Privacy Policy
We can understand your concern about privacy and security of your personal details. It is our duty to keep your personal information confidential. Our procedures and policies on the use, collection, sharing and disclosure of your information will be discussed in this privacy policy section. We will not share your personal details with any third party except as discussed here. This privacy policy is not applicable for information that we collect from other sources (including offline).
How we use collected information?
We use information that we collect for diagnosing technical problems or service, analyzing how our service is used, personalizing content, maintaining security, remembering information to help our users access their accounts efficiently, tracking user content and monitoring aggregate metrics like demographic patterns, traffic and number of visitors.
Information provided by users
If you want to register for a member account, you need to provide the following information.
- Your name
- Your e-mail id
- Your interests
If you choose to add your personal details to your profile, public will be able to view those information. If you wish to receive the answers of all your academic queries via text message, then you are required to provide your phone number. We may send our service related updates and notices to the e-mail address provided by you. We provide our users the scope to control receipt of specific service related messages. Your contact information may be used by us for sending you marketing messages. Users who do not want to receive our service-related messages can opt out. They just need to follow the instructions given in the message. If you send us any email, we may keep a record of your email address, our responses and the content of the mail. Users are allowed to use their Twitter or Facebook accounts for signing in to The Student Forum. In such cases, we will store their SNS (Social Networking Site) user IDs. If our users connect their The Student Forum Accounts with their SNS accounts, we take their permission for collecting certain information from their SNS accounts.
You need to provide certain information in the User Content that you post in our site. Public can view your questions, your contribution and metadata along with your name.
You can invite a friend by using our invitation service. You need to provide your friend’s email id. We will send him or her an invitation email. You can also use our contact importer tool for uploading your friend’s email address. You can also find those friends who are already on The Student Forum with the help of this tool. We store this information for sending invitations, for tracking the efficiency of our invitation service and for identifying your friends who are on The Student Forum. You guarantee that you have your friend’s consent by providing his or her email address. By doing this, you also give us the permission to use the information as mentioned above.
Information that are collected automatically
When customers use our service, we use several tracking technologies like clear GIFs, log files, flash technologies and session cookies for storing their passwords and username, customizing the service, analyzing the use of service and controlling the advertising. Clear GIFs may be included in HTML-based emails delivered to our users for determining whether the mails have been opened. We use these technologies for analyzing certain kinds of information such as IP address, unique device identifiers, geo-location information, browser language, unique codes or numbers in cookies, exit and referring pages, URLs, domain names, number of clicks, pages viewed, landing pages. We disclose some of the automatically collected information publicly. If you want this information not to be disclosed, then you can visit the settings page for opting out.
Cookies
Cookie, a small text file, is stored in users’ web browsers. It helps us for making our users’ visit to our website more enjoyable. Our users do not need to log in every time when they come back to our website and all thanks to cookies for this. Session cookie is stored in the computer’s RAM of a user or customer and it lasts for his or her browsing session. Persistent cookie remains on the computer even after a user closes the browser. We use security and authentication cookies for enabling you to remain logged in The Student Forum, and verifying that it is you. We also use research and analytics cookies for understanding how people use The Student Forum. We also use setting and product feature cookies for enabling the functionality of certain features. Advertising cookies are also used by us. We also use Flash cookies for delivering special content like animation or video clips.
How we share information provided by you?
We may share our users’ personal details with third party service providers in order to provide service to them such as email service providers, payment processors and technical infrastructure providers. We may disclose our users’ information with third parties that offer combined services with us.
If you log in to our service via a third party, then we cannot control them to use your information. We may share your personal details if we are obliged to do so by law. We can aggregate information gathered through the service so that it does not identify our users. We use anonymized, aggregated, and de-identified information for marketing or research purposes.
How we protect information provided by our users?
We use several managerial, technical and physical safeguards for preserving the security and integrity of information provided by our users. However, we cannot ensure that any information that a user transmits to The Student Forum is secure, in case of any breach of managerial, technical and physical safeguards.
Changes in our privacy policy
We can change our privacy policies any time. Once we change our policies and procedures, we will post those changed policies in this section.