Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

NextHire is an AI-assisted interview practice platform built as a student capstone project for Batangas State University. It is operated by the student project team, not by a commercial company.

This policy explains what personal information NextHire collects, why, how long it is kept, and what you can do about it. It is written to align with the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10173).

2. What we collect

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

• •Account details: your name, your school email address, and your department. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and is stored only as a cryptographic hash — nobody, including us, can read it.
• •Optional profile photo, if you choose to upload one.
• •Documents you upload: resumes and job descriptions. These are used to make your practice questions relevant to you.
• •Interview transcripts: a text record of the answers you give during a practice session.
• •Practice results: your scores, the written feedback generated for you, timing information, and counts of filler words detected in your answers.

3. Your voice and your camera

No recording of your voice is ever saved — not on your device, not on our servers, not in your account, and not anywhere anyone can play it back. What happens before that point depends on your browser, and we would rather spell it out than round it off.

On most computers, using Chrome or Edge with your usual microphone, the conversion from speech to text happens inside your own browser. Your voice never leaves your device at all. Only the resulting text reaches us. This is the normal case.

Some browsers — Safari, including on iPhone and iPad, and Firefox — have no built-in speech-to-text. The same is true if you choose a microphone other than your computer's default one, because the built-in service can only listen to the default. In those cases the only way to offer you spoken answers is to record your answer, send that recording to Google's Gemini service to be turned into text, and delete it the moment the text comes back. It is held in memory for that one request and is never written to any disk or database of ours.

Because that means your voice leaves your device, we do not do it unless you say so. On any device where it would be needed, NextHire asks first and explains what will be sent. If you decline, you simply type your answers instead — the interview runs the same way and is scored the same way, you only lose the filler-word and pacing analysis, which needs audio to measure. You can withdraw that permission at any time from the microphone panel during a session.

The built-in speech-to-text in Chrome and Edge leaves out hesitation sounds such as "uhm" and "uh". If you want those counted in your filler-word feedback, you can switch on "Capture filler words" before an interview. Each spoken answer is then also recorded and sent to Gemini to be transcribed word for word, under exactly the same rules as above. It is off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off again before any interview.

Your camera is switched on during a practice interview purely so the session feels like a real video call on your own screen. The video is never transmitted anywhere and never recorded. If you deny camera access, the interview works exactly the same.

4. How your information is used

Your data is used to run your practice sessions and to generate your personal feedback. That is all.

To generate interview questions and feedback, the text of your answers, and any resume or job description you have attached, is sent to Google's Gemini API. That processing is what produces the interviewer's questions and your written feedback.

We do not sell your data. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use it to train any AI model.

5. Who can see your data

Your interview transcripts — the actual words you said or typed — and the written feedback on each answer are visible to you and to nobody else. They are never shared with your instructors, your classmates, other students, or employers.

The administrator of your department can see your account details (name, email, department, section), how much you have practiced, and your scores: your overall, relevance, pacing and clarity averages. This is so they can support the students in their department. They cannot read your transcripts, your individual answers, or your per-question feedback.

No other department's administrator can see anything about you.

These boundaries are enforced by database-level access rules, not only by what the interface chooses to display.

6. How long we keep it

Your data is kept until you delete it, with one option that changes this.

In Settings, under Privacy and data, you can switch on automatic deletion of your interview transcripts. When enabled, the transcript of any session older than your chosen retention period is permanently deleted by a scheduled job. Your scores and written feedback are kept, so your progress history stays intact.

Deleting your account removes your sessions, transcripts, scores, feedback, and uploaded documents.

7. Your rights

Under the Data Privacy Act of 2012 you have the right to be informed, to object, to access your data, to correct it, to have it erased or blocked, to data portability, and to damages. In practice, within NextHire:

• •Access and portability: Settings → Privacy and data → Download your data gives you a PDF of your sessions, transcripts and scores.
• •Erasure: you can delete individual sessions from your session history, or delete everything with Delete all my data.
• •Objection and withdrawal of consent: you may withdraw consent by deleting your account. Practicing is voluntary and nothing here is required coursework unless your department says otherwise.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the National Privacy Commission.

8. How we protect your information

All traffic between your browser and NextHire is encrypted in transit using HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as hashes. Access to every table in our database is restricted by row-level security rules, so one account cannot read another account's records even if the interface were bypassed.

Only one device can be signed in to an account at a time. Signing in somewhere new is refused while another session is active, which prevents shared or borrowed credentials being used simultaneously.

Administrative actions are recorded in an activity log.

No system is perfectly secure. NextHire is a student project and should not be used to store information you would not be comfortable sharing with your department.

9. Changes to this policy

Each version of this policy carries a version number and effective date. If we make a material change, you will be asked to read and accept the new version the next time you sign in. Your previous agreement is not silently carried over to wording you never saw.

10. Contact

For any question about your data, or to exercise any of the rights above, contact the NextHire project team through your department administrator.