S. state privacy laws. We have never done so, and this policy would have to change before we could.

Ember sends a small number of emails:

• Account and service emails — sign-in links, your invitation when a waitlist spot opens, and a welcome email. These are part of having an account and can’t be turned off while your account is open.
• Study reminders — a nudge when you have flashcards due or have been away for a while.

Every study reminder has a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer. Using it stops the reminders immediately; it does not close your account or stop account emails. You can also just email support@emberprep.com and ask.

Ember uses two kinds of browser storage, both strictly functional:

• Session cookies set by Clerk, which keep you signed in. Without these the app cannot work.
• Local storage for your light/dark theme preference, so the app doesn’t flash the wrong colors on every load.

We set no advertising, marketing, or cross-site tracking cookies, which is why you don’t see a cookie consent banner. Blocking cookies entirely will prevent you from signing in.

We keep your account information and study history for as long as your account is open. Your study history is deliberately long-lived — spaced repetition works by replaying your full answer history, so deleting it resets your flashcard schedule.

If you close your account or ask us to delete your data, we delete your account record, study history, and tutor conversations within 30 days, except where we have to keep something to comply with a legal obligation. Waitlist emails are deleted on request or when the waitlist is retired. Aggregate, de-identified statistics about how questions perform — which do not identify you — may be retained.

Regardless of where you live, and regardless of whether your state has a privacy law, we will honor these requests from any Ember user:

• Access — get a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correction — fix anything that’s wrong.
• Deletion — delete your account and the data tied to it.
• Portability — get your study history in a machine-readable file.
• Opt out of reminder emails — via the unsubscribe link or by asking.

To make a request, email support@emberprep.com from the address on your account. We’ll respond within 45 days. We won’t charge you, and we won’t treat you differently for asking.

State privacy laws. North Carolina, where Ember is operated, has not enacted a comprehensive consumer privacy law. Residents of states that have one — such as California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, and Florida — may have additional rights, including the right to appeal a denied request and to opt out of profiling, targeted advertising, or the sale of personal information. Ember does not sell personal information, does not run targeted advertising, and does not use your data for automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Exercise any of these rights at the same address, and say which state you live in so we can apply the right rules.

All traffic to Ember is encrypted in transit. Sign-in credentials are handled entirely by Clerk and never reach our servers. Our database tables have row-level security enabled and are reachable only by the Ember backend using a server-side key — there is no path from a browser directly to another user’s records. Access to production systems is limited to the people who operate Ember.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won’t pretend otherwise. If we ever discover a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and any required authorities as the law requires.

Ember is built for nursing students and is not directed to children. You must be at least 18 to create an account, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete the data tied to it. If you believe a minor has given us information, email support@emberprep.com and we will delete it.

We’ll update this page when the service changes — for example, if we add paid plans or a new provider. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects your rights or how we use your information, we will email registered users and anyone on the waitlist before it takes effect.

Questions, requests, or complaints about privacy: support@emberprep.com, or write to JME & Associates, LLC, PSC 808 Box 3318, FPO AE 09618.

Your use of Ember is also governed by our Terms of Service.