Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal data we collect on acttuary.com, why, how long we keep it, and what your rights are. The data controller is Acttuary Ltd, trading as Acttuary (contact: hello@acttuary.com). Acttuary is a trading name of Acttuary Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 17423340). Registered address: The Mill House, Alfrick, Worcester, England, WR6 5HR. We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), registration number ZC233497.

What we collect

• Waitlist email, if you gave us one before we took the form down. Your email address and which product you were interested in. We no longer collect these: the sign-up form is off the site. We still hold the addresses given while it was up. Legal basis: consent. Withdraw it by unsubscribing from any email and we delete your address.
• Your account. If you sign up, our authentication provider (Clerk) holds your email address, your name if you give one, and your sign-in credentials. We store the account identifier it issues, plus your email address, so we can attach your purchases and progress to you. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• Subscription and payment records. Your plan, its status, the current period end and your Stripe customer reference. Payments are taken by Stripe: card details go straight to them and we never see or store a card number. Legal basis: contract, and legal obligation for the accounting records.
• Course progress. Which lessons you have marked complete, when, and your score on a lesson quiz, so that your progress bars, next-lesson links and track certificates work. Legal basis: contract.
• Your certificate record. When you finish a track we store the certificate’s reference, which track it is for, the name on your account and the date you earned it. That record is what a certificate rests on, rather than a page that recalculates itself every time you open it. It stays private unless you publish it, which is the next bullet. Legal basis: contract.
• Publishing a certificate, which is your choice. Certificates are private by default. If you press Publish on your own certificate, that record becomes readable by anyone who has the link, at an address of the form acttuary.com/verify/ followed by the reference. That page shows your name, the track, the date you earned it and our small print, and nothing else: no email address, no exam marks, no record of which lessons you read. This is what lets you add the certificate to your LinkedIn profile, because LinkedIn needs a credential page an employer can open. Legal basis: consent. Press Unpublish on the same page at any time and the public page stops showing it straight away.
• CV review orders. Your email address, whether you added a cover-letter review, the amount paid, the order’s status and our delivery notes.
• How you found us, if you tell us. Stripe’s payment page carries one optional question, “How did you hear about us?”, with a short list to pick from. If you pick one, we store your answer against that purchase, together with any campaign tag that was on the link you arrived through (the utm_source-style words some of our own links carry) and the referral code if you used one. It is stored against the payment and not against you: no name, no email address and no account identifier goes with it, and it is never used to build a profile or to decide what you are shown. It exists so we know which of the things we do are worth doing. Leaving the question blank is expected and changes nothing. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing where our customers come from, which is the lightest touch we could find for answering it: we ask rather than track, and nothing is stored on your device to make it work. Object at any time and we delete the answer.
• A Google ad click, only if you agree. If one of our Google ads brought you here, the address carries Google’s own reference for that click, and a strip on that page asks whether we may tell Google if your visit ends in a sign-up or a sale. If you say yes, the reference is kept in your browser tab until you close it, travels with any payment you start, and is copied onto your account’s record if you create one in that tab within a few minutes of arriving. Google Ads then collects, once a day and for 14 days, the references that made an account, started a checkout or paid, with the time and, for a payment, the amount and the currency: never your name, your email address or anything else from your account. Google can link the reference to the ad and to whatever it already knows about that click, which is why we ask. Legal basis: your consent. Say no, or leave it unanswered, and nothing is kept or sent. Change your mind before signing up or paying by closing the tab; after either, write to us and we take you off the list for the rest of the 14 days. We cannot recall what Google has already collected.
• The CV itself (and cover letter, if you send one). Stored in encrypted file storage that only our server can reach, used only to write your review, and never shared with employers, recruiters or anyone else. Legal basis: contract. A CV usually contains far more about you than we need. Please do not include a date of birth, a photograph, health information or anything else the role does not call for.
• Booked sessions (mock interviews and 1-1 coaching). For both: your email address, the slot you chose and the amount paid. Afterwards we store the written feedback we send you and, once your session is done, the meeting link is cleared. Legal basis: contract.
• What a mock interview booking asks for. The questionnaire may collect the employer, the role, the practice area, the stage you have reached, the date of the real interview, and a free-text box where we invite you to paste a CV summary, a job advert or an application answer. We use those answers to prepare the session and to brief the actuary taking it. Legal basis: contract. Please put no more in the free-text box than the session needs, and no health information, date of birth or photograph.
• What a coaching booking asks for. Only what we need to understand the question you want to discuss, plus anything you choose to send us with it. Legal basis: contract. The same request applies: no more than the session needs, and nothing about your health or your circumstances that the question does not turn on.
• Schemes you are tracking. If you use the UK actuarial tracker while signed in, we store the schemes you track, the stage you have reached on each one (saved, applied, interviewing and so on) and a short note of your own if you write one. Untracking a scheme deletes that record. Legal basis: contract. The note is free text, so please put nothing sensitive in it: it is there for “ask about the Bristol office” rather than anything about your health or your circumstances.
• Closing-date reminders, if you switch them on. We store that you asked for them and how many days’ warning you want. The one switch turns on two emails, and the tracker says so beside it: a warning before a scheme you track closes, and a note when a scheme you saved opens. We record which of each we have already sent you so the same one never goes twice. The emails go to the verified address on your account; we do not keep a copy of it, we ask Clerk for it when one is due. Legal basis: consent. Switch the reminders off on the tracker at any time and they stop.
• Partner payout details, if you join the referral programme. If you or your society hold a referral code, we store the code, who holds it, a contact address and where the commission should be paid: an account name, a sort code and an account number, or a PayPal address. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you, the partner. It is readable only by us, it is never shown to a customer, and asking us to end the arrangement is enough to have it deleted once anything outstanding has been paid.
• Purchases made with a referral code. When somebody types a partner code at checkout, or emails it to us within the week afterwards and we add it by hand, we record that purchase against the code: what was bought, what it cost, the commission it earns, and the email address it was bought under. Legal basis: performance of our contract with the partner, who is owed the money, and our legal obligation to keep accurate accounting records. It changes nothing about the purchase itself and nothing about the price. We tell a partner what they are being paid for; we do not hand them a customer list, and a partner is not told anything about anybody who did not use their code.
• Free access we have given you. If we have given you the courses for nothing, we store that we did: the address it was given to, when it started, when it ends, which link it came from if it came from a link, and a short note of our own. There are two legal bases here, because there are genuinely two cases. Where you redeemed a link or asked us for it, performance of our contract with you: we are giving you the product. Where one of us typed your address in to give you access, our legitimate interests in showing somebody the product they asked to see. That second case means we may hold your email address before you have an account with us, because somebody asked us to give you access. None of it creates a subscription, a card record or a bill.
• Whether you said yes to the occasional email. Your dashboard asks you once whether we may email you about the courses. We store your answer, either way, and the date you gave it. Legal basis: consent for the email itself, and our legitimate interest in keeping a record of your answer so that we neither ask you again nor get it wrong. If you say no, that record is the only thing we do with it.
• Emails asking you to subscribe. If you said yes to that question, we may send you a short email about subscribing, and we record that we sent it so the same one never goes twice. If you unsubscribe, we store your address so that we never send you another. Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a)) for sending it, which you can withdraw at any time and which nothing else here depends on, and, for the unsubscribe record, our legal obligation to honour it. We send it only to people who ticked the box, one line in every one of those emails stops them for good, and we keep your address only so that the stopping sticks.
• Analytics. We use two services to count page views, referrers and device type in aggregate: Plausible, which is cookieless, and Google Analytics 4. Both are run by third parties, so the address of the page you are on reaches their servers, which is why we switch both off entirely wherever an address can carry something private: your booking page, the CV upload page, a free-access link somebody has sent you, our own admin screens, whose addresses can contain a customer’s email address, and the page that checks one person’s certificate, whose address is that person’s credential. Your own dashboard is counted, but never with anything after the question mark in its address. Neither service is used for cross-site profiles or profiling of any kind, and we refuse Google’s tag every advertising permission it asks for. Google Analytics sets two cookies when you arrive and counts how the pages here are used; a short notice on the first page you open says so, or on the next one if you arrived on a partner’s link and that page was already asking you about the referral cookie, and one tap there or on the cookies page turns them off and deletes them, for six months at a time. Two things you do are counted as well as the pages, because they are the only figures there we can hold against our own records: that an account was created, and that a session time was held. One carries a word for what happened, the other that word and the price of the session. A third, that an order was paid for, is written into the site and switched off: the page you are returned to after paying is not handed the reference it would need, so nothing about an order is sent. None of them carries your name, your email address or any identifier for you, so Google is told that one of those things happened and never who did it. That is the statistical-purposes exception in the cookie rules rather than your permission, and the cookies page sets out the conditions it comes with, including what this site refuses the tag in the page itself and what we keep switched off in the Google account, so the figures are about pages rather than about people. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used so we can improve it, which covers the cookie counting and the cookieless counting alike. We have weighed that: the reports are aggregate, we send no identifier of our own and switch off the settings that would build one, we refuse the tag every advertising permission it asks for, and knowing which pages help people is what the site is improved from. Object at any time, and here is exactly what each way of doing it reaches. One tap, on the notice or on the cookies page, turns the cookies off and deletes them. What carries on after that is a count with nothing joining it to anything else, which no tap of ours can stop for you: the cookies page names the browser setting and the kind of extension that do stop it. And you can write to us at hello@acttuary.com. We hold no identifier for you, so there is no list of objectors to add you to, but we will answer, and we will tell you anything about this you want to know.
• Technical logs. Our host records standard request logs, including IP addresses, for security and debugging, and tells our checkout which country a request came from so we only sell where we are set up to. Legal basis: legitimate interest in running a secure, lawful service.

How long we keep it

• CV files: deleted 90 days after your review is delivered, automatically, by a job that runs every day. Ask us sooner and we delete it on the spot.
• Order and payment records: six years after the end of the relevant tax year, because HMRC requires it. That record keeps the order details, not the CV.
• How you found us: kept with the payment record it belongs to, for the same six years, because it sits in the same accounting export. It holds no name, email address or account identifier, so it identifies nobody once the payment record beside it is gone. Ask us to remove your answer and we remove it.
• A Google ad click reference, if you agreed: in your browser tab until you close it. If you created an account in that tab, on your account’s record for 14 days, after which a daily job removes it. If you paid, it is also part of that payment’s record at Stripe, kept with it for the same six years. It is on the list Google Ads collects for 14 days after the account was made or the checkout was opened. Google keeps what it collects under its own policies.
• Session questionnaires and our session notes: deleted 12 months after the session. That covers the free-text answers, the questions we write for a mock interview, anything a coaching customer sends us, and our session notes. We keep the written feedback we sent you for the same period so you can ask for it again, and the booking record itself (date, service, amount) stays with the order records below. Ask us sooner and we delete it on the spot.
• Account, subscription, progress and certificate records: while your account exists. Ask us to close it and we delete it, published certificates included, and their public pages stop answering.
• Schemes you are tracking, and the reminders: while your account exists. Untrack a scheme and its record goes immediately, note included. Switching the reminders off stops them and keeps the record of which have already been sent, so turning them back on does not resend anything. Ask us to close your account and all four go with it.
• Free access records: while your account exists. Ask us to close it and they go with it. If we were given your address before you had an account here and you never made one, ask us and we delete the record.
• Your answer about the occasional email: while your account exists, because it is the record of what you told us.
• Emails asking you to subscribe: the record that we sent one, while your account exists. An unsubscribe is different: we keep that for as long as the site runs, because deleting it is how somebody starts getting the email again.
• Referral partners and referred purchases: while the partnership runs, and then with the accounting years. Payout details are deleted once the arrangement ends and everything owed has been paid. The record of a referred purchase and the commission it earned is part of our accounts, so it is kept for six years after the end of the relevant tax year like every other payment record.
• A published certificate: visible to anyone with the link until you unpublish it. Unpublishing takes effect immediately. We do not control anything a third party has already copied, which is worth knowing before you publish anything anywhere.
• Waitlist email: until you unsubscribe, or until we have finished the emails you signed up for. No new addresses are being collected.

Under 18?

Parts of the site are useful to sixth-form students, and we design for that: we collect the minimum, apply high-privacy defaults, run no profiling or behavioural tracking, report a sign-up or sale to Google only when the person an ad brought here has said yes, and never knowingly sell to under-18s. Paid products are for adults, or for a parent or guardian buying on a young person’s behalf. If you are under 13, please don’t submit your email address. A parent or guardian can email us to have a young person’s data deleted, no questions asked.

Who processes data for us

These providers process personal data on our behalf, under their standard data-processing terms, and only on our instructions:

• Vercel: hosting and request logs.
• Supabase: our database and the encrypted CV storage.
• Clerk: accounts and sign-in.
• Stripe: payments, subscriptions and refunds. Stripe is a controller in its own right for fraud prevention and its regulatory duties.
• Resend: the emails our system sends, including the order alerts that reach the founders.
• Plausible: aggregate, cookieless statistics. Not loaded at all on your booking page, the CV upload page, a free-access link, our admin screens or the page that checks a certificate.
• Google: aggregate website statistics, through Google Analytics 4. Its purpose is to tell us which pages are read, where visitors come from, and how many accounts and booked sessions came out of that, and nothing else. The first script on every page refuses its tag all three advertising permissions, refuses Google signals, refuses ad personalisation and has the identifiers advertising uses stripped out of anything that does go; we send no User-ID; and we keep the two data-sharing settings that would let Google use what it collects here for its own purposes switched off. Its two cookies are set when you arrive and are turned off in one tap, on the notice or on the cookies page, and it is not loaded at all on your booking page, the CV upload page, a free-access link, our admin screens or the page that checks a certificate. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used.

Google Ads is different, and only reaches you if you agree. If one of our ads brought you here and you said yes, Google Ads collects the click reference and whether it led to an account, a checkout or a payment, as described under “A Google ad click, only if you agree” above. For that Google is not only following our instructions: it uses the reference to measure its ads, under its own advertising terms and privacy policy. No Google advertising script runs on acttuary.com; the list goes from our server to Google’s.

Some of them process data outside the UK. Where that happens it is covered by the UK’s approved transfer safeguards: an adequacy decision, or the International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum. We do not sell personal data to anyone, ever, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it or delete it, ask for it in a portable format, object to processing based on legitimate interests, and withdraw consent at any time. Email hello@acttuary.com. We normally respond within one month. In the limited circumstances allowed by data-protection law, a longer response period or a reasonable administrative fee may apply. If you’re unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk, though we would rather you gave us the chance to fix it first.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS only. CV files sit in private storage that no public URL reaches. Only our server can read them, and only to deliver your review. Administrative access to personal data is access-controlled and limited to authorised members of the Acttuary team who need it to provide or administer the service.

Changes

We’ll update this policy before any new data collection begins, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed.