Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data the Indian Strategy & Trading Conclave (ISTC) collects from participants, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can ask us to do with it. It covers https://istc.co and the participant portal on it.

ISTC is a talent identification programme in quantitative research, algorithmic trading, and strategy, organised by the ISTC team. The point of the programme is to put strong students in front of partner firms, so sharing your profile with those firms is a core purpose of this service, not an incidental one. This policy is explicit about that.

What we collect

From your sign-in

You sign in with Google or Microsoft. We never see or store your password. From that account we receive and store:

• your name
• your email address
• a persistent account identifier from the identity provider

We also derive a username from the local part of your email address. For institute addresses this usually contains your roll number. It is derived rather than typed so that it cannot be faked.

What you tell us

• your institution, degree or programme, and expected graduation year
• optional links to your GitHub, LinkedIn, or personal website
• a resume, as a PDF, if you choose to upload one

What we record about your participation

• which ISTC event you competed at
• your results, including rank and performance figures, once published

Technical data

• an essential cookie that keeps you signed in. It is httpOnly, so page scripts cannot read it.
• your light or dark theme preference, stored in your own browser's local storage and never sent to us.

What we do not do

We run no analytics, no advertising trackers, and no third-party tracking cookies on this site. We do not profile you for advertising, we do not sell your data, and we do not share it with data brokers.

One disclosure for completeness: the site loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address when a page loads. No other third-party request is made from the public pages.

Why we collect it

• To run the programme. Identifying you across events, placing you on a leaderboard, and issuing results and certificates.
• To present you to partner firms. Your profile and resume are what those firms look at. This is the purpose you joined for.
• To keep the competition fair. Verified identity makes it hard to enter twice or compete as someone else.
• To contact you about the programme, your results, and firm interest.

We process this data on the basis of the consent you gave when you registered. You can withdraw that consent at any time, as described below.

Who we share it with

Partner and sponsor firms

Recruiters at firms partnered with ISTC can view participant profiles, including your name, institution, academic details, links, competition results, and resume.

Access is not open. It is granted to named individual accounts on an explicit allowlist that we maintain by hand, and it can be revoked. Resumes are kept in private storage and are served only through links that expire minutes after they are created, so no permanent public link to your resume exists.

Service providers

• Supabase hosts our database, authentication, and file storage. Participant data is held in their Mumbai (India) region.
• Vercel hosts this website and runs its server code.
• Google and Microsoft handle sign-in. Your use of them is governed by their own privacy policies.

These providers process data on our instructions in order to run the service. We do not permit them to use it for their own purposes.

Otherwise

We may disclose data where we are required to by law. We will not otherwise share it with anyone without telling you.

How long we keep it

Your profile is deliberately long-lived. It is designed to accumulate a record across successive ISTC events, so that a firm looking at you later sees your full competition history rather than a single result. We therefore keep it until you ask us to delete it, or until the programme ends.

If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your profile and your resume. We may retain anonymised or aggregate results that cannot identify you, and anything we are legally required to keep.

Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you can ask us to:

• tell you what data we hold about you, and who we have shared it with
• correct or complete anything inaccurate
• delete your data
• withdraw your consent, which also means withdrawing from the firm-facing directory

You can change most of your details yourself in the portal at any time. Your name and institute email come from your sign-in account and are read-only there, so email us if either is wrong.

For anything else, including deletion, email team@istc.co. We aim to respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with how we have handled a request, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

If you are under 18

ISTC is intended for undergraduate students, who are usually adults. If you are under 18, you need your parent's or guardian's consent before registering, and they may contact us on your behalf at team@istc.co. We do not knowingly profile children or use their data for advertising.

Security

We take reasonable measures to protect your data. In particular:

• resumes are stored privately and never served from a public URL
• database access rules restrict a signed-in participant to their own record, and privileged access is only possible from our server, never from your browser
• sign-in sessions use httpOnly cookies, and your password is never handled by us

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that a determined attacker will never succeed. If we discover a breach affecting your data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board as the law requires.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will contact participants directly rather than relying on you to re-read this page.

Contact

For any privacy question, data request, or grievance, email team@istc.co. For sponsorship and partnership enquiries, email team@istc.co.