Privacy

This says what PsychologyOrbit collects, why, how long it is kept, and how to get it back or delete it. It is deliberately specific: a privacy policy that lists every category of data in the abstract tells you nothing.

What we collect

• When you create an account: your name, email address, password (stored only as a hash), and the account type you chose.
• When you complete a profile: whatever you choose to add, including your headline, biography, country and city, education, work history, specialisations, languages, research interests and professional links.
• When you request verification: the documents you upload, plus the registration or licence number you enter.
• When you use the site: posts, comments, research uploads, messages, community memberships, and who you follow.
• If you use the professional tools: your supervised-hours logbook (dates, hours, the kind of work, and your supervisor's sign-off; never client details, which the logbook refuses), your CPD record and any certificates you upload (stored privately, visible only to you), your full-text requests, and the conditions you list as working with. If you confirm a university email, we keep only the part after the @ and a keyed fingerprint of the address, never the address itself.
• Automatically: your IP address, browser user agent, and the times you signed in. These are kept for security and abuse investigation.
• Counts about your profile, shown only to you: how many search and directory pages listed it each day, and how many times it was opened. These are numbers only. Who looked is never recorded, for anybody's profile, so it cannot be shown or leaked.
• Endorsements: when a verified professional endorses a specialisation on your profile, we keep who endorsed which specialisation and when. They are shown on your profile, and either of you can see them in your data export.

What we do not collect

• No advertising identifiers, no cross-site tracking, and no third-party advertising network.
• No clinical or health information about you. Nothing on this site is a medical record.
• No client data. Case discussion must never contain information that could identify a person, and material that does is removed.

Who can see what

• Your profile is public by default and can be found by search engines. You can turn off indexing and directory listing in Settings, Privacy.
• Research you publish as public is readable by anyone, including people who are not members. That is the point of publishing it.
• Direct messages are visible to the people in the conversation, and to a moderator only when a message is reported.
• Verification documents are never public and are never shown on your profile. Only a reviewer opens them.

How long we keep it

• Your account data is kept while your account exists.
• Verification documents are kept while the badge is active, and can be deleted on request once a decision has been made.
• Security logs (IP address, user agent, sign-in times) are kept for 12 months.
• Daily profile counts and the record of which weekly digests were sent are kept for 13 months.
• Deleted content is removed from the site immediately and purged from backups within 30 days.

Your rights

• Export everything you have posted, from Settings, Data.
• Correct anything on your profile at any time.
• Delete your account, from Settings, Your data, or from the app. Your profile and personal data are deleted at once, including verification documents. You choose, on the website or in the app, whether your posts, comments, research and sent messages go too; keeping them is the default. Research that goes is withdrawn, so its citation still explains what happened. Edits you made to the knowledge base stay, credited to "Deleted member"; your name stays as a plain, unlinked name on research you co-authored with someone else; and anything under an open report is kept, hidden, until a moderator has reviewed it.
• You can also ask for deletion without signing in: see psychologyorbit.com/delete-account.
• Object to a specific use by contacting us. We will tell you what we did about it.
• If you are in the UK or EU, these rights exist under the UK GDPR and the GDPR. We do not require you to be in those places to use them.

Where data is stored

• On servers operated by our hosting provider. Where that is outside your country, the transfer is covered by standard contractual clauses.
• Passwords are hashed with Argon2id where available and bcrypt otherwise, and are never recoverable, including by us.
• All traffic is served over HTTPS.

Changes

• If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, we will tell members before it takes effect rather than quietly updating the date at the top.