Legal

Sifted (EU) or the Company respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you as to how we process your personal data where our customers are universities and higher education institutions and where access to our services is provided for the benefit of their students.

This privacy notice also tells you about privacy rights pursuant to Data Protection Laws such as the UK Data Protection Act 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the EU GDPR.

Controller for personal data

A “controller” is a person or organisation who alone or jointly determines the purposes for which and the way any personal data is or is likely to be processed. Unless we notify you otherwise Sifted (EU) is the controller of your personal data where we have a direct relationship with you.

Scope

This privacy notice applies to the processing of personal data by us in connection with:

University: Where we provide our services, subscriptions or products to universities and higher education institutions and engage with designated representatives, administrators or staff. Students: Where access to our services, content and subscriptions is provided to students through their university or higher education institution.

Types of personal data

Personal data or personal information means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed. This is known as anonymised data. Anonymised data falls outside the scope of Data Protection Laws.

Depending on your relationship with us we may process the categories of data above and categories of specific personal data that is specific to you. Please see below in the Processing Table on how we may process your personal data depending on our relationship with you.

Lawful bases: How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. We will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

Performance of a contract: Where we need to perform the contract, we are about to enter into or have entered into with you. For example, when you sign up to our services.

Legal obligation: Where we need to comply with a legal obligation. For example, for accounting or legal purposes.

Legitimate interests: Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests or those of a third party and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.

Consent: We do not generally rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data. Where we do rely on consent you have the right to withdraw consent at any time. Please contact us at  dpo@sifted.eu to withdraw consent.

Vital interests: Where is it necessary to protect your vital interests in case of emergencies.

Public obligation: Where we need to comply with a public obligation, for example in the matters of public health or public interests.

How we collect your personal data

Directly from you: You give us your personal data in your direct interactions with us. Such personal data includes Identity Data, Contact Data, Financial Data, Profile Data, Usage Data, Technical Data.

Third-party sources: We receive Identity Data and Contact Data about you from third parties when:

  • other parties send us your personal data to enable the provision of our services to you.
  • you provide your personal data to a third party for the purpose of sharing it with us.

Processing Tables

Depending on your relationship with us, you may need to refer to different tables relevant to your specific interactions or services.

University: Processing Information This is where we engage with an individual at the university to facilitate sign-on processes and enable access to our services.

Categories of personal data collected

  • Identity Data includes first name, last name, username or similar identifier, title, job title, university affiliation.
  • Contact Data includes institutional address, billing address, email address and telephone numbers.
  • Financial Data includes university bank account and payment card details (where subscriptions or other paid services are purchased).
  • Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you or your institution and other transaction details relating to subscriptions, reports, events or other services.
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology.

  • Profile Data includes login details and password, searches made by you, your ratings and comments, preferences and feedback.

    To manage payments, fees and charges and collect and recover money owed to us

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data, Financial Data, Transaction Data Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract with the university; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to recover debts due to us)

To communicate with you regarding service updates, renewals, changes to terms or operational matters

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to manage our relationship and provide services effectively)

To respond to enquiries, requests or support queries

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to respond to business communications)

To provide information about additional services, reports, events or partnerships

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data Lawful Basis: Legitimate interests (to develop and grow our business); Consent where required under applicable law

To administer and protect our business and platform including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data, Technical Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (running our service and for information security)

Students: Processing Information This is where access to our services, content and subscriptions is provided to you as a student through your university or higher education institution.

Categories of personal data collected

  • Identity Data includes first name, last name, username, university affiliation and student status (where applicable).
  • Contact Data includes email address.
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology.
  • Profile Data includes magic-link/OTP (no password data is stored on our systems), searches made by you, your ratings and comments, preferences and feedback.

To verify your eligibility for access through your university

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data, Technical Data Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract with the university; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to ensure authorised access)

To create and administer your user account and facilitate login processes

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data, Technical Data, Profile Data (login via magic link/OTP) Lawful Basis: Performance of a contract; Necessary for our legitimate interests (to provide and manage access to our services)

To provide access to articles, reports, newsletters and other content

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Technical Data, Usage Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to provide and manage access to our services)

To respond to enquiries, feedback or support requests

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to respond to you and improve our services)

To send service-related communications including updates to our services or changes to our terms or privacy notice

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to manage our relationship and keep you informed)

To administer and protect our website and platform including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support and hosting of data

Categories of Personal Data: Identity Data, Contact Data, Technical Data, Usage Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (running our business, provision of IT services, network security and fraud prevention); Necessary to comply with a legal obligation

To use data analytics to improve our website, services, content and user experience

Categories of Personal Data: Technical Data, Usage Data Lawful Basis: Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop and improve our services); Consent where required under applicable law (e.g. non-essential cookies)

Further information for Students Marketing communications Personal data relating to students will not be shared with marketing partners or advertising networks for ad targeting purposes and will not be used for marketing or advertising activities without the student’s separate and explicit consent.

Providing personal data Where we need to collect personal data by law or under the terms of a contract and you do not provide that information when requested we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you for example to provide you with our services. In this case we may have to cancel our service, but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

How We Disclose Personal Information In certain circumstances, we may disclose your personal information to third parties for contract fulfilment purposes, legitimate purposes and other reasons subject to this privacy notice.

Such circumstances where we disclose information may include:

  • Internally: Your personal data will be used by our employees and contractors who are working on providing our services to you on a need-to-know basis.
  • With our affiliates: We may share information within our corporate group to operate and manage our business effectively and to provide you with the services you request.
  • Our service partners: With vendors or other third parties who perform services on our behalf (for example IT management, customer support and cloud storage.
  • Marketing partners: With business and marketing partners to provide services and advertise to prospects/customers. Our business and marketing partners will use your information in accordance with their own privacy notices. We will firstly obtain your consent to share your contact details with third parties for marketing purposes.
  • Legal advisors: To enforce any applicable terms of service and to protect or defend the Services, our rights and the rights of our users or others.
  • Professional advisers: This would include bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, insurance and accounting services.
  • Payment Service Intermediaries: These providers help facilitate payment to us.
  • Advertising networks and analytics service providers: This is to support and display ads on our website and other social media tools.
  • Business transactions (M&A): This is in connection with a business transaction such as a merger or acquisition. Where this is the case, your personal data shall continue to be processed in accordance with this privacy notice.

International transfers for UK/EU We may transfer and process your personal data outside of the United Kingdom (UK) /European Union (EU) to countries where data protection laws are less stringent than those in the UK/EU. When we transfer your personal data outside of the UK/ EU we only do so to entities that offer our users the same level of data protection as that afforded by the UK Data Protection Act 2018 (including the UK GDPR) and the EU GDPR/ Data Protection Laws.

  1. We will only transfer your personal information to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal information; or
  2. We will use specific contracts approved for use in the UK or EU which give personal information the same protection it has in the UK/EU. For example, the use of Article 46 UK and EU GDPR safeguard mechanisms to transfer personal data endorsed by the UK Government or European Commission.

For other countries we will use local law guidance to ensure personal data is transferred securely where there is a requirement in law to do so.

Data security We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

Data retention We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

For students: After graduation, you may continue to use the platform for up to an additional 12 months of which we will retain your data that for that purpose.

Accounts are reviewed every 12 months and inactive accounts may be deleted to protect your information.

Data Subject Rights Under certain circumstances, you have rights under Data Protection Laws. Not all rights are absolute and depending on where you are located, not all rights are given to you. You can:

  • Request access to your personal data: This is known as a "subject access request" and enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
  • Request correction of your personal data: This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
  • Request erasure of your personal data: This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. We may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you at the time of your request.
  • Object to processing of your personal data: This is where we are processing your personal data based on a legitimate interest or those of a third party and you may challenge this.  However, we may be entitled to continue processing your information based on our legitimate interests or where this is relevant to any legal claims. 
  • Request restriction of processing your personal information: This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the information's accuracy (b) where our use of the information is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it (c) where you need us to hold the information even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims or (d) you have objected to our use of your information but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
  • Request transfer of your personal information (“data portability”): This is where in some circumstances we will provide to you or a third party you have chosen your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
  • Right to withdraw consent: This is where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. This will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. Depending on the processing activity, we may not be able to provide certain services to you if you withdraw your consent. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.
  • Automated decision making: This is where decisions are made about you by automated means. We do not carry out automated decision making.

Carrying out your data subject rights

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data or to exercise any of the other rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal information or to exercise any of your other rights. This is a security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated. If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us.

Keeping personal information accurate and current

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us. Please contact us if you wish to update your personal data. Concerns and complaints

We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns in the first instance. Please see Contact us section. If you have unresolved issues, you have the right to complain at any time to a data protection supervisory authority for data protection issues such as the UK data protection regulator – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
You may lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority if you live or work outside the UK or you have a complaint concerning our personal data processing activities.

Changes to our privacy notice

This privacy notice may be changed from time to time in response to legal, technical or business developments. We will take appropriate measures to inform you when we update our privacy notice. We will obtain your consent to any material privacy notice changes if and where this is required by applicable Data Protection Laws.

Contact us 

If you would like more information about the way we manage personal information that we hold about you please contact us at: Email address: dpo@sifted.eu

This version was last updated in February 2026