Privacy policy

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The Privacy Policy is categorized and catalogued into separate links for ease of reference. The Privacy Policy is cumulative and form part of a single document and the same shall be applicable on all Users in its entirety for the use of Our Services, save for the clauses inconsistent with the federal/ state/ provincial or local laws applicable where the User is located.

This Privacy Policy explains the collection, usage, storage, protection and disclosure of your Personal Identifying Information through our Services. Fidum Technologies is the data controller of your Personal Identifying Information collected through our Services (please refer to the Terms of Use for more information). We are committed to respect and protect your privacy, but certain information is required to be collected for the providing you with our Services or in compliance with legal requirements.

The Privacy Policy includes:

1. Information Collection
2. Use of Information
3. Disclosure of Information
4. Data Retention
5. Information Protection
6. Privacy Control
7. Data Protection Officer
8. Changes to this Privacy Policy

 As part of the User’s access to our Services, Fidum must receive or collect some information to operate, provide, improve, customize, support, and market our Services, including when you install, access, or use our Services. Some Services cannot be provided to the User without collection of information, including your email id at the time of registration. There is some other information that is not critical to your use or access of our Services, and is therefore, optional, for the User to provide. Some information, while optional, may impact your access to certain Services.

The information that is collected or received includes information that is provided to us by the User, information that is automatically collected by Fidum, and information that is received from other sources.

INFORMATION PROVIDED BY THE USER

· Account Information- At the time of registration on Totso, you are required to create a username and password, and provide us with your email address as a way to contacting you. In addition, if the User is registering as an aspirant, they are required to provide their targeted postgraduate course(s) and institution(s), their undergraduate institution, work experience in India, if any, and GRE or GMAT scores, as applicable. If the User is registering as a mentor, they are required to provide their institution or work email id, the details of their postgraduate course and institution, the GRE or GMAT score, as applicable, year of graduation, and work experience in the United States of America, if any.

· Your Content- Totso allows the User to share Content (please refer to the Terms of Use for more information). This information is retained for Content moderation and to facilitate sharing of Content amongst different Users.

· Optional Information- We may allow to add certain optional information which will help us in providing you with our Services more efficiently.

INFORMATION COLLECTED AUTOMATICALLY

In addition to the above information that is provided to us by the User, the following information is automatically collected during the use or access of our Services:

· Device Information- We collect information about the device used for accessing our Services by the User. This includes information like Device Type, Device ID, and location and permissions including access to camera and gallery, sending notifications, access to microphone.

· Usage Information- We collect event information related to your interactions and engagement with our Services. For example, the channels you visit or the Content you interact with.

INFORMATION PROVIDED BY OTHERS

Some information about the User is also collected through third parties, such as other Users, email service provider, payment aggregator. This includes:

· Other Users- We collect information about other Users’ interaction with your Content or reports of violation of our Terms or community guidelines by the User or their content. 

· Third-Party Service Providers- We allow you to use our Services in connection with certain third-party service providers, including email service providers. This includes your email id and other essential information required for provided our Services to the User.

The information collected or received from the User allows us to deliver and improve our Services. The information also helps us to keep the Users and the community safe. The information also helps us to provide you with advertising that may be relevant or of your interest. The use of your information includes the following purposes:

PROVIDING OUR SERVICES TO YOU

· Creating and administering your user account;

· Provide you with customer support and respond to your requests and reports;

· Communicating with you regarding our Services;

· Collecting and storing your Content for other Users to interact with;

· Personalize your user experience on our Services;

· Reviewing customer care interactions to improve our Services;

· Developing and testing new features or services.

CONNECTING YOU WITH OTHER USERS

· Show user profiles to one another;

· Enable you to search and connect with other users;

· Notifying you if you are tagged in a conversation in any group or channel;

ENSURING COMMITMENT TO COMMUNITY GUIDELINES

· To monitor and take action against users and Content in violation of the Terms of Use or Community Guidelines;

· Responding to user reports;

· Using reported Content, Content in violation of the Terms of Use or Community Guidelines to create systems and models that may be automated for faster detection and action against violative Content or conduct.

PREVENT OR REMOVE ILLEGAL OR UNAUTHORIZED ACTIVITIES

· Find and address ongoing, suspected or alleged violations of our Terms of Use based on flagged or reported Content and conduct;

· Better understand and create automated countermeasure systems to address violations and prevent repeated offences;

· Enforce or exercise our rights, as set out in our Terms;

· Communicate with the User or third party who has submitted a report regarding our action on their report.

LEGAL COMPLIANCE

· Comply with legal requirements;

· Report to law enforcement regarding illegal content or conduct;

· Assist law enforcement in investigation.

MARKETING AND ADVERTISEMENT

By acceptance of our Terms and Policies, you consent to the use of your information to provide you with advertisements that may be of your interest, and to send you marketing communications where legally required. You can revoke your consent at any time by writing an email to  corporate@fidumtechnologies.com  with the subject line : “consent for marketing and advertisement”, but may not be able to use certain services or features which require the collection or use of that Personal Identifying Information.

 FOR ACCESS TO SERVICES- We allow users to share Content with each other. When you share Content on our Services, you are telling us to make that Content available to certain other Users or channels. The access to the Content shall depend on who can access that channel. 

WITH OUR THIRD-PARTY SERVICE PROVIDERS- We may provide information to our third-party service providers that have been hired to carry out specific work for us. This includes our cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services and push-notification system provider

LEGAL COMPLIANCE- We may disclose information in response to a request for information that is believed to be required by law, or on orders of law enforcement and Courts. Where allowed and feasible, we will attempt to provide you with prior notice before disclosing your information in response to such a request.

ENFORCEMENT OF OUR POLICIES AND RIGHTS- Information may be disclosed if such disclosure is required for the enforcement of our Terms, Policies, Community Guidelines, or the protection of our rights, property, interests, and the safety of Fidum, our users or third parties.

AGGREGATED OR DE-IDENTIFIED INFORMATION- We may disclose anonymized or aggregated information, which cannot reasonably be used for identification of the User, such as aggregated user statistics for the description of our business.

 As detailed above, we are required to collect and receive information from the User and others in order to provide our Services effectively. We retain the information for as long as it is needed for the purposes it has been collected for, meeting our commitments to our users and satisfying the legal requirements. Some information shall be retained as long as you continue to hold a Totso user account. However, you can delete or change the optional information, such as your phase of preparation directly from the Services. There is some information which shall be retained for a certain period of time for specific purposes. 

INFORMATION RETAINED TILL USER ACCOUNT IS DELETED- We retain some information during the life of your Totso user account. This includes your username, email address and password. Some of that information may also be retained for a longer period of time, as described below. 

DATA RETENTION PERIODS FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

We need to retain certain information for set periods of time due to business and legal requirements, some of which may extend beyond the deletion of your user account. The various information and retention period has been highlighted below:

· User Content- Your Content is stored on our servers for a period of two years, after which the information shall be deleted from our Servers. This is retained for us to display your Content to other Users.

· Database Backups- Our database backups are stored in accordance with the applicable policies of our third-party service provider- Amazon Web Services , and shall be deleted after the period specified by the third-party service provider.

· Compliance with legal obligations- Certain information is required to be retained for a longer period to comply with legal requirements. This includes transaction details for tax and accounting purposes, information retained by order of courts or law enforcement, or such other information which may be retained in compliance with applicable laws.

· Terminated Accounts- Information including email addresses and usernames are stored for a period upto two years, or as per policies of our third-party service provider- Amazon Web Services, in case accounts are terminated for violation of our Terms, Policies, or Community Guidelines. This information helps us to protect our interests and the interests of other users by preventing violators from creating new accounts or otherwise engaging in behaviour that violates our Policies.

· Legal Claims- When you contact Totso for customer support inquiries and requests to access your information, we retain the related information for a period of five years, or as per the policies of our third-party service provider- Amazon Web Services, whichever in shorter, from the closure of your request in case of a dispute or to exercise or defend our legal rights.

· Continuity of our Services- The Content shared by you shall be retained and displayed to other Users till the time it is stored in our system, i.e., upto two years from date of sharing, even if you delete your user account. We do this to ensure that our other users do not experience disturbance in their access to our Services.

ACCOUNT DELETION

If you have deleted your account, there is no way to recover the same, and it shall be permanent. After your account has been deleted, we begin the process of deleting your Personal Identifying Information, anonymizing and aggregating other information and statistics. We retain the aggregated and anonymized information, which is information that no longer enables anyone, including us, to identify you and is no longer tied to you as an individual.

 We take a number of steps to help protect your information. All information sent within our Services is encrypted both in transit and at rest. We also enforce technical and administrative access controls to limit which of our employees and third-party service providers have access to Personal Identifying Information of the users. 

 We strongly believe that you should be able to tailor your experience on Totso, especially privacy. Accordingly, the User can do the following to tailor their user experience:

· Choose your channels- The User can choose which channels they want to participate in. You can also choose how you interact with the channels including sharing of Content, viewing Content shared by other Users. You also decide which other users you interact with during the access to our Services.

· Delete your user account- You can delete your Totso user account. Deleting your account permanently deletes all Personal Identifying Information and anonymizes other data, as described in the Data Retention section of this Policy.

 You can contact the Data Protection Officer of Fidum Technologies at corporate@fidumtechnologies.com

 The Privacy Policy is updated from time to time. The date of publication of the latest release is mentioned at the top of the Privacy Policy, and in case of significant changes, we shall notify the users by mail, highlighting the changes within our services.