Privacy & Data

This page explains what information Agora for Cultural Development collects through this website, why we collect it, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do with it. It is written in plain language on purpose.

We only collect information you choose to give us by filling in a form, and the small amount of technical information any website needs in order to work. We do not buy information about you from anyone, and we do not sell or rent yours.

Every piece of information below reaches us because someone typed it into a form on this site.

• Contact form — your name, organisation, email address, and optionally a phone number, country and city; the type of enquiry and the service it concerns; and your message.
• Join Our Network — whether you are registering as an individual or an organisation, your name, country and city, email address, optional phone number, preferred language, the ways you would like to work with us, your areas of expertise, where you are available to work, your years of experience, an optional professional link, and a short biography.
• Consultation bookings — your name, organisation, email address, country, the topic you want to discuss, a short summary of it, and an optional link. Paid sessions also create a payment record (see below).
• Event registrations — your name, email address and organisation, and nothing else.
• Course accounts — your name, email address, an optional phone number, and a password that is stored only in scrambled form that cannot be read back. Once you are enrolled we also record which lessons you have marked as read, the answers you give in exams, your marks, and any certificate you earn.
• Technical information — the internet address (IP) you submitted a form from, which language you were reading in, and the date and time. Our server also keeps short-lived error logs.

Where a form asks you to agree to something before you can send it, we record that you agreed, and when. That record is the evidence that your consent was given, so it is kept alongside the rest of the entry.

Each form has one purpose, and we do not repurpose what it collects:

• To reply to an enquiry you sent us.
• To contact you about collaboration, research, training, project and event opportunities that match the interests you registered — and only if you asked us to.
• To arrange, confirm and remind you of a consultation you booked.
• To manage your place at an event.
• To give you access to a course you enrolled in, record your progress, mark your exams and issue your certificate.
• To take and reconcile a payment you chose to make.
• To keep the website working, and to reduce automated abuse of the public forms.

Registering with the network does not guarantee engagement or paid work, and being in the directory does not mean we will contact you about everything — only about things that match what you told us.

The newsletter is a separate choice from the consent to be contacted. Ticking one never ticks the other, and you can be in the network without receiving news.

Inside Agora, access depends on the person's role. Staff who manage content and respond to enquiries can see form submissions and the network directory. Staff who only work on how the site appears in search results cannot see any of it. Payment records are visible to administrators.

Outside Agora, your information reaches only the organisations that are technically necessary:

• Paymob, our payment provider, for paid consultations and paid courses.
• Our hosting and email provider, which stores the website's database and delivers the emails we send you.
• Analytics and advertising providers — but only those we have deliberately switched on, and only for the technical browsing information described on our cookies page. They never receive what you typed into a form.

We do not sell, rent or trade your information, and we do not publish it or share it with third parties for their own purposes without asking you first. We may disclose information where the law requires it.

When you pay for a consultation or a course, you are taken to Paymob's own secure checkout to enter your card details. Those details are never sent to this website and are never stored on it. We never see your full card number.

What we keep is the record of the transaction itself: the amount, the currency, whether it succeeded, the reference numbers Paymob gives it, the email address it was made with, and the confirmation Paymob sends us. We need that record to give you access to what you paid for, to answer a question about a payment, and to keep proper accounts.

Paymob handles your card details under its own privacy policy and the card industry's security standards.

We keep information for as long as the purpose it was given for lasts, and then delete it.

• Enquiries — up to two years after our last exchange with you.
• Network registrations — until you ask to be removed. We review the directory periodically and contact registrants we have not heard from in a long time before removing them.
• Bookings — up to two years after the session.
• Event registrations — up to one year after the event.
• Payment records — five years, because tax and accounting rules require it. This period is not something we can shorten on request.
• Course accounts and progress — for as long as your account is open. Ask us to close it and we delete the account, your progress and your exam answers.
• Certificates — kept indefinitely, on purpose. Anyone can check a certificate is genuine by entering its number on our verification page, and deleting the record would make every certificate we have issued impossible to verify. A certificate record holds only the name it was issued to, the course title, the date and the certificate number.
• Server error logs — fourteen days.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what information we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything that is wrong or out of date;
• delete your information, where we are not required to keep it;
• stop contacting you, or take you out of the network directory;
• withdraw a consent you gave us, at any time. Withdrawing it does not undo anything we did while it was in place.

Write to the contact address at the bottom of this page. We will reply within thirty days. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that we do not hand someone else's information to the wrong person.

Personal data in Egypt is governed by the Personal Data Protection Law (Law No. 151 of 2020). If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request, you can raise it with the competent authority under that law.

Cookies. This site sets the small number of cookies it needs in order to work at all, and analytics cookies only if we have switched them on. Our cookies page explains both.

Children. This website is intended for adults working in the cultural sector. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has given us information, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes. If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and change the date shown at the bottom of it. Material changes affecting people already in our records will be notified by email.