Privacy Policy

• Your name and email address, when you sign in.
• Your phone number, mailing address and a second email, if you enter them — the address is what a printed booklet is sent to.
• What you write: forum posts, shailos to the Dayanim, and messages to the office.
• Your chaburah and your chavrusa, if you are in one.
• Whether you are on a paid tier, and what you have paid for.
• The email or phone number of someone else, if you give it to us — a chavrusa you invite, or a person you gift a scholarship to. A gift is emailed to that person, with reminders until it is accepted or it lapses.
• Notes the office keeps on your file — calls, emails and meetings with you. Only the office sees them, and they are deleted with your account.

If you were in touch with us before this site opened, we may already hold the details you gave us then — your name, email, phone and mailing address. We use them only to recognize you if you sign in, so your account is filled in for you, and to send you our emails, which you can stop at any time from the link at the foot of each one.

• Which shiurim, booklets and marei mekomos you have opened or marked as done. This is what draws your progress and is visible only to you and to the office.
• How you use the site: the pages you visit, what you click on, which shiurim, booklets and files you open, download or print, and how long each visit lasts. Only the office sees this, and it is used to learn what helps people learn and what needs improving. It does not include your internet address or anything you type. It is kept for as long as you have an account, and is deleted with it.
• If you visit without signing in, a small cookie of our own holds a random number, nothing about who you are, so the same record can be kept for that browser. If you later join or sign in on it, that record becomes part of your account. If you never do, it is deleted after six months.
• With each visit we also note which website you came from, whether you came from one of our ads, how far down each page you read, and the kind of device and browser (for example, “Chrome on Windows”).
• Your written tests and farhers, and their marks, if you take them.
• Whether this browser has visited our homepage before: a small cookie that holds only how many times it has visited and when it last did. It is used to show the homepage’s welcome line to first-time visitors and on every third visit, and for nothing else. It holds nothing about who you are.

• A record of your sign-ins and of failed attempts to sign in to your account — the date, how it was tried, and the kind of device, but not your internet address; our sign-in provider separately keeps the date and internet address of each sign-in. It is what lets the office answer “was that me?”.
• If you set a PIN, we store a scrambled form of it that cannot be turned back into your PIN.
• On the Kollel’s shared computer, the office sets your PIN when you give it to them, and it is stored the same way.
• If you ask a device to be remembered, we store a scrambled form of that device’s cookie — never the cookie itself — so the list cannot be used to impersonate you.
• The cookie that keeps you signed in. It stays on this device until you sign out — we renew it each time you visit rather than making you sign in again — and it is what tells us a request is coming from you. Signing out ends it.
• A few other small cookies of our own, each doing one job: where to take you after you sign in, which program you last used, a short pass after you confirm a payment or a change with an emailed code, what you typed for a gift while you pay for it, which call-back request was yours if you asked us to call you about Yoru Mishpatecha, short notes so a message is shown to you once, and — on the Kollel’s shared computer — that it is the Kollel computer, and when it was last used. None of them is used for advertising.

If you turn on alerts, your browser gives us an address for that one device, which we use to make it ring. Turning them off, or deleting the app, ends it. An alert never contains anything anybody wrote — not a psak, not a message, not a shaila. It says something is waiting, because a notification is drawn on a lock screen that other people can see. The same rule governs our email about a shaila or a psak: it tells you there is something to read, and you read it here.

Running the site needs a handful of companies, and each one sees only its own part:

Payments are handled by our payment processor, Banquest, and your card details go to it and never to us. To renew a plan, or to charge a scholarship gift when it is accepted, we keep the reference Banquest gives us for your card, with its brand, last four digits and expiry date. The card number itself we never see.

Beyond that, we give your information to nobody — except where the law requires it.

• Your name on anything you post in a forum, and on a shaila you ask for your whole chaburah. In the forums you choose how your name is shown; in your chaburah’s learning space it is your full name unless you change it.
• Your name to the members of your chaburah, and to your chavrusa. The heads of your chaburah also see when you joined, whether you have signed in, and whether you have a plan of your own — never your email, phone or address.
• A shaila you ask privately is seen only by you and by Yorucha. On Yoru Mishpatecha that includes the Chavrei HaKollel, who answer them alongside the Dayanim. If you shared one with your chavrusa, he sees it too.
• If you claim a scholarship, the member who paid for it sees your initials, city and state, and you see theirs. If someone gives you a scholarship by name, you see who it is from unless they chose to stay anonymous, and they see only the email or phone they typed.
• On the Kollel’s shared computer, the names of the Chavrei HaKollel are listed there so each can pick his own.

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from My Account. It removes your details, your address, your subscription, what you have learned, your messages with the office, your chaburah membership, your chavrusa, your phone alerts, and any private shailos you asked. It cannot be undone.

It also takes you off the Yorucha mailing list at Constant Contact. If you are on other mailing lists of ours there, those are not changed — each of their emails has a link to stop them.

Two things stay, with your name taken off them: forum posts, and shailos you asked on behalf of your chaburah. Other members are reading those and replying to them, and deleting one person’s words out of a conversation would take away everyone else’s. They appear afterward as written by “a member”. Our record of what you paid, and when, stays too, for bookkeeping.

One more thing stays, and this one keeps your email address: if you asked us to stop sending update emails, we keep a record of that. It is the only way to honor it. If we deleted it along with everything else, and your address later came back to us from an old list, we would start emailing you again — which is the opposite of what you asked for. It holds nothing but the address and the date.

And if someone gave you a scholarship by name, their own record of the gift keeps the email or phone number they typed for you.

Our own list of your sign-ins is deleted with your account. The record our sign-in provider keeps is held as a security log and is not linked to your account once it is gone. If you would rather write to us than press the button, use Message the office and we will do it for you. If you run a chaburah, hand it to another member from your chaburah page first; if there is nobody to hand it to, write to us and we will arrange it.

Yorucha is written for adults learning business halacha, and we do not knowingly collect anything from children under 13.

To see what we hold about you, to have something corrected, or to ask anything on this page, write to yorucha@baishavaad.org.