Privacy Policy

This policy covers anyone who creates a Linklet account or visits linklet.org. Registration is restricted to holders of an institutional @mnnit.ac.in email address — Linklet is not open to the general public.

When you register, we collect:

• Your full name, institutional email address, and a password (stored as a bcrypt hash — we never store or see your plaintext password), or your Google account identifier if you sign in with Google.
• Academic details you provide: department/branch, semester, section, and academic year.
• Content you create: posts, questions, answers, comments, chat messages, uploaded resources (notes, PYQs, assignments), and profile information (bio, avatar, phone number if you choose to add one).
• Timetable and attendance data you upload or enter, used only to power your personal dashboard.
• Basic technical data: IP address (used for abuse/rate-limit protection) and a session cookie that keeps you logged in.

Every field above exists to power a specific feature you use directly: your academic details drive the resource filters and dashboard, your chats and posts are shown to the people you're communicating with, and your IP is used only to throttle abusive request patterns (e.g. OTP brute-forcing), never to track you across the web.

• Google — for institutional Google Sign-In, if you choose that login method.
• Cloudinary — stores images, documents, and voice notes you upload.
• Brevo — delivers OTP verification and password-reset emails.
• Google Gemini — used only when you upload a timetable image/PDF, to extract your class schedule. The file is processed for that request and not used to train any model on our end.

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with advertisers, and we do not run third-party ad-tracking or analytics scripts on Linklet.

• Your posts, questions/answers, and public profile fields are visible to other logged-in Linklet users.
• Your chat messages are visible only to the participants of that conversation.
• Your email address and password are never shown to other students.
• Platform administrators can access account and content data solely to moderate abuse, respond to reports, and maintain platform integrity — every admin action is recorded in an audit log.

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, your profile, posts, and messages are removed from active use; some records may be retained briefly in backups or audit logs where required for security or legal reasons before being purged.

You can review and update most of your information from your Settings page at any time. To request a full export or deletion of your account data, reach out through our Contact page. We will respond and act on verified requests within a reasonable time.

If this policy changes in a way that affects how your data is used, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, for material changes, notify users through the in-app notification system.

Questions about this policy or how your data is handled? Reach out via the Contact page.