Privacy Policy

VLSI Mentor (“we”, “us”, “our”) operates the website at vlsimentor.com, an India-based online education platform for VLSI and semiconductor engineering. This policy explains what data we collect and how we use it.

VLSI Mentor is an India-based educational platform. Formal legal entity and business-address details will be added before paid services are launched.

We collect the information you choose to give us:

• Account & profile. When you sign in and complete your profile, we store your email, full name, and — if you provide them — your phone number, college or organisation, current role, and areas of interest.
• Contact messages. When you use the contact form, we receive your name, email, subject, category, and message.
• Paid-course enquiries. When you submit a course enquiry, we receive your name and email, and optionally your phone number, the course you're interested in, your experience level, your company or college, and a message.
• Enrollment requests. When you request access to a paid product (an MCQ pack or course) we store the enrollment request linked to your account — which product, and the submitted/reviewed timestamps — plus, if a request is reviewed, an admin review note. You pay offline and send your payment screenshot to us through the external contact shown on the enrollment page; we do not collect or upload the screenshot on the site. This is used solely to verify your payment and grant access.

We do not collect or process card numbers, CVV, bank passwords, UPI PINs, OTPs, or any authentication codes, and we never ask for them. We are not a payment processor and make no PCI-compliance claim. Enrollment-request data is retained only as needed to verify access and keep reasonable records. Please do not include sensitive personal data in free-text fields.

We use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to understand aggregate usage — but only after you grant analytics consent. Analytics storage is denied by default on your first visit, so no analytics data is collected until you allow it (see cookies). When granted, GA4 is configured privacy-first: IP addresses are anonymised, Google Signals is disabled, and ad-personalisation signals are disabled. GA4 then collects:

• page views and pages visited;
• device and browser type;
• approximate, coarse (country-level) location;
• referrer / traffic source.

Analytics runs only when you have granted analytics consent (and the site is configured with an analytics measurement ID); otherwise no analytics data is collected. We do not build advertising profiles from this data.

Sign-in, sign-up, and session management are handled by Clerk. Clerk stores your account identity (such as your email and any details from a sign-in provider you choose) to authenticate you. Your use of authentication is subject to Clerk's own privacy practices as our service provider.

We use Resend to send transactional emails to our own team — for example, a notification when someone submits a contact message or a course enquiry, and an internal alert on a successful sign-in. These are operational notifications to us; we do not currently send marketing emails or a newsletter.

The site is hosted on Vercel. Vercel processes standard request data (such as IP address and request metadata) as part of serving and securing the site, acting as our hosting provider.

We use Supabase as our database. To be precise about what is actually stored:

• Stored in the database: your profile record (email, full name, and any optional phone, college, role, and interests you provide).
• Not stored in the database: contact messages and course enquiries are not saved to our database — they are emailed to our team and recorded in server logs so we can respond and keep reasonable operational records.

We use Google Consent Mode v2 with a cookie-consent banner. Cookies fall into three categories:

• Essential — required for the site to work (including sign-in / session). Always on.
• Analytics — GA4 analytics cookies (for example _ga). Denied by default until you grant consent; GA4 runs only when analytics consent is granted.
• Advertising — denied by default. If advertising is enabled on VLSI Mentor, advertising cookies are set only after you grant advertising consent. See advertising for what these cookies do and how to control them.

On your first visit, all optional storage is denied until you choose. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using the “Cookie preferences” link in the footer. The two optional categories are independent: granting analytics never enables advertising, and granting advertising never enables analytics.

VLSI Mentor uses Google AdSense and may use other Google advertising services alongside our free tutorials and articles. Google’s advertising infrastructure is enabled on those pages: the AdSense library loads in your browser and communicates with Google. Visible advertising placements are not currently active — we have not added any advertisement units, so no advertisements are displayed. This section describes how advertising works, so that the choice you make in Cookie preferences is meaningful.

When advertisements are shown on VLSI Mentor:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, may use cookies or similar technologies to select and serve advertisements, to limit the number of times you see the same advertisement, to measure whether an advertisement was effective, and to detect invalid or fraudulent activity.
• Personalised advertising selects advertisements using your previous visits to this and other websites. We permit it only where it is lawful and only when you have granted advertising consent.
• Non-personalised advertising is selected from the general context of the page you are reading and a coarse (country-level) location rather than from a profile of you. Where advertising consent has not been granted, this is the only form of advertising that may be shown; it still uses limited storage for frequency capping and fraud prevention.
• Your advertising consent controls this. Advertising storage is denied by default on your first visit. We use Google Consent Mode v2, so your advertising choice is passed to Google as a signal and applies before advertising storage is used.

Google processes the data it collects through its own advertising services under its own policies rather than ours. You can read how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Controlling advertising. You can change or withdraw your advertising consent at any time from “Cookie preferences” in the footer. Independently of this site, you can manage or turn off Google personalised advertising at myadcenter.google.com, and opt out of personalised advertising from many other vendors at optout.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.eu. Your browser settings also let you block or delete cookies.

Where advertising is not shown. Google’s advertising library is loaded only on our free tutorial and article pages. It is not loaded on the home page, on browsing and index pages, on sign-in and sign-up pages, on your account and dashboard pages, on enrolment or payment pages, or inside MCQ papers and assessments. Advertising is also kept out of paid content you have enrolled in.

Advertising is separate from analytics. Our analytics configuration keeps Google Signals and ad-personalisation signals disabled, and we do not build advertising profiles from analytics data.

• to create and manage your account and profile;
• to respond to your contact messages and course enquiries;
• to understand aggregate, anonymised usage and improve our content;
• to operate, secure, and maintain the platform.

In plain English: we process your information to provide the service you ask for (such as answering an enquiry or maintaining your account), and, where the law requires it, on the basis of your consent. We are not claiming any specific regulatory certification; we aim to handle your data responsibly and only as described here.

We share data only with the providers that help us run the service, acting on our behalf: Clerk (authentication), Supabase (database), Resend (transactional email), Vercel (hosting), and Google Analytics (privacy-first analytics).

We do not sell your personal data. We do not give any advertising vendor your name, email address, phone number, profile details, or the contents of messages you send us. If advertising is enabled, the vendors that serve it — including Google — act as independent third parties for that advertising rather than as providers acting on our behalf; see advertising.

We keep your profile for as long as your account is active. Contact and enquiry emails and logs are kept for as long as needed to respond to you and to maintain reasonable operational records, after which they may be deleted. You can ask us to remove your profile data (see your rights).

We serve the site over HTTPS, rely on reputable infrastructure providers, and keep server-side secrets (such as service keys) on the server only, never exposed to the browser. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete the profile information we hold about you. We handle these requests manually — we do not currently offer automated self-service deletion — so please reach out via the contact page and we will action reasonable requests.

VLSI Mentor is intended for students and working professionals in engineering. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact us and we will remove it.

Our service providers may process and store data on infrastructure located in various countries. By using the site, you understand that your information may be processed outside your country of residence, in line with this policy.

We may update this policy as the platform evolves — for example, when advertising is switched on, or when a new service provider is introduced. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.

For any privacy question or request, use the contact page or email support@vlsimentor.com.