Privacy policy

Who holds your data

The Tech Idea operates this site and is responsible for the personal data described here.

Registered address: Kuwait

Privacy questions and requests: fahad@thetechidea.com

What we collect, and why

Your sign-in

Signing in is handled by our identity service at identity.thetechidea.app, which holds your email address, password or external login, phone number if you add one, and two-factor settings. The first time you sign in, this site creates its own account record holding your identifier, email, name and — if you enter them — job title and phone.

What you do here

This site stores, against your account:

• Orders, invoices, licences and subscriptions, including the billing name, email and address you enter at checkout
• Your cart and wishlist
• Product reviews and ratings you write
• Forum posts, replies and votes, and the posts, replies and product reviews you report to the moderators, with the reason you give
• Support tickets, their comments and attachments, and messages you send through the contact form
• Notifications sent to you and your notification preferences
• A record of each download: which file, when, and the IP address it was requested from
• Sign-in dates and last activity

We hold this to run your account, deliver and license what you buy, meet our accounting obligations, and answer you when you contact us.

Who else sees it

• Payments. Card payments are processed by our payment provider. Your card details are entered on the provider's own checkout and are never sent to, seen by, or stored on this site. We keep only the amount, currency, status, provider name and transaction reference.
• Email. Notification and account email is sent through the mail relay configured for the site, which receives your email address and the message.
• Text messages. Sent only if you switch them on yourself under notification preferences; we never text you without that opt-in. They are sent through Twilio, which receives your phone number and the message.
• Hosting. The site and its database run on servers provided by our hosting provider, which stores the records described here on our behalf.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Cookies and browser storage

This site sets only cookies that keep it working or that remember a choice you made, so there is no cookie banner to click through:

• Sign-in cookie (__Host-TheTechIdea.Auth, split into numbered parts when it is large) — keeps you signed in between pages. Set when you sign in; removed when you sign out or your browser session ends. The site stops accepting it after 14 days without a visit and, in any case, 30 days after you signed in at the identity service — 24 hours when that sign-in used a second factor.
• Sign-in check cookies (__Host-Beep.Correlation.… and __Host-Beep.Nonce.…) — set when you start signing in, so the site can check that the identity service's answer belongs to the sign-in this browser started. Removed as soon as the sign-in completes; one that is never used expires after 15 minutes.
• Anti-forgery token (__Host-TheTechIdea.Antiforgery) — a security cookie that stops another site submitting forms as you. Removed when your browser session ends.
• Language (.AspNetCore.Culture) — remembers the language you chose for the site. Set only when you choose one; kept for a year.
• Welcome tour (.TheTechIdea.Welcome) — remembers how far you got in the welcome tour, or that you finished or skipped it, so it is not offered again. Set when you start, move through or skip the tour; kept for a year.

The language and welcome-tour cookies hold only that choice and identify nobody. You can change your language, replay the tour, or have this browser forget both on the preferences page.

If you add items to your cart before signing in, they are kept in your browser's local storage so they survive a refresh, and are merged into your account when you sign in.

There are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party scripts. The site's pages, fonts, scripts and icons, the product documentation included, are served from this domain, so browsing here sends nothing to anyone else, with one exception: a product picture that the catalogue links from another web address is fetched by your browser from that address when the product is shown.

Your rights

From your personal data page you can, at any time and without asking us:

• Download everything. A single JSON file containing both your sign-in details and every record listed above.
• Delete your account. Your sign-in is removed, and on this site your name, contact details and addresses are erased; your cart, wishlist, notifications, support tickets, contact messages, the reports you made to the moderators and your download history are deleted outright.

Two things deliberately survive a deletion. Orders and invoices are kept, with your personal details removed from them, because tax law requires the transaction record itself to be retained. Forum posts and reviews are kept, shown from then on as written by a deleted user, so conversations other people took part in stay readable.

You can correct your details yourself under profile. For anything else — including objecting to how we use your data — write to fahad@thetechidea.com.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept for as long as your account exists. When you delete it, the records listed above are erased or anonymised in the site's live database at once, except the orders, invoices and community content named in the previous section. Error and payment logs are kept for troubleshooting and financial audit.

Backups are different. A copy of the database that the site's host made before your deletion is not edited by it: the copy stays until the host's backup cycle replaces it. How long the host keeps its backups is set by the host and is not yet published here.