Your
information.

The Anvil is a student-led entrepreneurship organization at Purdue University. We are an independent student organization. We are not operated by Purdue University, we are not a university department, and this is not a university privacy policy. When we say Purdue students, we mean the people we serve, not who runs us.

This policy covers anvilstartups.com, including our event pages, our signup and application forms, and Ember, the founder directory described below. Questions about any of it go to TheAnvil@purdue.edu, which reaches the students who actually maintain these systems.

We only collect what you type in. We do not track you across other websites, we do not run advertising pixels, and we do not build profiles from third-party sources.

Event registration

Your name and email, plus whichever of these the event asks for: phone number, year in school, major, whether you are working on a startup and what it is, dietary restrictions, and how you heard about us. We use it to plan the room, to know who to expect, and to email you about that event.

Contact form

Your name, email, the role you picked, and your message. Used to reply to you.

Team application

Your name, email, phone, year, major, LinkedIn, the teams you applied to, and your written answers. Used to evaluate applications for that recruiting cycle.

Ember profile

Whatever you choose to put in it: your name, what you are building, your skills, what you are looking for. This one is public. See the next section.

Newsletter

Your email address, if you subscribe. Not currently connected to any provider, so at the moment nothing is stored.

We do not ask for and do not want your student ID number, your grades, your date of birth, or any government identifier. Please do not put them in a free-text box.

This is the most important section on the page, so it is deliberately blunt.

Ember is a private directory, not a public one. It is not readable by the open internet and it is not indexed by search engines. Access is an allowlist that The Anvil controls: a named set of people, mostly students and staff at partner Purdue entrepreneurship organizations, who have been approved individually. The database refuses to return a single record to anyone not on that list, so this is enforced by the system rather than by a setting someone could forget.

It is still a directory, which means the people on that list can see your profile, and that list grows as the Purdue entrepreneurship community does. Treat it as a room full of founders, mentors, and organizers rather than as a private note to us. We can remove you from it at any time, and we will the moment you ask.

Event registrations are narrower still. Your registration is visible only to the small number of Anvil team members who run events, and only after they sign in. It is not shared with partner organizations, it is never shown on the event page, and the public page shows at most a count of how many spots are taken, never who took them.

These two are joined only by your explicit choice. When you register for an event you may tick a box asking to be added to Ember. It is unticked by default, ticking it is never required to attend, and even after you tick it a person on our team reviews the entry before any profile appears. Nothing you type into an event form is published automatically.

Three categories, and no others. We do not sell, rent, or trade your information, and we never will.

• The Anvil team. Event registrations and applications are readable by the students on our team who need them. Access is controlled per person and revoked when someone leaves.
• Partner organizations, for Ember only. Ember is built to be shared across the Purdue entrepreneurship community, so approved people at other student organizations we work with can see the profiles in it. Access is granted person by person and can be revoked. Nothing you submitted privately, such as an event registration or an application, is ever shared with them.
• Service providers that operate the site for us, such as our database, email, and hosting providers. They process data on our instructions and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes. Ask us and we will tell you who they are.

We will also disclose information if the law actually requires it. If that ever happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

• Event registrations: through the event and the semester that follows, so we can measure what we ran and follow up. Then deleted or reduced to anonymous counts.
• Team applications: through the recruiting cycle and the following academic year, so a later cohort can see who applied before.
• Ember profiles: for as long as you want one. Ask us and it is removed.
• Contact messages: as long as the conversation is useful, and no longer than a year after it ends.

We are a student organization with turnover every year, so these are the periods we hold ourselves to rather than an automated guarantee. If you want something gone sooner, ask and we will delete it.

• Attend without joining anything. Leave the Ember box unticked. You will still be registered for the event.
• Get a copy of what we hold about you. Email us and we will send it.
• Correct anything that is wrong. Email us, or edit your Ember profile directly if you have one.
• Be removed. Email us and we will delete your registrations, your profile, or both. We do not require a reason.
• Stop the email. Every announcement we send has an unsubscribe option, and you can reply to any message asking to be taken off. Transactional mail about an event you registered for is not marketing and is not covered by that, though you can ask us to stop that too.

Requests go to TheAnvil@purdue.edu. We aim to answer within a couple of weeks, which is realistic for a student team during a semester.

Access to event registrations is enforced by the database itself rather than by the website. Someone who is not on our team allowlist reads nothing, whatever page or address they try. Our team signs in with one-time codes sent to email, so there are no shared passwords to leak, and removing someone from the allowlist revokes their access immediately.

We should be honest about the limits. We are students, not a security company, and no system is perfect. We keep the amount of information we hold small on purpose, because the most reliable way to protect something is not to collect it.

Our events and programs are intended for university students and are not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has submitted information to us, email us and we will delete it.

When we change this policy we update the version at the top of the page. Every event registration records the version that was on screen when it was submitted, so what you agreed to stays attached to your entry rather than being quietly replaced by a later version. If a change materially affects information we already hold, we will contact the people affected rather than relying on you to re-read this page.