Privacy policy

This website, rajivkpoddar.com, is published by Rajiv K Poddar. Any question about this policy, or about information you have already sent, can be sent to hello@rajivkpoddar.com and will be answered within two working days.

If you are contacting us to ask what we hold about you, or to ask us to delete it, say so plainly in the message — no particular form of words is required.

We collect the information you choose to type into one of the three forms on this site: the contact form, the speaking request form and the book review form. Nothing else about you is collected, and there is no visitor account, login or profile.

The contact form asks for your name, email address, an optional phone number and your message. The speaking form additionally asks for your organisation, an optional event name, the event date, the audience type and the audience size. The book review form asks only for your name and your review, and a review you send may be shown on this website with that name.

• Name, email address and optional phone number
• Organisation and event details, on the speaking form only
• The message you write, and the date and time you sent it
• The IP address the message was sent from, used only to limit abuse
• The page you sent it from and the description your browser identifies itself with

When you submit a form, the contents are checked, saved to this website's own database, and emailed to hello@rajivkpoddar.com. It is saved first so that a message is not lost if the email fails to send. Only the site owner can read what is stored. Your message is never passed to any marketing platform, mailing list or advertising service, and it is never sold or shared.

To keep automated spam out, each submission is checked against a hidden field that only software fills in, a minimum time between opening and sending the form, and a limit on how many messages can be sent from one device in an hour. These checks use your IP address for that purpose alone.

We keep the stored message and the resulting email for as long as it takes to deal with your enquiry and to keep a normal record of correspondence. Ask us to delete it and we will remove both.

This site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read. Google sets a small number of cookies for that and receives your IP address, which it truncates; we see totals and trends, never who you are. You can opt out with Google's browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout, or by blocking cookies for this site.

One functional cookie is set, and only on the contact and speaking pages: a standard PHP session cookie that carries the security token protecting the form against cross-site request forgery. It contains no personal information, and it expires when you close the browser.

Song and podcast players are shown as a still image with a play button. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play; only then is a player loaded, from the youtube-nocookie.com domain, and only then can YouTube see that you are watching. If you never press play, no third-party media request is made from these pages.

The site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com when a page loads. Google receives your IP address as part of that request. No other third-party service is loaded anywhere on this site.

Nobody. Information you send through this site is not sold, rented, traded or shared with any third party. The only parties who see it are Rajiv K Poddar, the people who help answer correspondence, and the email provider that carries the message.

You can ask what information we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. You can also object to us holding it at all. Write to hello@rajivkpoddar.com and you will get an answer within two working days and action within thirty days.

Because the only information we hold is the correspondence you started, honouring a deletion request is usually as simple as deleting an email thread.

The site is served over HTTPS, form submissions are validated on the server as well as in the browser, and the forms are protected against cross-site request forgery. No system is perfect: please do not send bank details, identity documents or passwords through a website form, here or anywhere else.

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the date below is updated. There is no mailing list, so the only notice of a change is this page itself.

Questions about privacy, or requests about your own information, go to hello@rajivkpoddar.com. You can also use the contact form, though for a deletion request email is simpler for both of us.