Privacy policy

A. OVERVIEW

The following page contain Privacy Policies, written in easy language. We refer to our General Site Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy collectively as “the Terms” or “our Terms”. We have tried to minimize the legalese (i.e. text that is perfectly understandable by a lawyer but will sound like legal mumbo-jumbo to you).

As you will hopefully notice, these Terms are both understandable to laywomen/ men like yourself and actually enjoyable to read. We hope you will appreciate our efforts in simplifying it and ‘Happy reading from the whole team behind the CT’.

B. PRIVACY POLICIES AND TERMS OF USE

PRIVACY POLICIES SHOULD BE STRICTLY READ ALONG WITH TERMS OF USE. READING AND ACCEPTING ONE SHALL BE TREATED AS ACCEPTANCE OF BOTH.

ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS OF USE & PRIVACY POLICIES

These Site Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies (collectively called the “Terms”) is a legally binding agreement made by and between curioustimes.in (hereinafter, “CT”) and you, personally and, if applicable, on behalf of the entity for whom you are using this web platform or App or any of its services (collectively, “you”). These Terms govern your use of CT’s website located at www.curioustimes.in (hereinafter the “Site”) and CT’s services.

By accessing or using any part of the Site, you agree that you have read, understand, and agree to be bound by this Terms. If you do not agree to be so bound, do not access or use the Site.

C. PRIVACY POLICY AND PERSONAL DATA USE

SUMMARY, SCOPE, PURPOSE

The following document works like what lawyers call an “Agreement”. In this case, it is the “Privacy Policy” of CT. Before we tell you what that actually means and thus delve into the details of it, we first need to establish a few definitions so it’s easier for you, our dear reader, to fully understand.

The first question is who this document is relevant to, i.e. the parties of this agreement. That’s fairly straight-forward to answer and the parties are:

CT (“curioustimes.in”) is a privately held organization located at Gurgaon, India. That’s us.
Our website visitors (i.e. a “Visitor”). That could be you, unless you fall into the next category called “Users and Members” who – unlike “Visitors” – have a membership of the Curioustimes.in.
Our members (i.e. a “Member”) who have taken up a membership with the curioustimes.in. This could be a membership as an individual Member of the CT, a school membership (for example, when a school signs up 10 or 1000s of its students as members of the CT), or a membership as an individual through a free trial membership offered by CT.
Our users (i.e. parents, teachers, schools, institutional members, who subscribe or become our users or member and in turn allow their wards or students to use the site and services, in or not in their presence), who are users/ readers and viewers of content on curioustimes.in.

When we say “you” in the following text, we assume that you fall into the one of the aforementioned categories, either a Member, User or a Visitor. When we say “we”, we mean CT.

At the curioustimes.in, we collect personal data about you (i.e. our Visitors, Users and/or Members) during the normal course of our activities to provide you the product and services. We made this Privacy Policy to explain all relevant aspects of this collection and handling of your data in one place – easy for you to understand. We collect and handle data about you by means of the website located at www.curioustimes.in (hereinafter referred to as the “Site”) and/or other websites used and/or controlled by us from time to time. We process your personal data collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, in accordance with applicable laws in India.

The personal data and any information you provide us with – or that we collect about you – will be used, among other purposes, to:

maintain a register of Members and Visitors
send transactional email, e.g. send you an email when you have taken various actions as a member like fee payment, appreciation, earned some rewards, points, awards etc.
supply you with any goods and services you may request from us from time to time via our Site, e.g. send you a copy of the book you bought
create browsing and consumption preference profiles of you in order to make recommendations and a better user experience (UX). We provide a lot of age, grade, city personalised content for the users.
create databases to be used to send Visitors, Users and Members emails with newsletters, promotions, advertising and information about our Site in accordance with your wishes and permissions.

By entering and using our Site, you hereby provide us with your consent for the collection, treatment and processing of your personal data according to this Privacy Policy

Edits, comments, commentaries and other contributions to our Site made or provided by you can be publicly distributed, and except in certain, very limited circumstances, will remain a permanent part of this site. If you decide to contribute to our Site, you must keep this in mind. Your contributions will be subject to our Site’s Terms and Conditions and www.curioustimes.in’s IP.

2. THE INFORMATION OF PERSONAL DATA

You may request a copy of the information we hold on you for free, by writing to our address office@curioustimes.in.

3. WHAT INFORMATION IS BEING COLLECTED

The general operation of our services requires us to collect certain personal information that can be divided into two groups, “personal data” and “sensitive personal data”. The curioustimes.in will ONLY collect personal data such as names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, school information, IP addresses, etc. www.curioustimes.in will NEVER collect sensitive personal data, such as religious beliefs, genetic data, ethnic origin, biometric data, credit card data, etc.

We only hold what’s called a “token” and then the last 4 digits in your credit card number. That way, we don’t have to worry about storing extremely sensitive information about you.

Another example is your password, which we would consider sensitive personal data. We don’t store passwords at all but use the Bcrypt cryptographic algorithm to one-way encrypt passwords instead. That way, we only store the so-called “hash” of your password, which allows us to know if you are entering the correct or incorrect password – but without storing the actual password on our servers.

4. WHERE IS INFORMATION STORED?

So, where do we store your information? We store information in the following locations:

in our database
in cookies on your device
at third parties listed in the “Who is collecting data?” section

5. WHO IS COLLECTING DATA

Next question: Who is collecting your data? Good question! The following entities are collecting data through our Site:

www.curioustimes.in (that’s us and we do it for the general operation of our services)
Google (for statistical, analytical, marketing and conversion tracking purposes)
Payment gateway (for payment purposes)
Facebook (for marketing and conversion tracking purposes)
Digital Ocean or similar cloud servers (for hosting purposes)

6. WHY IS DATA BEING COLLECTED

To deliver our services to you, we must collect personal and non-personal information from you. This information is essential for the provision and quality of our services. For example, it would be pretty impossible for us to send you a personalised, gradewise content and newsletter if we did not have users (your child’s) age/ grade or your email address. Similarly, it would be pretty impossible for us to create analytics and reading pattern, if schools do not provide student’s grades and reading ability. To sum up, we collect data for the following purposes:

For the general operation of our services including the ability to log in, to take content, to generate certificates, to send and receive emails, to receive comments, to create voluntary posts in our forum, etc.
For the ability to send out newsletters and other mailings
For hosting, e.g. figuring out which city and country you are from so we can serve you faster through one of our thousands of servers in our CDN, Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a fancy word for us having a server placed geographically near you to serve our video content to you MUCH faster and avoid choppy videos.
For collecting and processing your payment
For marketing thorough what’s called retargeting/remarketing, so that we can remind you of our great new features or offerings, guest editors, news relevant for your child’s interests through ads even after you have left our website
For conversion tracking, so that we can learn exactly how our Members have become our Members. It also allows us to pay commission to our partners since we can attribute certain conversions to a given partner
For statistical and analytical purposes, e.g. for purposes of user research and to make our Site easier to use
For building of our Andriod and IOS App. We are in the process of building Apps to give you better experience. The data and your journey, experience with our platform shall help us create engaging and useful Apps for you.

7. BREACH NOTIFICATION

In the extremely unlikely event of a data breach, which comes to our knowledge, our Officers will notify you, the authorities and relevant third parties of any risk within a 120-hour period of it coming to our notice.

8. NO TRANSFER OF INFORMATION OR DATA

We will not share any email addresses of our Members, Users and Visitors, nor will we disclose any identifying personal data, to any third party, without your clear and unambiguous consent. Data collected by us through logging visits to our Site (e.g. originating IP, referral data, browser and platform type, traffic flows, geographical area of request) is only used in an aggregated, anonymous form, which means we will not make any further effort to personally identify our Visitors (as opposed to Members). We only use such data for server administration, fault finding, site improvement and other legitimate purposes.

Aggregate (and thus non-identifying) statistics generated from our Site may be reported as part of research results or may be published on our Site.

9. DATA COLLECTION FOR VISITORS, I.E. NON REGISTERED WEBSITE VISITORS

For non-registered website Visitors – as opposed to fully registered Members – we collect data similar to most websites e.g. through Google Analytics or other products for website analytics.

Any time you visit a page on the internet, you send information to a remote server. The servers that host our Site maintain access logs with the information that you send. This information is used to provide and generate statistics and analytics and to provide us with marketing and traffic data regarding our Site and other websites that link back to our Site.

The data we log and store may also be used by us to solve technical problems with our Site and, in cases of abuse, and to conduct any investigate therefrom.

We may also use web analytics services to understand the type of traffic received by our Site and other of our websites, in order to provide better services and to set benchmarks for our goals. For example, through Google Analytics, we record things like IP address, browsing time, length and date, sections visited, websites you accessed prior to our Site and type of browser.

We do not intend to use such data to identify actual website Visitors, as mentioned in the previous section. If you are concerned about attempts to match your IP address to your identity anywhere else on the Internet, you may wish to use an anonymous browsing service or attempt other means to obfuscate your real IP address. Browsing our Site does not reveal your identity publicly.

10. DATA COLLECTION FOR REGISTERED MEMBERS AND USERS

Data collection for registered Members is – by necessity – more extensive in order to allow our Site to function. As an example, we record, including but not limited to, the following items:

Full name of parent/ school member (required)
Name of the child (not mandatory). A nickname entry is proposed for you to remember login credentials.
Email address (required)
Phone number (required)
Address, city, zip code and country (optional). Although we recommend that you mention city, zip code and country for us to serve you personalised content
Name of the school: (optional, except for School Members)
Credit card/ net banking/ wallet information (required, but not stored on our servers )
Photo (optional)
IP address and country of each session (for security purposes and for server session management)

If you choose to cancel your membership, or if we terminate it, we will employ what is commonly referred to as a “soft delete” in our database, which means that data will still be stored physically in our database but marked as “deleted”. We do so for the technical requirements of our relational databases and for dependent functionality such as the group association and publications on the “www.curioustimes.in ” to continue to work. These functionalities depend on this data being available. For example, if you have published an article in our articles section, we want to keep showing your name as the author – regardless if you cancel your membership.

If you forget to renew your membership, and hence it is auto-cancelled, the data marked as previously deleted (i.e. “soft deleted”) will be used to restore your course answers, group affiliations, course certificates and other data if you elect to renew your membership at a later point. This will prevent a permanent loss of data for you.

School memberships (i.e. group memberships) also require the aforementioned data collection by us, so that it can be displayed to the pertinent school administration (i.e. for evaluating student/ teacher compliance)

We may not permanently delete your data. As a part of various Indian compliances, audits and taxation, we are required to retain transactions data (like your name, address, service and subscription, invoice data, etc), we keep the records of your transactions and payment history.

11. COOKIES AND OTHER WEB BEACONS

With the purpose of providing a better experience for you, we may use “cookies” or other kind of web beacons. We do this to make it convenient for you to use certain of our Site’s features. For example, if you have made a choice in a drop-down menu, we may place a cookie on your computer so that we can auto-select that menu item in the drop-down menu for you in the future. If we did not do that, the user-friendliness of our Site would be poor.

Okay, just to get a bit technical here… for purposes of this Privacy Policy, “cookies” shall mean text files of information sent by a website in your computer in order to store some records and preferences; and “web beacons” shall mean computer code inserted into a website or e-mail that can be used to monitor the behavior of a Visitor or Member (e.g. IP address, browsing time, length and date, sections visited, websites you accessed prior to our Site and type of browser).

The Site may allow advertising or third-party functions that place “cookies” on your computer. For example, when we use Google Analytics on our website, that service also places a cookie on your computer.

You may change your options through your computer equipment and/or browsers to stop accepting “cookies” and / or “web beacons” or confirm whether or not to accept them. Modern browsers make this very easy since privacy has become an issue that many people take an active interest in.

You may also wish to clear these cookies and the browser cache if you want to refrain from revealing any identifying information, especially if you are using a public or shared computer. You may also prevent your browser from accepting cookies by disabling such functionality as mentioned above.

12. EMAIL COMMUNICATION OPT OUT

We use email as the preferred way of communicating with you. Without collecting email addresses and using them to communicate, it would not be possible to alert Members and Visitors:

when requesting a new password
when new features become available
when receiving grading comments
when sending newsletters
when membership is about to expire
when becoming part of a Group
when a potential Member drops out of the sign-up process
when using the refer-a-friend functionality
when earning awards and rewards
when membership has been auto-renewed or expired

13. SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION OPT OUT

We engage in active communications through major social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. If you have previously chosen to follow or like us on a particular social media, you can log into your social media account and unfollow or remove your like of us in order to stop receiving communications on that particular social media.

14. PERSONAL DATA RELEASE

We may only release collected personal data under the following circumstances:

as required by applicable law (e.g. in response to a valid request from a law enforcement agency)
to designated third parties, in order to resolve or investigate abuse complaints
when the information is related to spiders, bots, and other technical issues
when attempting to block abusive users or to complain to such Internet Service Provider
to defend ourselves or our affiliates from legal claims by third parties
when deemed necessary to protect the rights of our user community or our Site

15. DATA OWNERS RIGHTS AND REVOCATION OF CONSENT

You can make a request to us in order exercise your rights to:

access your personal data
rectify your personal data when inaccurate or incomplete
soft-delete your personal data
object with legitimate reason the process of your personal data.
revoke your consent for the process of your personal data at any moment, in order to stop the use of the same

Information and procedures not covered by the abovementioned pages and method should be requested in writing by Members through our office, with the email address hello@curioustimes.in and must include at least the following:

data owner’s name, address, and email address
documents establishing the identity or, where appropriate, legal representation of the data owner. We need to know that we’re dealing with you, and not someone pretending to be you, so we need documents to verify your identity
a clear and precise description of the personal data with regard to which the data owner seeks to exercise any of the abovementioned rights (when rectification is requested, modifications that should be made should be specified and provide documentation to back up its request)

The exercise of users of the abovementioned rights shall be subject to the laws and regulations applicable and in force in India.

16. AUTHOR IDENTIFICATION

When making contributions to our Site (e.g. posting a comment, commentaries, editing a page), the minimum amount of information required is a name and email address.

Your activity on our Site may be identified by your IP address. These numbers could potentially be traceable to identifying information about you, whether it is your home ISP or the school or work account where the IP address is registered.

17. FACEBOOK APPLICATION

In certain parts of our website, we use Facebook as sharing platform to share articles on your Facebook wall on your behalf. We always do this with your conscious consent and in a way where the you have to explicitly confirm the sharing of an article. We never auto-post anything on your behalf. We also do not store any personal information from your Facebook account.

18. DISCLAIMER

Our Site may include hyperlinks or hypertexts that, when used by you, may forward to other portals or Internet websites that may be property of third parties. When those website collect and handle data about you, you are not covered by this Privacy Policy and are not our responsibility or liability. We encourage you to verify the privacy notices displayed and applicable in those portals or Internet websites.

In addition, you may also find that we use social media functionalities and other services within our Site from third parties that may collect your personal data (hereinafter the “Third Parties’ Sites”). Any information related to your personal data provided through the Third Parties’ Sites will be subject to the corresponding privacy notices contained in each one of them, unless we indicate otherwise. For example, if we embed a functionality or service made by Facebook and if you choose to use that functionality or service, it means that you then need to understand Facebook’s privacy terms.

Liability in such cases: We are not liable for the use, publication, or disclosures made from personal data collected, handled, used, published, disclosed and/or revealed through the the means outlined in this document.

In addition, The content provided on our Site through the writers, and editors including content posted by you, is for general information, discussion and entertainment purposes only. We make no representations or guarantees about any aspect of any content on our Site and do not endorse any opinions expressed by anyone. All content on our Site is posted “as is” and your use or reliance on any content is at your own risk. We hereby disclaim all liability to you for the consequences of using or relying on any content in or within the sites. For example, this means that you cannot base a decision on content you find on our Site and then blame us if that decision turned out to be wrong. We do not warrant or guarantee that any information available using the site or other services is accurate or reliable or your use of the site will be uninterrupted, secure, or free from error. we, our vendors and affiliates give no express warranties or guarantees nor implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, workmanlike effort, and non-infringement.

We recommend that you to be careful and responsible on the personal information you provide through such means.

19. CHANGES TO THE PRIVACY POLICY

We reserve the right to modify, at any moment, the terms of this Privacy Policy. Any change made to the Privacy Notice will be notified to you through our Site. Once a new version of the Privacy Policy is published, it will automatically be in force.

Date of last revision is November 30, 2018.

YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ THESE TERMS OF USE, UNDERSTAND THE TERMS OF USE, AND WILL BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS. YOU FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THESE TERMS OF USE TOGETHER WITH THE PRIVACY POLICY REPRESENT THE COMPLETE AND EXCLUSIVE STATEMENT OF THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN US AND THAT IT SUPERSEDES ANY PROPOSAL OR PRIOR AGREEMENT ORAL OR WRITTEN, AND ANY OTHER COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN US RELATING TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS AGREEMENT.

27. LEGAL DISPUTES

Any dispute arising from the use of the Site or the interpretation of the terms is governed by the laws of India, and shall be settled by the courts of New Delhi, India. All communications regarding legal matters must be made in writing to CT Address..