Education marketing carries real regulatory weight, and our partners' reputations ride on every campaign. GradSignal is engineered so that compliance isn't a checklist at the end — it's a constraint built into how every audience is researched, constructed, and delivered.
GradSignal operates in full compliance with the laws and regulations relevant to education marketing and consumer data, and our practices are designed to support our partners' and their institutions' own obligations, including:
FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) — we never access, collect, or use student education records. Our audiences are built from professional signals, not institutional data.
COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) — our platform serves graduate and professional-certificate marketing exclusively. We hold no data on minors, and our audiences are working professionals.
Higher Education Act & U.S. Department of Education misrepresentation rules (34 C.F.R. § 668.71) — our research and audience deliverables are factual program summaries that support truthful, non-deceptive recruitment marketing.
FTC Act, Section 5 — truth-in-advertising and unfair/deceptive practices standards inform every deliverable we produce.
TCPA and CAN-SPAM — contactable media (email match lists) are delivered with the consent provenance and suppression practices these laws require.
State consumer privacy laws — including the CCPA/CPRA and the comprehensive privacy statutes of other states, with consumer rights requests honored through our parent company's privacy program.
We never use prohibited or sensitive factors in the construction of any audience. That means no age, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, credit score, or financial or health attributes — ever, in any audience, for any channel. GradSignal audiences are built exclusively from professional signals: job titles, industries, employer and workplace attributes, geography, and program-fit indicators.
Because Meta applies special-category treatment to Education advertising, GradSignal audiences are uploaded directly into your Meta ad account via API — they are never "shared" from an external account. Direct upload keeps the audience inside your account's compliance boundary and under your control.
Meta deployment requires temporary Manage permission on the ad account during delivery. Once audiences are delivered, that access can be adjusted back to view-only, which we use solely for usage measurement.
Compliance questions are welcome — they're usually a sign of a partner we want. Reach us at partnerships@gradsignal.com, or contact our parent company's privacy team at data_privacy@justsearched.com.
This page is provided for general information about our practices and does not constitute legal advice.