Privacy notice
How QGF Limited collects, uses and retains personal data for the Global Portfolio Challenge, the public website, and certificate verification.
Who we are
QGF Limited operates the QGF Global Portfolio Challenge and this website at www.qgf.org. For privacy requests write to support@qgf.org with the subject line “Privacy”. Where a university coordinator registers a cohort, the university remains the controller of its own student records; we are the controller of the competition account we create from the registration form.
Data we collect
From participants and mentors: name, email, university, programme of study, team name, role (form submitter or member), language preference, and the content of forms, rationales and support tickets. From visitors: standard server logs (IP address, user agent, referring URL) and any email you send us. From certificate verification: the ID or URL you paste, which is processed to render a public certificate and is not used to build a marketing profile.
We do not require government ID numbers, payment cards or health data to enter Spring 2026. If you volunteer extra information in a free-text box, we will store it as part of that submission.
Why we use it
To run the competition (eligibility, forms, balances, disputes), to communicate deadlines, to issue and verify certificates, to produce anonymised statistics (for example “100+ universities”), and to answer support and media queries. The legal bases we rely on are performance of a contract (your entry), legitimate interests in running a fair educational contest, and consent where you opt into a non-essential mailing.
Cookies and analytics
This is a static site. We do not drop advertising cookies. A language preference may be stored in localStorage on the certificate pages. If a future edition adds a privacy-respecting analytics beacon, this notice will be updated before it goes live.
Sharing
We share data with: email and hosting providers acting as processors; university coordinators for their own cohort (names and team results of students who registered under that university); and anyone who successfully looks up a certificate ID — that lookup reveals the name and award line printed on the certificate, which is the point of a verifiable credential. We do not sell personal data. We do not publish a crawlable directory of named student winners on this website.
International transfers
QGF is a distributed organisation. Data may be processed in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the European Union and other locations where our processors host mail or files. We use processors who offer an appropriate transfer mechanism where one is required.
Retention
Competition accounts and rationales are kept for four years after the season ends so that a graduate can still verify a certificate and so that we can investigate a late conduct complaint. Server logs are rotated on a shorter cycle. Support mail is kept as long as the thread is active and then in archive for the same four-year window unless a longer legal hold applies.
Your rights
Subject to local law, you may request access, correction, deletion, or a copy of the data we hold, and you may object to or restrict certain processing. Certificate records that have already been issued cannot be silently deleted without breaking verification for employers; we can re-issue a corrected certificate and retire the old checksum. We will not honour a request to invent a better score.
Children
The Challenge is aimed at university students. We do not knowingly register children under 16. Adjacent high-school programmes listed on The Field are run by other organisations under their own notices.
Contact
QGF Limited · support@qgf.org · +852 2601 5555. If you are in a jurisdiction with a statutory privacy regulator, you may also lodge a complaint there. We would rather fix the issue first.