Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy governs the collection, processing, use, and protection of your personal data by the administration of the DevSense platform (hereinafter referred to as "Platform", "We"). We are committed to protecting your privacy and process data in strict compliance with applicable laws, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

1. Data Controller

The controller of your personal data is the DevSense Administration. For any questions regarding the processing, modification, or erasure of your data, you can contact us at: [email protected].

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following categories of information:

• Author Account Data: when registering as an author, we request your full name, email address, password (stored securely using one-way cryptographic hashing), and assigned role.
• Author Profile Data: you may optionally provide your job title, biography (bio), links to social media profiles (GitHub, LinkedIn), and upload a profile picture (avatar).
• Technical Data (Server Logs): IP address, browser type and version, language settings, time and date of visit, pages viewed, referrer URL, and search queries.
• Analytics and Caching: interaction data collected via local caching mechanisms (Redis/Meilisearch) and third-party analytical tools (Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics when active in production environment).
• Reports and Submissions: when reporting content, we capture your IP address, selected preset reason, and the text details provided.

3. Legal Basis and Purposes of Data Processing

We process your personal data based on the following grounds:

• Performance of a Contract: managing your author account, publishing your articles under your authorship, and handling your profile visibility.
• User Consent: processing optional profile fields (biography, social links), using cookies to persist preferences (language, theme selection), and email notification preferences.
• Legitimate Interests: protecting the platform against spam, automated bots, and abuse, ensuring database security, content moderation, and traffic analysis to improve the quality of published technical guides.

4. Cookies and Local Storage

DevSense uses cookies and similar local storage technologies (LocalStorage) to maintain essential site functionality:

• Session Cookies: required for author authentication and active session maintenance.
• CSRF Protection: tokens to prevent cross-site request forgery and protect form submissions.
• Interface Settings: remembering your selected language locale and UI theme (light, dark, or nord).

You can disable cookies in your browser settings, though doing so will prevent you from logging into the author dashboard.

5. Third-Party Data Transfers

We do not sell or lease your personal data to third parties for marketing purposes. Data transfers are strictly limited to technical service providers:

• Cloud Providers: PostgreSQL database hosting and DigitalOcean Spaces (S3-compatible) storage for profile and article media. Uploads are stored on secure external servers.
• Analytics: on the production server, anonymized traffic data might be processed in Google Analytics without identifying individual users.

6. Security and Retention

We employ appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your data from unauthorized access, modification, or erasure:

• All user passwords are hashed using modern cryptographic algorithms (bcrypt).
• Data transmission between your browser and the server is encrypted using SSL/TLS protocols.
• Media files are stripped of metadata (including EXIF/GPS info) prior to cloud storage upload to prevent location leakage.
• Your personal data is stored as long as your author account remains active, or as required by law.

7. Your Rights (GDPR & International Law)

Under GDPR, you have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Right of Access: you can request information on what personal data we store about you.
• Right to Rectification: you can update your profile information at any time in your cabinet dashboard settings.
• Right to Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten"): you can request the deletion of your account and all associated data. Send requests to [email protected].
• Right to Restriction and Portability: you can request restriction of processing or download your account data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Right to Withdraw Consent: you can withdraw your consent to data processing at any time, which will result in account termination.

8. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy. In the event of significant changes, we will post the updated version on this page with the revised date.