Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2 November 2026  ·  Applies to ticnes.ai and its subdomains

1. Who we are

This website, ticnes.ai, and the platforms published on its subdomains (including scholarship-hackathon.ticnes.ai, photo-vault.ticnes.ai, ai-bootcamp-training.ticnes.ai, q-mvutu.ticnes.ai and lei-geral-do-trabalho-12-2023.ticnes.ai) are operated by TICNES, Lda., trading as TICNES AI (“TICNES AI”, “we”, “us”).

We are the data controller for personal data processed through these sites. Our contact address for all privacy matters, including data-protection requests, is dr.jorgeclemente@proton.me.

2. What data we collect

2.1 Information you give us

• Contact and enquiry details — your name, email address, organisation, phone number if you supply one, and the content of your message, when you write to us or submit a consultation or contact form.
• Account details — where a platform requires registration, the name, email address and authentication method you choose. If you sign in with a third-party identity provider, we receive only the basic profile information that provider releases to us (typically name, email address and profile identifier). We never receive your password for that provider.
• Scholarship and competition submissions — the material you submit to a programme we run, together with the information needed to evaluate it and, for award recipients, to disburse funds.
• Content you create in our products — for example text you ask an assistant to process, or tags and captions you add. Products designed to run locally (such as our desktop photo library) keep that content on your device unless you explicitly send it somewhere.

2.2 Information collected automatically

• Server and security logs — IP address, request path, timestamp, user agent, referrer, and response status. These records are used to operate the service, diagnose faults and detect abuse.
• Aggregated performance data — page load and interaction timing collected in aggregate to keep the sites fast on slow connections. This data is not used to build a profile of you.
• Cookie and advertising identifiers — described in sections 4 and 5.

2.3 What we do not collect

We do not knowingly collect special-category data (such as health, religious belief or political opinion), we do not ask for payment card numbers on this website, and we do not buy personal data from data brokers.

3. Why we process it (legal bases)

• To answer your enquiry and provide the service you asked for — performance of a contract, or steps taken at your request before entering one.
• To operate, secure and improve the sites — our legitimate interest in running a reliable and abuse-free service.
• To serve advertising and measure it — your consent, where consent is required, and otherwise our legitimate interest in funding the free parts of our platforms.
• To meet legal, tax and accounting obligations — compliance with a legal obligation, including record-keeping for scholarship disbursements.

4. Cookies and similar technologies

A cookie is a small text file placed on your device by a website. We also use related technologies such as local storage, which behave similarly for the purposes described here. Cookies fall into four groups on our sites:

• Strictly necessary. Required for the site to function: session continuity, security tokens that prevent cross-site request forgery, and load balancing. These cannot be switched off without breaking the service.
• Preference. Remember your language choice (English or Portuguese) and interface settings, so you do not have to reselect them on every visit.
• Analytics. Aggregate measurement of which pages are used and how quickly they load. Configured to avoid identifying individuals where the provider allows it.
• Advertising. Set by Google and its partners on pages where advertisements are displayed, as described in section 5.

You can delete or block cookies through your browser settings. Every major browser allows you to view stored cookies, delete them, block third-party cookies, and set per-site rules. Blocking strictly necessary cookies will prevent parts of the site — particularly sign-in — from working.

5. Advertising, Google AdSense and third-party vendors

Some pages on our platforms display advertising. Advertising revenue funds programmes that we offer without charge, including our student scholarship competition.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to our sites and/or other sites on the internet.
• Google uses the DoubleClick DART cookie for this purpose. Users may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
• You can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalised advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info. Users in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom can additionally use www.youronlinechoices.eu.
• Our advertising partners maintain their own privacy policies. Google’s is available at policies.google.com/technologies/ads and describes how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Opting out of personalised advertising does not remove advertising. It means the ads you see are selected from contextual signals, such as the content of the page, rather than from a profile of your browsing history. You can also reset or refuse advertising identifiers through your device settings on mobile.

We do not permit advertising on pages that collect sensitive information, and we do not place ads inside our legal, privacy or support documentation.

6. How we share information

We do not sell personal data. We share it only in the following circumstances:

• Service providers that host our infrastructure, deliver email, process payments or provide advertising. They act on our instructions under contract and may not use the data for their own purposes.
• Advertising partners such as Google, as described in section 5, when ads are displayed.
• Programme partners — where a scholarship or competition is run with a named partner, the information needed to evaluate submissions and disburse awards may be shared with that partner, and we say so in the programme’s own terms.
• Legal requirements — where disclosure is required by law, court order or a competent authority, or where it is necessary to investigate fraud or protect the safety of a person.
• Business transfer — if the company or a platform is transferred, data may move with it, subject to this policy remaining in force for the data already collected.

7. How long we keep it

• Enquiries: up to 24 months after the last exchange, so that we can pick up a conversation that resumes later.
• Account data: for as long as the account exists, and 12 months after closure to handle disputes and legal claims.
• Scholarship records: for the period required by the programme’s funders and by applicable accounting and tax law.
• Server logs: typically 30 days, and longer where retained for a specific security investigation.

When data is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for, it is deleted or irreversibly anonymised.

8. How we protect it

Traffic to our sites is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3. Data at rest is encrypted with AES-GCM-256, with tenant partitioning so that one customer’s records cannot be read through another’s credentials. Access is granted on a least-privilege basis and reviewed; autonomous workloads execute inside isolated sandboxes. Our fuller description is published in the Security Whitepaper.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a high risk to your rights, we will notify the competent supervisory authority within 72 hours and inform affected users without undue delay.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectify data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erase data, subject to legal retention obligations.
• Restrict or object to processing, including processing for direct marketing.
• Port data you provided to us in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing that already took place.
• Complain to a supervisory authority — in Portugal, the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD); in Angola, the relevant authority under the Angolan data-protection framework.

To exercise any of these rights, write to dr.jorgeclemente@proton.me with enough detail for us to locate your data. We respond within one month and do not charge a fee for reasonable requests. We may ask for proof of identity to prevent disclosure to the wrong person.

10. Children

Our platforms are intended for users aged 16 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. Where a scholarship programme is open to younger students, the programme’s own terms set the requirements for parental or guardian consent. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

11. International transfers

Our infrastructure is distributed and some providers process data outside your country of residence. Where personal data leaves the jurisdiction in which it was collected, we rely on appropriate safeguards — standard contractual clauses, adequacy decisions where they exist, or an explicit consent basis for specific transfers. You can request a copy of the safeguards in place for your data.

12. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the way we process data changes. The date at the top of the page reflects the current version. Material changes affecting rights or the purposes of processing are announced on the site before they take effect.

13. How to contact us

TICNES, Lda. (TICNES AI)
Data protection contact: dr.jorgeclemente@proton.me
Website: ticnes.ai  ·  Contact page: ticnes.ai/contact/

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to your national data-protection supervisory authority.