Privacy Policy

The rest of this page is the detail. This is the whole of it in six lines.

• You can browse the entire directory without telling us anything about yourself.
• If you make an account, we hold your name, your email, your phone number if you give one, and a record of the devices you are signed in on.
• If you send an enquiry, we pass your name and contact details to the institute you asked about. That is the point of the form, and it is the most significant thing that happens to your data here.
• We do not sell anything about you, to anybody, ever.
• There is no advertising network, no analytics script and no third-party tracking anywhere on this site.
• You can see and change what we hold from your account settings, and you can ask us to delete it.

TeachMe, of St/Joseph lane, Sillalai, Pandatherippu, Sri Lanka, decides what is collected on teachme.lk and why. That makes us the controller of it, and the people to complain to.

Email

hello@teachme.lk

Phone

074 39 05 940, 9AM – 5PM, Monday to Saturday

Post

St/Joseph lane, Sillalai, Pandatherippu, Sri Lanka

This policy covers the website and the dashboards behind it. It does not cover an institute's own systems, and it does not cover any site we link to.

Grouped by why it exists, because that is what actually tells you whether we have it.

Nothing, if you are only reading

Browsing courses, scholarships, events and guides needs no account and creates no record of you. Searching and filtering happen in the address bar, not in a profile.

Account details

Your name, email address and, if you give one, your phone number. Your password is stored only as a hash, which means we cannot read it and cannot tell you what it is. An institute account also holds the institute's name.

Your profile photo

Only if you upload one. It is stored as a file, separately from the rest of your account.

Sign-in records

Each time you sign in we keep a session record: the IP address the request came from, the browser's user-agent string, when it started and when it expires. This is what makes the device list in your settings possible, and it is what lets you sign a lost phone out.

Enquiries

The name, email, phone number and message you type into an enquiry form, and which course or scholarship it was about.

Event registrations

The name, email, phone number and any note you give when you register for an event, and which event it was.

What you save

The listings you save to come back to, tied to your account.

Ordinary server logs

Our hosting keeps the technical records any web server keeps (request addresses, times, response codes, IP addresses) for keeping the site up and dealing with abuse.

If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, your email address and your profile picture from Google. We do not receive your Google password, and we get nothing else from your Google account.

Each of these is a purpose, not a category. If a use is not on this list, it is not a use we make.

• To run your account: signing you in, verifying your email, resetting a password, and showing you the devices you are signed in on.
• To deliver an enquiry to the institute it was addressed to, and a registration to the organiser it was addressed to.
• To send you the emails the site owes you: a verification code, a password reset, a registration confirmation. These are not marketing and there is nothing to unsubscribe from.
• To show you what you saved, and what you have already sent.
• To keep the site working and safe: spotting abuse, investigating a problem, and stopping somebody who is misusing an account.
• To meet a legal obligation, where one applies.

Our grounds for this are the ones that fit: performing the agreement with you when you have an account, your consent when you press send on an enquiry, and our legitimate interest in keeping a public site running and free of abuse.

This is the section that matters, so it is specific.

Institutes and organisers

When you send an enquiry about a course or a scholarship, the institute behind it receives your name, your email address, your phone number and your message, and can see them in their dashboard. When you register for an event, the organiser receives the same. This is the entire purpose of those forms, it is said on the form before you press send, and it cannot be undone afterwards. Once an institute has your details, what they do with them is governed by their privacy policy, not ours.

Our own staff

TeachMe administrators can see accounts, enquiries and registrations in the admin dashboard, because somebody has to be able to answer a complaint about one.

The companies that run our infrastructure

Our database host, our file storage, and the mail provider that delivers our email. They process this on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.

Google

Only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only as part of that sign-in.

Anybody the law requires

A court order or a lawful demand from an authority. We will tell you when we are allowed to.

Worth stating plainly, because a directory is exactly the kind of site where the opposite is normal.

• There is no advertising on this site and no advertising network in it.
• There is no analytics script: no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no heatmap recorder, nothing counting you.
• No third party is loaded to watch you read. Even the share buttons on a guide are plain links, with the icons drawn by us, so that opening an article does not announce it to three social networks.
• We do not build a profile of you for advertisers, and there is nobody we would sell one to.
• We do not email you about anything you did not ask for.

If that ever changes, if we add a way of measuring how the site is used, the Cookie Policy will say so, this section will change with it, and the choice you made in the cookie banner will be honoured.

We set four cookies. Two keep you signed in, one remembers whether a dashboard sidebar is open, and one records the choice you made in the banner.

Every one of them is named, explained and dated in the Cookie Policy, which is also where you can change your mind.

Your account

For as long as you have one. Ask us to close it and we delete the account and the profile photo with it.

Sign-in records

A session expires 30 days after you sign in, and signing out ends it immediately. Expired sessions are cleared.

Enquiries and registrations

These are kept as a record of a conversation between you and an institute, so they outlive your account: an institute cannot answer a complaint about an enrolment with no record of the enquiry that started it. We keep them for as long as they are needed for that, and no longer.

Server logs

A short period, for security and troubleshooting.

Deleting your account does not withdraw an enquiry you have already sent. The copy the institute holds is theirs, and you would need to ask them.

Some of this you can do yourself, immediately, without asking anybody.

• See and correct what we hold about you, from your account settings.
• Sign out any device you no longer recognise, from the same place.
• Change your password, or reset it if you cannot get in.
• Ask for a copy of your information, or for it to be deleted, by writing to hello@teachme.lk.
• Object to something we are doing with it, and have an actual person look at the objection.

We answer these within 30 days. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm who you are first, which is a protection for you rather than an obstacle: we are not handing somebody else's data to whoever emails us.

Much of this site is written for people finishing A/Ls, so a good number of our readers are 16, 17 or 18. That is expected, and the site is built for it.

You must be at least 16 to create an account. If you are under 18, we would rather you talked an enquiry over with a parent, a guardian or a teacher first, not because there is anything hidden in it, but because it sends your phone number to an organisation that will ring it.

If you believe we hold information about a child under 16, write to hello@teachme.lk and we will delete it.

• Passwords are stored as hashes. Nobody at TeachMe can read yours, and nobody will ever ask you for it.
• Traffic to the site is encrypted, and the session cookie is marked so that a browser will not hand it to a script or send it over a plain connection.
• Access to the admin dashboard is restricted by role, and an institute can only see the enquiries addressed to it.
• Your data is stored on managed infrastructure outside Sri Lanka, which is where our database and file storage providers run. It is protected by this policy wherever it sits.

No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise. If something happens that puts your information at risk, we will tell the people affected and the relevant authority, promptly and in plain terms.

The effective date at the top of this page is the date of the current version. When we change something that matters (a new purpose, a new recipient) we will say so on the site before it takes effect, and email account holders where it warrants it.

Every version of this document is a commit in the repository that runs the site, so what it said on any given day is a matter of record rather than of memory.

Tell us first, at hello@teachme.lk. Most of what goes wrong is something we can fix the same week.

If we do not put it right, you can take a complaint to the data protection authority in Sri Lanka. Doing that does not affect any other legal remedy available to you.