Terms & Privacy

This policy is published by Olive Independent Study, Inc. ("Olive"), which operates olive.is and the Olive assessment service. It takes effect on August 14, 2026 and replaces every earlier version.

Two kinds of people appear in it. Candidates take an assessment an employer invited them to: a real piece of a job, done with an AI assistant, reviewed by a human being. Employer users are the people at that employer who run the account. If you are a candidate, this policy plus the disclosure shown before your session are the documents that apply to you — you never create an account, and you never accept the Terms of Use, which bind only employers.

What is collected from candidates

The list below is complete. If it is not listed here, it is not collected.

• Your email address — the single piece of information the product asks a candidate to type. Your name is stored only if your employer supplied it with the invitation.
• An anonymous session identifier — a Firebase authentication ID that ties your browser session to your assessment. It is not an account: there is no password, no profile and no sign-up.
• A screen recording of the assessment tab only, saved as webm video in 10-second chunks. The capture uses the browser’s own screen-share prompt, pointed at the current tab, and can never see another tab, another window or your desktop. Declining the recording is a supported choice: the session continues, and the decline is recorded as an integrity note, not a failure.
• Think-aloud audio, only if you opt in. It is microphone audio only — there is no camera anywhere in the product — and typing your annotations instead is an equal path to the same assessment.
• The AI-panel transcript — the append-only record of your exchanges with the assistant provided in the workspace, together with any exchanges you paste in from an assistant of your own.
• The workspace event log — packet opens, edits, submissions and their timestamps. This log is where the report’s evidence excerpts come from.
• Your deliverable and debrief — the drafts of the work itself and your debrief responses.
• Your consent record — when you consented and the dated version of the disclosure you saw.
• The released report, stamped with the rubric, scorer and bank versions it was produced under. You receive the identical report your employer receives, at the same time.
• The reviewer’s private integrity notes. These are closed to your employer and to you alike; the only thing ever released from them is a single flag bit with no content attached.
• Anything you write about the assessment itself, if you choose to. The closing screen offers one note on the assignment, the workspace and the accommodation path. It is optional, it is filed against the assessment rather than against you — no name, no address, no identifier for a person anywhere on it — and it goes to the people who maintain the item banks. No reviewer sees it beside your session, no dimension reads it, and it reaches your employer in no form at all. It is kept as a record of the instrument rather than of you, which is also why it outlives a deletion of your assessment.
• The optional voice module, where a role uses it. It is offered per role and per candidate, it is opt-in, and declining it is a supported choice. Where you accept, the module records your answer and, where the module is switched on, the short conversation it conducts; a reviewer then writes a reading of it. That reading is kept apart from the six scored dimensions and is never merged into them. Two things are worth knowing before you accept: the module is not switched on in production today, and where it does run, its reading is released to the employer and is the one part of the record you do not currently receive — which is the single exception to the parity described above, and we would rather name it than let you discover it.

What is collected from employers

• Account and member sign-in details, and the roles each member holds.
• Hiring-pipeline records about candidates: decisions (a decline requires a written note), tags, custom fields the employer defines, notes, and an append-only activity trail.
• Email correspondence employer users compose and send to candidates through the service, delivered via Mailgun.
• Billing records, processed by Stripe. Card details go to Stripe and never reach Olive.

One piece of employer information is deliberately public: the employer profile — organization name, legal name, accommodation contact and reviewer of record — is world-readable, because candidates see it on the invite page before deciding to proceed.

What is never collected

Each line below is a promise, not an oversight, and each is verifiable against how the product behaves.

• No webcam and no camera of any kind. The product contains no video capture of you — the only recording of a screen is of the assessment tab, and the only microphone use is the opt-in audio above.
• Nothing outside the assessment tab. No other tab, window, application or part of your screen.
• No biometric identifiers of any kind — no voiceprints, no facial geometry, no keystroke dynamics. The distinction matters and deserves stating precisely: think-aloud audio is recorded when you opt in, but no voiceprint, speaker template or any other identifier is ever derived from it. The recording is something a human listens to, not something you are identified by.
• No analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs, and no advertising cookies. The only cookies and identifiers used are the ones that keep your session working.
• No geolocation.
• No phone number, postal address, government ID, Social Security number or payment details from candidates.
• No third-party enrichment. Olive buys no data about you, runs no background checks and pulls no public-records profiles.
• No sale of personal information, and no sharing of it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Ever.

How the information is used

• To run your assessment session and keep it working while you take it.
• To let a human reviewer assess the session and write the report — including reading the transcript, the event log, the capture and the audio.
• To deliver the identical released report to you and to your employer.
• To protect the integrity of the assessment, including the reviewer’s private integrity notes.
• To operate employer accounts: pipeline records, correspondence, billing and support.
• To meet legal obligations, and to establish or defend legal claims when necessary.

Nothing about the assessment is scored by a machine. Every finding in a report is written by a named human reviewer before release, and no automated decision is made about you by Olive.

Who can see your session

• Olive reviewers and staff on an access allowlist read sessions, capture, transcripts and the answer key through the review console. A human reviewer is how the product works, and this access is the product working as described, not an exception to this policy.
• Your employer receives the released report, and holds its own pipeline records about you. It never sees the reviewer’s private integrity notes — only the single content-free flag bit.
• You receive the identical released report, free, and can export it from the report page.

Sub-processors

Olive uses five service providers to run the product, each only for the purpose named.

• Google Firebase and Google Cloud — hosting, database, file storage and authentication.
• Google Vertex AI — the model behind several parts of the product, each named here. In the candidate workspace it powers the provided assistant, and only the text of typed turns reaches the model: not the packet, not the candidate’s identity, not the employer’s name. It also words the questions Olive asks aloud during an assignment; those carry where the work has got to and the line of work the role sits in — the field and its terms of art — and never the employer’s name, product or competitor. In the employer dashboard it powers an assistant for the people running the account, and that one does see pipeline records — including candidate names and email addresses — because answering questions about a pipeline requires reading it. It drafts a reading of a finished session for the reviewer to work from, seeing the assignment and the record of the work and neither party’s identity. It drafts a role from a job description an employer pastes in. And it describes the employer’s own company from the name and website on the account — what the company does, its market, its products, its competitors and its risks — which is stored on that account and shown to the reviewer.
• Mailgun — delivery of email the service sends.
• Stripe — employer payments. Stripe’s handling of card data is covered by Stripe’s own PCI compliance.
• Vercel — hosting for the web surface.

These providers process data to provide their service to Olive and for no other purpose. Personal information is not sold to anyone, and no other third party receives it except as the law compels — a valid legal demand, or the protection of someone’s safety — or as part of a merger or acquisition, in which case this policy’s commitments follow the data.

Retention and deletion

Assessment records are kept while the employer’s account holds them. A released report does not expire with a plan.

One limitation worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of what most people assume: a report is a single record shared between the two parties, not two copies. When an employer deletes an assessment, the report goes for the candidate too. The copy that is durably a candidate’s own is the one they download — which is why the report page offers a download in two formats, and why it is worth taking.

Deletion works by request, and deliberately not instantly. A deletion request opens a 30-day window during which it can be canceled; after the window elapses the deletion runs. It is neither immediate nor automatic — a deletion that fired instantly could not be withdrawn. Deletion reaches the session, its event log, the AI transcript, the deliverable, the capture, the released report and the reviewer’s private notes. Candidates request deletion by writing to hello@olive.is; employers can request it from their dashboard.

Asking to be erased reaches further than asking for one assessment to go, and the difference is worth knowing before choosing between them. Erasure removes the record of you, not only the work you did: your entry in that employer's directory, every application filed about you there, and with each one its notes, the letters sent to you, your replies, the evaluations and the decision recorded. Your assessments go too — they are removed as their own requests, filed at the same moment and running on the same thirty days.

You can do this yourself, and it reaches every employer at once. If you have bound an address to your account — the same step that lets your reports outlive one browser — erasure is available from your own account and files against every employer on Olive holding a record under that address, not one at a time and not through anyone else. Writing to hello@olive.is still works and always will; it is no longer the only way.

It is available only once that address is confirmed, and the reason is worth stating plainly: an address is what finds every record of one person, so accepting an unconfirmed one would let somebody erase a stranger by typing their email. Confirming it is the same act that binds it. Nothing about an erasure asks the employer first — the request appears in their list, where either of you can withdraw it for thirty days.

Your California privacy rights

In the categories the CCPA/CPRA uses, Olive collects: identifiers (candidate email, name if the employer supplied it, the anonymous session ID — used to run the session and deliver the report, kept while the record exists); audio and visual information (the tab recording, and think-aloud audio where you opted in — used for human review, kept with the session); professional or employment-related information (your assessment work, the released report, and the employer’s pipeline records about you — kept as described under retention); internet or other electronic network activity, limited to the workspace event log inside the assessment tab; and, for employer users only, commercial information (billing records).

Olive does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and has not done either in the preceding twelve months. Olive does not collect the CPRA’s categories of sensitive personal information from candidates by design — no government identifiers, no precise geolocation, no biometric data processed to identify a person — and honors requests to limit sensitive-information use on the same footing as every other request.

If you are a California resident you have the right to know, access, correct and delete the personal information collected about you, the right to portability, the right to limit use of sensitive personal information, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of them.

You can exercise every one of these rights without an account. Write to hello@olive.is from the email address your invitation was sent to; identity is verified by matching that address, which is the only identifier the product asked of you. Responses come within the timelines California law sets, and an authorized agent may act for you with proof of authorization.

Other U.S. state privacy rights

Residents of other states with privacy statutes — access, correction, deletion, portability and appeal rights among them — are honored on the same footing as California requests, through the same address and the same email-match verification.

If you are in the EEA or the UK

Olive is the controller of assessment data, and processes it on three legal bases: performance of a contract, for employer accounts; legitimate interests, in running the assessment an employer commissioned and keeping it fair and secure; and consent, for the think-aloud microphone audio, which you may decline or withdraw without affecting the assessment.

You have the rights the GDPR and UK GDPR provide — access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and withdrawal of consent — exercised through hello@olive.is with the same email-match verification, and the right to complain to your supervisory authority. No decision producing legal or similarly significant effects about you is made by automated means: a human writes every finding, and your employer — not Olive — makes the hiring decision.

International transfer

Olive operates from the United States, and the sub-processors named above process data there. If you take an assessment from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, and this policy applies to it wherever it is processed.

Children

This is an employment assessment and is not directed to minors. The service is for people aged 16 and over, and Olive does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone younger. If you believe it has, write to hello@olive.is and the information will be deleted.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit, access to sessions is limited to the allowlist described above, and released reports are immutable once released. No security is absolute, and this policy will not pretend otherwise: Olive cannot guarantee that no breach will ever occur, and will notify affected people and authorities as the law requires if one does.

Changes to this policy

Revisions are posted here with a new effective date. The disclosure candidates see before a session carries a dated version string, and your consent record stores exactly which version you saw — so a change can never silently apply to a session that predates it. Material changes to employer processing are sent to account email before they take effect.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests go to hello@olive.is, or by mail to Olive Independent Study, Inc., 770 Juniper Street, Suite 2011, Atlanta, GA 30308.