Privacy Policy

Who We Are

This Privacy Policy describes how TwentyMinutes LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company ("Twenty Minutes", "we" or "us"), handles information about you when you use the Twenty Minutes website and service (the "Service"). Our mailing address is 971 US Highway 202N, Ste N, Branchburg, NJ 08876.

If you have any questions about your information, contact us at hello@twentyminutes.co. Messages to this address are read by a person.

Twenty Minutes is an independent service. It is not part of, run by, or endorsed by any university.

Information We Collect

Information from all users

• Your email address, your name, and your confirmation that you are 18 or older.
• A record of your agreement to our Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy, including the date and the version you agreed to.
• Your network (IP) address when you sign in or use a part of the Service that is rate limited, so that we can prevent any one person from overwhelming it. We use it in short-lived counters and do not store it alongside your email address.
• A log of the emails we send you, so that we do not send the same message twice and can tell whether a message failed to send.

Information from students

• Your school, the track and role you are pursuing (in your own words if no listed role fits), your recruiting cycle and your year.
• Your interests, the topics you want help with, and your neighborhood.
• Optional background facts about your path, chosen from a list. The list covers how you came to the field, your recruiting timeline, the internships you have completed, whether you are the first in your family to attend college, whether you have family or other connections in the industry, and how many hours a week you work. None of these is required, and you choose which of them a mentor may see.
• The brief you write when you book a time, describing what you are stuck on and anything you want the mentor to know before the meeting. Do not include sensitive information in your brief.
• Optionally, one line about yourself outside school or work, which you can add to your brief. It is shown to the mentor you book and to no one else.
• Private notes you keep about a meeting, for your own use.
• Your answers to the short survey after a meeting, including a question about whether anything made you uncomfortable.
• Your answers to questions about the Service itself, which are part of the form we send after a meeting. We link these answers to your email address.

Information from mentors

• Your school and graduation year, your firm, your role and team, and the tracks and topics you can help with.
• Optionally, background facts about your own path (from the same list students choose from), your interests and neighborhood, whether you prefer to meet in person or on video, and any topics you ask not to be asked about.
• The short pitch you write for your card, and your LinkedIn profile address, which the founders may review to confirm who you are. Students see your LinkedIn address only if you tick the box that says so.
• Optionally, answers to a few prompts about who you are beyond work, a short personal note, and a switch that shows a small "Open to talking beyond work" label on your card. You choose what to write. Students can read it before they book and again before they meet you.
• Optionally, an email address that students can use to contact you after they have booked a time with you.
• The weekly hours and one-off times you make available.

Information from your use of the Service

• Which times were booked, held, cancelled or missed, and who cancelled.
• Which mentors were shown to each student, in what order, together with the scores we calculated and the reason lines shown on each card. We refer to these as the "research records".

Sources of information

Most of this information comes directly from you. We also receive information from two other sources:

• Invitations. At present, users join by invitation. The founders assemble lists of people they know or have been introduced to, and send invitations to those addresses. If you were invited as a mentor, we held your first and last name and your email address, on an account record created for the invitation, before you took any action. If you decline the invitation, that account record remains, with a note that you declined, so that we do not contact you again. If you were invited as a student, we held your email address and, in some cases, your first name. A student invitation that is not answered is deleted 14 days after it expires. An invitation that a founder schedules for later is held, with the pasted names and email addresses, until it is sent, for up to 30 days, and is deleted 14 days after it is sent or cancelled. If a student asks us to stop contacting them, we keep only their email address.
• Mentor requests. A person who asks to become a mentor provides their name, email address, firm, title and LinkedIn address, and confirms that they control the email address by entering a code. We delete the request 14 days after we decide it.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information for the following purposes:

• To provide the Service: to sign you in, to show a student mentors who may be able to help, to reserve a time, to send confirmations and reminders, and to set up a video call.
• To keep the Service safe: to limit abuse, to investigate a report of discomfort, and to remove anyone who breaks the rules in our Terms of Use.
• To improve the Service. Students see mentors in an order set by a scoring formula that uses their answers. We keep a record of what was shown and what happened next, and we study which pairings lead to a second conversation. This is research into how to make better introductions.
• To communicate with you about the Service, including sign-in codes, bookings, reminders and changes to our Terms of Use or this policy. These messages are part of the Service, and you cannot opt out of them while you have an account.

If we share the results of this research with anyone other than the founders, we will share only totals and patterns, or information from which names, email addresses and anything else that identifies a person have been removed. We will not provide individual records to a university, an employer or anyone else.

The scoring formula determines which mentors appear first on a board. It does not make any decision about your rights, your employment or your finances.

How We Share Your Information

What a mentor sees about a student who books them

• The student's first name and last initial.
• The student's year, track and campus, if they provided one. The mentor does not see the student's school.
• The topics they want help with, and whether they prefer to meet in person or on video.
• The student's brief, including what they wrote and any figures they provided. The brief is also emailed to the mentor.
• The optional line about themselves outside school or work, if the student wrote one.
• Only the background facts the student chose to share. A mentor does not see the student's other background answers, full last name or survey answers.
• The system behind that screen also returns the student's interests and neighborhood to our software, but they are not shown to the mentor.
• For a video meeting, the calendar event lists both participants' email addresses, so the mentor can see the student's email address there (see "Service providers" below).

What a student sees about a mentor

• The mentor's card: name, firm, role, the pitch they wrote and the times they offer. A mentor chooses, item by item, which background facts students may see.
• Anything the mentor chose to write about who they are beyond work (answers to a few prompts and a short note), and a label if they said they are open to talking beyond work. A student sees it on the mentor's page, on their confirmation and in the reminder emails before the meeting.
• The mentor's LinkedIn address, only if the mentor chose to show it.
• After a booking, the mentor's contact email address, if the mentor has chosen to provide one.
• The video call link.

Neither participant sees the other's answers to the survey after the meeting. New mentor cards remain hidden until a founder has approved the mentor.

The founders

Because we operate the Service, the founders can see more than the participants can, including profiles, bookings, briefs and survey answers. A report of discomfort is sent to the founders immediately.

Service providers

We use the following companies to operate the Service. Each one handles your information only to perform services for us:

• Vercel hosts the website and runs our scheduled jobs (United States).
• Supabase hosts our database (United States).
• Resend sends our email.
• Google provides Calendar and Meet. Most meetings are video calls, and when we can, we create a Google Meet link for you. When we do, both participants' email addresses are added to a calendar event owned by our own Google account, which is how the link works for both of you. Our own email is hosted on Google Workspace.
• Cloudflare manages our domain name.

Other disclosures

• We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising.
• We do not tell your university anything about you. We currently send no information to any university.
• We may disclose information if the law requires it, or if we believe disclosure is necessary to protect someone from harm. Where we are permitted to, we will notify you first.
• If our business is ever sold or merged, your information would be transferred as part of that transaction, and the commitments in this policy would continue to apply to it until we notified you of a change.

Cookies and Similar Technologies

We set two cookies of our own, both strictly necessary: one keeps you signed in, and the other stores the state of a sign-in you have started. A draft you are writing is saved in your own browser. Our host may also set its own security cookie if traffic appears suspicious. We use no analytics, advertising or tracking tools, our fonts are served from our own site, and the site is configured so that a page cannot load scripts from another company. See our Cookie Notice for details.

We do not track you across other websites, and we do not sell or share your information for advertising. As a result, there is nothing for browser signals such as Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control to turn off.

Data Retention

We keep information for the following periods:

• Your account, profile, briefs, notes and survey answers: for as long as your account is open. If you delete your account, we delete this information.
• Research records (which mentors were shown to which students, and what happened next): 24 months, after which they are deleted. They are kept for that period even if you delete your account sooner, linked to an internal account number and not to your name or email address.
• Sign-in sessions: 14 days. A sign-in code is valid for ten minutes.
• The counters that limit sign-in attempts, which include your network (IP) address: about seven days.
• Email logs for messages sent to an address that has no account, such as a sign-in code or an invitation: up to 90 days.
• Requests to become a mentor: 14 days after we decide them.
• The account record created when a mentor is invited: kept if the mentor declines, with a note that they declined, and deleted if the account is deleted.
• Student invitations that are not answered: 14 days after they expire. If you asked us to stop contacting you, we keep only your email address, for as long as we need it to honor that request.
• Information the law requires us to keep: for as long as the law requires.

Your Rights and Choices

These rights apply to every user of Twenty Minutes, wherever you live. You may ask us to:

• tell you what information we hold about you, and provide you with a copy;
• correct information that is inaccurate;
• delete your information;
• provide your information in a portable format that you can take elsewhere;
• stop using your information for a purpose you previously agreed to (withdrawing your consent).

To make a request, email hello@twentyminutes.co from the address associated with your account. You can also delete your account yourself: while signed in, select "Delete my account" in the footer at the bottom of the page.

We will respond within 45 days. If we need more time, we will tell you why before the 45 days end. We will not charge you for a request, and we will not treat you differently for making one.

If we deny your request, or you disagree with our response, you may ask for an appeal by replying to our response. We will review the decision and tell you the result in writing within 45 days. If you remain dissatisfied, you may file a complaint with the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs (https://www.njconsumeraffairs.gov) or the New York Attorney General (https://ag.ny.gov). You do not need to use our appeal process first.

Security

The Service is delivered over an encrypted connection. Sign-in codes are stored in a hashed form, so we cannot read them back. Your sign-in cookie cannot be read by scripts running on the page.

The two founders have access to the database in order to operate and maintain the Service. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise that a security incident will never occur.

If we learn that your information has been exposed in a way that could harm you, we will notify you by email without unreasonable delay, and we will notify the authorities where the law requires.

Children

You must be 18 or older to use the Service. Every meeting is a private conversation between two adults, which is why we ask you to confirm that you are 18 or older before you can sign in. We do not verify dates of birth. If we learn that a person under 18 has an account, we will close the account and delete their information, except for any information the law requires us to keep.

Where We Process Your Information

We process your information in the United States. The Service is designed for students and mentors in the United States and is not intended for use in the European Union or the United Kingdom.

Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy. The date at the top of this page shows when the current version took effect. If we make a material change, such as a new use of your information, we will email you and ask you to agree again on your next visit. We may make minor changes, such as correcting a typo, without notice.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, contact TwentyMinutes LLC, 971 US Highway 202N, Ste N, Branchburg, NJ 08876, or email hello@twentyminutes.co.