Privacy policy

This page explains the data that Ofoq handles, why we need it, how long we keep it, how we protect it, and what you can do about it. It applies to the ofoq.co website and to the Ofoq service itself: the dashboard from which a teacher runs their platform, and the teacher’s platform that their students use.

Public sign-up for teachers has not opened yet, and what this page describes is how the service works today.

Who runs Ofoq

Ofoq is run by a team from Egypt, which provides the service under the brand name Ofoq alone. We have not appointed a data protection officer, and we have no email address, phone number or form for receiving privacy requests. The “Your rights and how to use them” section below explains what can be done today.

The ofoq.co website

The website sets no cookies, uses no advertising or tracking tools, and has no forms that collect data. It measures its visits with a measurement tool that uses no cookies and shows us aggregate statistics, such as the number of visits, the pages opened, where visits came from and how fast pages loaded. The website’s security settings stop your browser from loading fonts or scripts from other sites, apart from this measurement tool.

The home page, in both its Arabic and English versions, keeps only two values in your browser’s session storage (sessionStorage):

• The value ofoq:q stores the level of motion that suits your device (low or high), so that it is not chosen again each time you open the page in the same tab.
• The value ofoq:p stores the page’s path and your position on it, so that you return to the same position when you reload the page or come back to it.

Both values stay in your browser until you close the tab, and they are not sent to us or to anyone else. To choose the level of motion, the home page reads some of your device’s characteristics inside your browser, such as its memory size, its number of processors, its approximate connection type, its data-saver setting and its reduced-motion preference, and it may measure how fast your device displays motion. These characteristics are not stored or sent anywhere.

The website reaches you through a content delivery network that processes the technical data of each request, such as the IP address, the browser type and the page requested, to deliver the pages and protect them from abuse, and shows us aggregate statistics from it, such as the number of requests and the countries they came from. Your browser may also send this network a short technical report if a page fails to load, which it uses to follow up on its faults.

Basis: our legitimate interest in running and protecting the website.

Data about teachers and their teams

When a platform is created, and while it is used, we store:

• The platform’s name and link, the name of its owner, and the username they sign in with.
• The password, stored in a way that does not let anyone read it, not even the Ofoq team.
• The details of the team members the teacher adds: their name, their username, the role that sets their permissions, and their password, stored in the same way.
• What the teacher adds to their platform: levels, courses, lectures, offers, files and images, the text of its home page and its appearance settings, and the contact details the teacher chooses to display.
• A record of each sign-in to the dashboard that includes the browser type and the operating system, deleted automatically 3 days after the sign-in.

We do not ask the teacher for an email address or a phone number.

Purpose and basis: providing the service the teacher asks for and securing access to it, in performance of the agreement between us in the Terms of use.

Retention: for as long as the platform exists, and then as described in the “Closing a platform and deleting data” section below, except for sign-in records.

Student data on teachers’ platforms

The teacher is responsible for their students’ data, and Ofoq processes it on the teacher’s behalf and only to run their platform. The details are in the Student data processing terms.

A teacher’s platform stores the following about each student:

• What the student enters when signing up: their name, their phone number, their guardian’s phone number, their governorate, their school level, and a password stored in the same way.
• A code for each device the student signs in from, calculated inside their browser from the screen size, the memory size and the number of processors, and used only to apply the device limit the teacher sets. The code stays on the student’s account until the teacher resets the student’s devices or deletes the account.
• A record of each sign-in that includes the browser type and the operating system, deleted automatically 7 days after the sign-in.
• What the student sends themselves through the platform’s pages after signing in.
• What the teacher and their team record about the student: their subscriptions, the bills the team records after the student pays them, follow-up calls, notes, and the status of the student’s account, such as a freeze.

The teacher edits a student’s data from the dashboard and can delete the student’s account. When they do, the student’s sign-up data, device codes and what they sent through the platform are deleted, and their sign-in sessions end, while the subscriptions, bills, follow-up calls and notes that the team entered remain in the platform’s records.

We do not use student data for any purpose of our own. The Ofoq team can access any platform when this is needed to run the service, fix a fault or check for misuse, and does not use this ability for anything else.

Basis: the teacher’s instructions and their use of their platform. Retention: for as long as the student’s account exists, except for sign-in records, and what remains after the account is deleted, as described above.

What the public can see on a teacher’s platform

• The teacher’s name, photo and page text, and any phone number, WhatsApp number, email address or social media link they put on their platform: all of this is visible to anyone who opens the platform, and it may appear in search engine results. So do not put a personal number there unless you want anyone to see it.
• The files and images the teacher uploads are stored with a cloud storage provider. Anyone who has a file’s direct link can open it, and the file may remain available at that link after the content it was attached to is deleted. So do not upload files that contain personal data.
• When a student opens a video in a lecture, the player is loaded from the video service the teacher linked the video from, and that service handles data about the student’s device under its own policy.

Basis: the teacher’s choice of what to display.

Cookies and browser storage in the dashboard and teachers’ platforms

The dashboard uses one sign-in cookie, and a teacher’s platform uses one sign-in cookie for the student. Neither is set until you sign in to your account. This cookie is needed to keep you signed in, the page’s scripts cannot read it, it is not used for tracking, and it ends when you sign out, or after 3 days in the dashboard and 7 days on a teacher’s platform.

The dashboard and a teacher’s platform also keep some preferences and display data in your browser, such as light or dark mode, the state of the menu, the student’s name as shown on the platform, the notice the student closed, and the page the student returns to after signing in. A teacher’s platform also keeps a draft of a student’s choices on a page they have not submitted yet. The draft is deleted when they submit it or sign out, and it is kept for no more than 7 days. These values stay on your device and are not used to track you.

The dashboard measures its visits with a measurement tool that uses no cookies and shows us aggregate statistics, such as the number of visits, the pages that were opened and how fast they loaded.

Abuse protection and technical logs

• To protect sign-in and sign-up from repeated attempts, the Ofoq server keeps IP addresses in its memory temporarily, for no more than an hour.
• The server’s technical logs record the type of each request, its path, its result and its time, and a description of the error if a request fails, without the IP address and without the content of the request. The hosting provider keeps these logs for the period it sets.
• The hosting providers we rely on may keep technical logs of their own under their own policies.

Basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the service.

Closing a platform and deleting data

• Some things deleted from the dashboard remain stored: deleted content moves to the dashboard’s trash and can be restored, and deleting a team member stops their access while their data remains stored on the platform.
• Today, only we can close a platform. When a platform is closed, it stops being shown and every sign-in session to it ends, but its data remains stored, and its uploaded files remain available to anyone who has their direct link, because there is no automatic deletion of them yet.
• When a platform is permanently deleted under the Terms of use, Ofoq deletes its data, including its students’ data, and its uploaded files within 90 days.

Your rights and how to use them

You have the right to know what data we keep about you, and to ask for it to be corrected or deleted, for its processing to be restricted, or to object to its processing. This is what can be done today:

• The teacher: sees the data of their platform, their team and their students in the dashboard, edits it, and deletes whatever the dashboard lets them delete. For anything the dashboard does not offer, such as closing the platform or deleting its data permanently, there is no way today to send us that request; it will go through support inside the dashboard once that is added.
• The student: their data is on their teacher’s platform, so they ask the teacher to see, correct or delete it, through the contact channels the teacher shows on their platform.
• A website visitor: the ofoq.co website keeps no data about you that identifies you, apart from what the delivery network and the measurement tool process, as described above.

Data security

• Each platform’s data is kept separate from every other platform’s, and each request is limited to its own platform.
• Sign-in sessions are kept in cookies that the page’s scripts cannot read, and changes made in the dashboard are protected against forged requests.
• The number of sign-in attempts is limited, and each student has a device limit and one active session.
• Data is stored with hosting and cloud service providers outside Egypt, who process it on our behalf and only to run the service.
• We do not sell personal data, we do not share it for advertising, we do not send marketing messages, and we do not disclose it to anyone else unless the law requires us to.

Even so, no system is entirely free of risk.

If a breach happens

If we learn of an incident affecting personal data that we handle, we work to contain it and publish a notice on this website as soon as possible, and we also send it by WhatsApp message to the affected teachers whose accounts have a registered number. The notice explains what happened, which data was affected, what we did and what they can do, and we help the teacher inform their students if needed.

Children

The ofoq.co website and teacher accounts are intended for people aged 18 or over, and the website does not ask its visitors for data. Teachers’ platforms, however, may be used by students under 18, and in that case the teacher is responsible for obtaining their guardians’ consent where required, as the Student data processing terms explain.

Changes to this policy

We publish any change on this page with a new effective date and a new version. If we need to collect data that this page does not mention, as will happen when public sign-up opens, we will list it here before we start collecting it.