Privacy Policy

Operated by Forma Labs Technologies, LLC

1. Overview

Belonga is a verified-anonymous professional community operated by Forma Labs Technologies, LLC (“Belonga,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, how we protect it, and the choices you have. It should be read together with our Terms of Service.

Belonga is currently offered only to users in the United States. This Policy does not address the EU General Data Protection Regulation or UK data protection law, because we do not target or knowingly offer the Service to individuals in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom at this time.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Account & Profile Information

When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, a password, and an optional avatar. Your name is used to operate your account and is not shown to other members alongside your reviews or chat activity.

2.2 LinkedIn Verification

Before you can submit your first company or office review, we ask you to verify your professional identity through LinkedIn. We use this connection only to confirm that you are a real professional with a genuine employment history. We record that verification succeeded, the date, and a verification identifier. We are designed to keep this verification record separate from your anonymous review activity, and we do not display your LinkedIn identity, employer, or profile information to other members.

2.3 Anonymous Reviews & Aggregate Results

When you review a company or office, you answer a structured set of questions — a slider and multiple-choice checkboxes — about that employer. These reviews do not include an open free-text field, which reduces the risk that a review could identify you. We combine eligible responses into aggregate statistics (percentages, contributor counts, and trends) that other members can view by searching for a company.

2.4 Anonymous Peer-Feedback Chat

If peer-feedback chat is available in your version of the Service and you choose to request or accept a conversation about a company, we process the messages you send in order to deliver them and to enable reporting, blocking, and moderation. Unlike the structured reviews above, chat is free-form text, and it is possible for you or the other participant to reveal identifying details voluntarily — see “Verified Anonymity and Its Limits” in our Terms of Service.

2.5 Career Development Questionnaire & AI Recommendations

Career Development is an optional feature. If it is available in your version of the Service and you activate it, you may answer a structured questionnaire about your professional field, career level, current role, development goals, skills of interest, learning preferences, available time, budget range, and interest in certifications or scholarships. We use your answers, together with an AI-assisted recommendation system, to generate suggested educational programs, certifications, discounts, and scholarship opportunities. We do not use your reviews, the companies you reviewed, your chat activity, or your LinkedIn verification information to build this profile or personalize these suggestions, and we do not share your questionnaire answers with education providers.

2.6 Sponsored Offers & Eligibility Tokens

Some educational programs, discounts, or scholarships we display may be sponsored, or may pay us a placement or referral fee; we label these as sponsored or partner offers. If you save or redeem a benefit, we may issue a shared campaign code or a single-use eligibility token designed not to encode your name, email, employer, or account identifier. We keep limited records of token issuance and redemption status to prevent fraud and duplicate use, but we do not give the provider a way to map a token back to your Belonga account.

2.7 Automatically Collected Information

We and our service providers automatically collect certain technical information when you use the Service, including device type and operating system, app version, approximate location derived from IP address, and usage and diagnostic events such as screen views, crash reports, and timestamps. We do not permit our diagnostic or analytics tools to capture screen recordings or session replay of your activity, and we take reasonable steps to keep review or chat content out of diagnostic logs.

2.8 Information From Service Providers

We use third-party service providers to help operate Belonga — for example, cloud hosting, database storage, authentication, real-time messaging, crash and analytics reporting, transactional email, and push notifications. As of this Policy's effective date, several of these production vendors are still being finalized; we will update this section to name each vendor, the categories of data they process, and their role once selected. LinkedIn is our confirmed identity-verification partner; your use of LinkedIn through Belonga also remains subject to LinkedIn's own terms.

3. How We Use Information

We use the information above to: operate and secure the Service; verify professional identity; generate and display aggregate review results; enable peer-feedback chat and Career Development where available; generate AI-assisted educational recommendations; process sponsored offers and eligibility tokens; communicate with you about your account and the Service; detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and policy violations; and comply with our legal obligations.

4. Verified Anonymity — What We Do and Its Limits

Belonga's core design principle is to keep your verification identity (LinkedIn), your anonymous review activity, and your chat activity separated, so that your name and ordinary account identity are not displayed alongside your reviews, aggregate results, or peer-feedback messages. We are actively finalizing the technical implementation of this separation and will update this section to describe it precisely — including whether any internal mapping between identity and activity exists and who, if anyone, can access it — once that engineering work is complete.

Anonymity has limits regardless of technical design. A reader may be able to infer your identity from information you voluntarily disclose (especially in free-form chat), from timing or context, or from information available outside Belonga. We do not promise that no member, employer, provider, or third party will ever infer or attempt to discover your identity — only that we do not display it ourselves, and that we do not disclose it except as described below or as legally required.

We intend to apply a minimum-contributor threshold before publishing aggregate results for a company or office, to reduce the risk that a small group of reviewers could be individually identified from the results. Until that safeguard is fully implemented and tested, aggregate results may be shown for companies with very few reviewers; we will update this section once the safeguard is live.

5. Legal Requests

We may disclose information, including information that could identify a member, if required by valid legal process (such as a subpoena, court order, or law enforcement request) that we are legally obligated to honor. Where legally permitted, we will attempt to notify the affected member before disclosure, and we will push back on requests we believe are overbroad or improper. We do not promise to resist every request, and in some cases we may be legally barred from providing notice.

6. No Sale of Personal Information; No Behavioral Advertising

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share your verification, review, questionnaire, or chat activity with advertisers or data brokers for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not use third-party advertising SDKs. Sponsored offers in Career Development are paid placements from education providers, not advertising built on your personal data — see Section 2.6.

7. Data Retention & Deletion

We retain information for as long as needed for the purposes described in this Policy. As our production systems are finalized we may refine the following periods, but this is our current retention practice:

Account and profile information: retained while your account is active; deleted within 30 days of account closure, except as noted below.

LinkedIn verification record: retained for the life of your account; deleted upon account closure.

Anonymous review submissions and aggregate results: individual responses are retained in aggregate or de-identified form to preserve the integrity of published results. Closing your account removes the connection between your account and your past responses to the extent our architecture supports (see Section 4), but aggregate statistics that already reflect your responses may persist.

Peer-feedback chat messages: retained for up to 12 months after the last message in a conversation, or until deleted by both participants, whichever is sooner, primarily to support safety review and moderation.

Career Development questionnaire answers and AI recommendations: retained until you edit or delete your Career Profile, or after 24 months of inactivity, whichever is sooner.

Offer and eligibility-token issuance and redemption records: retained for up to 24 months to prevent fraud and duplicate use.

Diagnostic, device, and crash logs: retained for up to 12 months.

Support tickets and abuse reports: retained for up to 24 months.

Backups: rolling deletion, generally within 90 days.

Legal holds: retained as long as legally required, notwithstanding the periods above.

You can request deletion of your account and associated data at any time — see Section 9.

8. Your Privacy Choices & Rights

Depending on your state of residence, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete your personal information, and to know the categories of information we collect and why. To exercise these rights, contact us at privacy@formalabstech.com. We will verify your identity before responding and will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights. If we deny a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision with the word “Appeal.”

9. Account Closure

You may close your account at any time through the app or by contacting privacy@formalabstech.com. See Section 7 for what happens to your information afterward.

10. Children's Privacy

Belonga is intended for users who are at least 18 years old. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected information from someone under 18, we will delete the account and associated information.

11. International Scope

Belonga is currently offered only to users in the United States and is not directed to, and does not knowingly collect information from, residents of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or other jurisdictions outside the United States. If that changes, we will update this Policy accordingly.

12. Security

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect your information, including encryption in transit and at rest and access controls limiting who can view sensitive data. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. If we make a material change, we will notify you through the Service, by email, or by another reasonable method before the change takes effect, except where we are required by law to obtain your renewed consent. We will keep prior versions of this Policy available on request.

14. Contact Us

Forma Labs Technologies, LLC 3230 9th St S, Arlington, VA 22204 Support: support@formalabstech.com Privacy: privacy@formalabstech.com