Privacy
What Studiety collects, why, and how to get it removed.
What we collect
- Account details — username, email address, and optionally your first name, last name and major. You choose what to give beyond a username, email and password.
- What you contribute — reviews and ratings, uploaded files, tutor listings, posts, comments, bookmarks and saved schedules.
- Technical records — a session cookie to keep you signed in, and your IP address recorded briefly when a sign-in fails or an account is created, so the site can stop password guessing and bulk fake sign-ups. These records are deleted automatically within an hour.
- Visit statistics — which pages are opened, roughly where from and on what device, through Google Analytics. See Cookies and analytics below.
- Session recordings — how a visit actually goes: the pages opened, where the mouse moved, what was clicked and how far the page was scrolled, replayed as a video so we can see which parts of the site confuse people. What you type into a password, email, name or contact field is hidden from the recording. See Cookies and analytics below.
Cookies and analytics
Five things can be stored in your browser:
- A session cookie — this is what keeps you signed in. It disappears when you close the browser or sign out, and the site cannot work without it.
- A count of the course pages you have opened — kept in your own browser's local storage, never sent to us and never stored on our servers. It is what decides when a signed-out visitor is asked to create a free account. It holds course numbers and dates and nothing about you, it clears itself after a month, and clearing your browser data removes it at once.
- Google Analytics — we use it to see how many people visit, which courses get looked at, and which pages are broken or ignored. It sets its own cookies and tells Google your approximate location (city level, from a shortened IP address), your device and browser, and which pages you opened.
- Inspectlet — this is what records the sessions described above. It sets its own cookies so a return visit is recognised as the same browser.
- Google AdSense — only if you are not signed in. It funds the site by showing ads to signed-out visitors, and sets its own cookies to do so. Signed-in members get no ads and no advertising cookies. See Advertising below.
What a recording does not contain. Every field that carries a password, an email address, a real name or a tutor's contact details is marked so that Inspectlet does not capture what is typed into it — the keystrokes are not recorded and the value never leaves your browser for Inspectlet. The admin area is not recorded at all, and neither is anyone signed in as an administrator.
We use Analytics to understand traffic, not people. We have not enabled Google Signals, advertising features or remarketing in Analytics, we do not send Google your name, email address or username, and analytics data is not used to build a profile of you or to target advertising. The only advertising on the site is described under Advertising below — and it is never shown to signed-in members.
If you would rather not be counted or recorded, both can be switched off for good. Google publishes a browser add-on that turns Analytics off everywhere: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Inspectlet has its own opt-out, which stops recording on every site that uses it: inspectlet.com/optout. Most browsers' tracking protection and most ad blockers stop both anyway, and nothing on Studiety breaks if you block them. Signed-in administrators are never counted or recorded.
Advertising
Signed-in members are never shown ads. Ads appear only for visitors who are not signed in, and creating a free account removes them.
Those ads are served by Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use advertising cookies to decide which ad to show, based on this visit and on prior visits to this and other websites. We do not give Google your name, email address or anything else we hold about you — its cookies are set and read by Google in your own browser, and what Google does with them is described in How Google uses information from sites that use its services.
You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, and out of many other vendors' advertising cookies at aboutads.info. Where the law requires it — in the EEA and the UK, for example — you will be asked for consent before any advertising cookie is set. And as above: signing in removes the ads entirely.
How your name appears
Reviews can be posted under your display name or anonymously. An anonymous review hides your name from other students, but the account that wrote it is still recorded in the database so that abuse and impersonation can be dealt with. Anonymous is not the same as untraceable — please write accordingly.
Why we hold it
To run the site: to show your contributions, to keep your account secure, to let you recover a forgotten password, to email you as described below, and to moderate content that breaks the Terms.
We do not sell or rent your personal data, and we do not hand it to advertising networks or data brokers. That includes the ads described above: Google serves them from its own cookies, and we pass it nothing about you.
We do use a small number of service providers to operate Studiety — our web host, an email delivery service to send the messages described below, Google Analytics to measure traffic and Inspectlet to record sessions. They process your data only to provide that service to us, on our instructions, and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes. Analytics data is held on Google's infrastructure and session recordings on Inspectlet's, each subject to that company's own terms. Beyond that, we share personal data only where we are legally required to.
We send two kinds of email, and they are treated differently.
Essential account email — confirming your address and resetting your password. These are part of having an account and cannot be switched off while the account exists. We do not use them to advertise anything.
Everything else — reminders to review courses you took, news about features, announcements about the site, occasional invitations to take part in something we are running, and messages about Studiety itself. This is the category that has widened: we may write to you about the site and what is happening on it, not only about courses you follow.
We send these because you have an account here and we have a genuine interest in keeping the community active. We do not send you other companies' advertising, we do not sell or rent your address, and we do not pass it to advertising networks or data brokers. Anything we send comes from us and is about Studiety.
Stopping them is meant to be easy. Every non-essential email carries an unsubscribe link in the footer, and your email app's own "unsubscribe" button works too — one click, no sign-in, and it takes effect immediately. You can also switch it off any time from your account settings. Opting out never affects your account or your contributions, and we will not ask you to justify it.
If you registered on the older version of Studiety and are hearing from us again after a long gap, the same applies: one click stops it for good.
How long we keep it
Your account and contributions stay until you ask us to remove them. Sign-in and sign-up rate limiting records are deleted within an hour. Password reset links expire and can only be used once.
Your choices
You can ask for a copy of your data, correct it, or have your account and contributions deleted. Reviews you wrote can be deleted with the account, or kept detached from your name if you prefer the content to remain useful to other students — tell us which you want.
Write to hello@studiety.com and say what you would like done. We will confirm your identity via your registered email address before acting.
Children
Studiety is intended for university students. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly hold their data.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects how your data is used, we will say so on the site before the change takes effect.