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Privacy and security

This explains what we collect, why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can make us do about it. It also explains exactly what an expert can and cannot reach when you invite one into your own machine, because that is the part worth reading twice.

The short version

We read the conversations, because that is the only way to tell where people get stuck. We keep your email separate from everything else so it can be handed back or deleted on its own. We never take payment, so we never hold your card details. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. If you invite an expert onto your machine, they work inside limits you set, everything they do is logged in front of you, and you can cut the access off at any moment.

Who this covers

Midsesh("we", "us") operates this website and the Get An Expert agent. We are the controller of the information described here. Our postal address is 704, 1 Western Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. You can reach us at midsesh.social@gmail.com.

What we collect

We do not collect payment card details at any point. You pay the expert directly, after the work is delivered, so that information never passes through us.

Session replay, stated plainly

We record a replay of your visit, and that replay includes the conversation: what you wrote and what the assistant wrote back. This is deliberate. Knowing that someone left tells us nothing on its own. Knowing what the assistant had just asked them tells us what to fix.

Email and name fields are the exception. Those fields are blocked at the moment of recording, so what you type into them is never transmitted to our analytics provider at all. If you would rather not be recorded, enabling Do Not Track or blocking analytics in your browser will stop it, and the service works normally without it.

How expert access to your machine works

This section applies only if you install the Get An Expert agent and ask for help inside your own editor. Nothing on this website gives anyone access to anything on your computer.

Why we are allowed to use it

Where the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation applies, we rely on the following legal bases. We process your messages and brief because it is necessary to perform the service you asked for. We use your email address to send you the introduction you requested on the same basis, and your consent is recorded at the moment you submit it. We keep analytics, replay, rate limiting counters and security records on the basis of our legitimate interest in understanding, running and defending the service, having weighed that against your interests. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

Who else sees it

We use the following providers. They act on our instructions and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

Beyond these, we share your brief with the expert we introduce you to, which is the entire point of the service. Every expert is under a signed confidentiality agreement before they take any work. We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months. This includes the personal information of anyone under sixteen.

Where it goes

We and our providers are based in, and store information in, the United States. If you are in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, using this service involves transferring your information there. We rely on the transfer mechanisms our providers have in place, which for these providers are standard contractual clauses. You can ask us for details.

How long we keep it

Deletion runs automatically, once a day, on this schedule.

Email addresses are stored separately from everything else, on purpose, so that a request to export or delete yours can be honoured without unpicking anything.

None of that schedule is the only way out. If you have an account you can delete it at any time from Your account, without waiting for a retention period and without asking anybody. What that removes and what it keeps is set out under Your rights below.

Profiles we find for you

When we search for experts, we keep what the search returned about each person: the name and photo on their public marketplace profile, the link to it, and their listed rating and price. We keep it so that the people we found for you are still there when you come back, rather than disappearing when you close the tab.

Alongside each one we store two short pieces of writing. The first describes what their public listing says. The second, shown to you under the heading “Why this could fit”, is our own view of how that listing lines up with what you asked for. It is our opinion and it is labelled as one. It is not a statement of that person's history, and we do not add facts about anyone that their public profile did not already say.

These records belong to the search that produced them, so deleting the search deletes them too. If you are one of the people we listed and you would rather we did not, write to midsesh.social@gmail.com and we will remove you.

How we protect it

Database access is closed by default and no public key can read or write any table. Every endpoint that changes something checks the request came from our own site, and is rate limited so it cannot be hammered. Text arriving from visitors and from the open web is stripped of hidden characters before it reaches anything else. The site sends a content security policy and the usual protective headers. No secret is present in anything the browser downloads.

We do not currently hold a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and we would rather say so than imply one. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

If a breach affects your information, we will notify you and the relevant regulator where the law requires it, without undue delay and within the timeframes those laws set.

Your rights

If you have an account, you can delete it yourself. Sign in, open Your account, and use Delete my data. It removes the account, the credit balance and its history, your saved searches and the people in them, and every request for quotes you have made. Orders stay, because we have to keep a record of work we did and were paid for, and your email address and name are taken off those rows so they stop naming you. You type a word to confirm before anything runs, and the page states all of this before you do.

Wherever you live, and with or without an account, you can also ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to midsesh.social@gmail.com and we will action it. We will not charge you, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If the UK or EU GDPR applies to you, you also have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, to receive your information in a portable format, and to complain to your data protection authority. In the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what we collect and why, the right to delete it, the right to correct it, and the right to opt out of sale or sharing. As set out above, we do not sell or share your personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of. You may use an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf.

Children

This service is for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under sixteen. If you believe a child has given us information, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects what we do with information we already hold, we will tell the people it affects rather than relying on them noticing.

Contact

Email midsesh.social@gmail.com and we will answer. If you are writing about your own information, say so in the subject line and it will be handled first.