Privacy Policy.

Pragati is an institutional student innovation initiative organized by the Algorand Blockchain Club at Academy of Technology (AOT). We collect only the minimal necessary information required to authenticate participants and manage hackathon team registrations.

When you sign in using Google Single Sign-On (OAuth 2.0), we access basic profile information provided through your authorized Google account. This information includes your full name, verified email address, and optional avatar image URL.

We strictly require that participants authenticate using their official institutional email address ending with @aot.edu.in. Personal email domains (such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, or outlook.com) are automatically rejected by our authentication services.

In addition to account profile information, our platform records competition-related data, including team creations, member invitations, join requests, problem statement selections, and milestone proposal submissions.

We process your data exclusively for legitimate operational purposes directly tied to the Pragati Student Innovation Challenge:

1. Institutional Verification: Confirming active student enrollment and identity at Academy of Technology.

2. Team Formation & Roster Management: Maintaining team rosters, invite codes, leadership roles, and member permissions.

3. Event Coordination: Communicating critical competition announcements, evaluation deadlines, and milestone schedules.

4. Evaluation & Certification: Verifying project submissions and issuing official participation certificates and winner commendations.

We do not use your personal information for marketing, commercial profiling, advertising, or automated behavioral tracking.

Pragati's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other service will adhere strictly to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Specifically, information retrieved through Google OAuth scopes is utilized exclusively to provide participant-facing identity verification on our application. We never transfer Google user data to third-party databases, advertising networks, data brokers, or external analytics systems.

We never use data obtained from Google Workspace or Google accounts for advertising purposes, or to develop, train, or improve generalized machine learning or artificial intelligence models.

All participant records, team relationships, and submissions are stored in an encrypted PostgreSQL database hosted on enterprise-grade serverless cloud infrastructure.

Transport Security: All communications between your web browser and our servers are protected using Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.3 / HTTPS) with HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) enforced.

Session Security: Authenticated sessions are managed via cryptographically signed HttpOnly cookies (HMAC-SHA256). Session tokens cannot be accessed or manipulated by client-side JavaScript or third-party browser extensions, preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) session theft.

Access Control: Administrative endpoints are protected by server-side email whitelisting, role-based access checks, and sliding-window rate limiters to prevent brute-force and credential stuffing attacks.

We maintain a strict non-disclosure policy regarding student data. We do not sell, rent, trade, or monetize personal information under any circumstances.

Your data may only be accessed by designated faculty coordinators, evaluation committee members, and authorized student organizing leads strictly for judging and event operations.

Public Team Profiles: Your team name, problem statement title, and team member names are visible to other logged-in participants within the competition registry. Email addresses and student identity numbers remain private to organizers and judges.

Competition data is retained for the active duration of Pragati 2026 and for an archival period following the conclusion of the event to ensure auditability of awards and academic certificate validation.

Participants have the right to request deletion of their account profile and team records at any time. If you wish to permanently delete your registration data, revoke team membership, or exercise your data rectification rights, please contact the organizing committee at blockchainclub@aot.edu.in.

Upon receipt of a verified deletion request from your institutional email, all personal account records and team associations will be permanently purged from our database within 5 business days.

If you have questions, concerns, or inquiries regarding this Privacy Policy or our data protection practices, please contact:

Algorand Blockchain Club, Academy of Technology

Campus Address: G.T. Road, Adisaptagram, Aedconagar, Hooghly, West Bengal - 712121, India

Official Inquiries Email: blockchainclub@aot.edu.in

Institutional Portal: https://pragati.blockchainclubaot.in