Privacy Policy & Data Protection

1. Statutory Framework & Data Fiduciary

This Privacy Policy sets out the institutional data handling practices of New Media Animation (NMA) (“Academy”, “we”, “us”, or “our”), acting as a Data Fiduciary under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and adhering to the Information Technology Act, 2000 along with the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011.

This policy governs all data processing activities across our public web portals, admissions counter, classroom attendance terminals, examinations module, and student learning management consoles. By visiting our portal, applying for course admissions, or submitting an enquiry, you consent to the collection, storage, and processing of your personal data as outlined herein.

In full compliance with child protection guidelines, student privacy norms, and DPDP mandates:

• Zero Public Disclosure of Student Photos: Student profile photographs uploaded during admission or profile completion are strictly stored in private, unindexed server vaults (/storage/students/) outside the public root.
• Authenticated Streaming Only: Student images and confidential academic records are completely shielded from unauthenticated public access. Any direct request without verified role session credentials triggers an automatic HTTP 403 Forbidden rejection.
• Anti-Hotlinking & Anti-Scraping Protection: Direct downloads, search bot hotlinking, and unauthorized third-party harvesting of student candidate imagery are prevented via firewall rewrite rules and cryptographic session validators.
• Privacy First Media Storage: All uploaded administration media is converted into modern WebP binary streams with sanitized filenames, stripping proprietary EXIF telemetry and camera location metadata.

3. Categories of Information Collected

4. Academic & Operational Purpose

Personal data is processed strictly for legitimate educational purposes, including:

• Conducting coursework, 2D/3D animation software practicals, VFX editing drills, and web programming sessions.
• Issuing unique Enrolment Numbers and assigning reserved computer terminal workstations.
• Administering academic evaluations and issuing QR-coded, tamper-proof Certificates of Completion.
• Facilitating studio placements, campus recruitment drives, and employer portfolio reviews.
• Sending critical academic alerts, fee due notifications, holiday advisories, and timetable updates via official Email communication.

Institutional Declaration: Admission once finalized will not be cancelled and fees paid (including registration charges, tuition installments, and examination fees) are strictly non-refundable under any circumstances.

Due to strictly capped batch sizes, dedicated high-end GPU workstation reservations, and upfront software licensing allocation per enrolled candidate, seats cannot be transferred, exchanged, or refunded once batch timing has been assigned.

6. Credential Retention & Verification

Under Indian educational standards, graduate certification records, certificate codes, and course completion transcripts are retained indefinitely on our verified ledger to enable lifelong employer background checks via our public verification portal (/verify-certificate).

Temporary session logs, contact inquiry tickets, and unfulfilled application drafts are archived or securely purged after statutory limitation periods.

7. Cookies & Generative AI Search Crawlers

Our portal utilizes essential first-party cookies for secure authentication and CSRF session verification. We do not sell user data to advertising aggregators.

Public Content & AI Search Indexing: Publicly available academic curricula, course outlines, placement records, and institutional tutorials are open for discovery by ethical web crawlers and Generative AI knowledge systems (including Google, OpenAI GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Apple Intelligence) to facilitate educational discovery and accurate course information retrieval. Private directories, student records, and administration modules remain strictly restricted.

In accordance with Rule 5(9) of the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011 and Section 12 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the details of the designated Institutional Grievance Officer are provided below:

Resolution Timeline: All data grievances and rectification requests submitted with appropriate identity verification will be acknowledged within 48 hours and definitively resolved within 15 to 30 calendar days as mandated by Indian statutory provisions.