Privacy Notice (KVKK and UAE PDPL)

The data controller for your personal data is Sit Consultancy LLC, which operates the Study in Turkiye brand and the StudyinTurkiye.com website. It is a limited liability company registered with the Sharjah Media City Free Zone Authority (SHAMS), Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, under licence number 2538627.01.

• Registered address: Shams Business Center, Sharjah Media City Free Zone, Al Messaned, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
• Contact address in Türkiye: Mall of İstanbul, Floor 14, Office 116, Başakşehir / İstanbul, Türkiye
• Personal data and rights requests: privacy@sitconnect.net
• Corporate and compliance correspondence: compliance@studyinturkiye.com
• Company information: https://studyinturkiye.com/en/company-information/

We ask only for what the service needs. We do not ask for special-category data (health, religion, ethnic origin and the like); please do not include it in free-text fields or documents.

• Identity: first and last name; passport details at the application stage.
• Contact: email address, phone and WhatsApp number, country of residence.
• Education and preferences: nationality, level of study, the subject, city, university and budget you are interested in; diplomas, transcripts and similar application documents.
• Enquiry and correspondence: form messages, Mr. SIT chat transcripts, email and WhatsApp correspondence, and the recording and transcript of phone calls you have allowed.
• Security: IP address, browser and device information, form security checks (bot protection) and error logs.
• Marketing and measurement: the campaign or site that brought you to us; advertising click identifiers and measurement events only if you accepted analytics and advertising cookies.
• Preference and consent records: your cookie choice, your optional call and WhatsApp permissions and the version of the text you were shown.

We process your personal data for the following purposes, on the legal bases set out in KVKK Article 5 and permitted by the PDPL:

• Answering your enquiry, advising you, suggesting suitable programmes and universities, preparing and forwarding your application to the universities you choose and following it up: necessary for establishing or performing a contract with you (KVKK Art. 5(2)(c)).
• Keeping the site and forms secure, blocking fake and automated submissions, fixing errors, and measuring and improving service quality: our legitimate interests, provided they do not harm your fundamental rights and freedoms (KVKK Art. 5(2)(f)).
• Meeting legal obligations and responding to competent authorities: expressly provided for by law and legal obligation (KVKK Art. 5(2)(a) and (ç)).
• Establishing, exercising or defending legal claims (KVKK Art. 5(2)(e)).
• Analytics and advertising cookies, advertising measurement, calling you or messaging you on WhatsApp where you chose that, and sending commercial electronic messages: your explicit consent or approval (KVKK Art. 5(1); Law No. 6563). Explicit consent is always optional, asked for separately, and never a condition of the service. Changing your browser cookie choice does not withdraw the advertising-measurement consent recorded when you sent an enquiry; to withdraw that, write to privacy@sitconnect.net.

We collect personal data electronically, by wholly or partly automated means, through the forms on the site, the Mr. SIT chat assistant, WhatsApp, phone, email and cookies. You upload your application documents yourself.

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only as far as the purposes above require, with:

• The universities and education providers you want to apply to or hear from.
• Our own team and the SIT Connect systems that run the service, including consultants working for Sit Consultancy LLC from our contact offices in Türkiye and Egypt.
• Our service providers, which process data to provide their services to us: website hosting (Vercel), application hosting (Railway), database and file storage (Supabase), hosting of the Mr. SIT chat service (Hetzner), email delivery (Resend), phone and WhatsApp messaging (Twilio, Meta), the AI models behind Mr. SIT and the call assistant (OpenAI, Anthropic, directly or through OpenRouter), bot protection (Cloudflare Turnstile), error monitoring (Sentry), country lookup from IP address (ipwho.is), payments for optional paid services (Stripe) and internal team notifications (Telegram).
• Only if you accept analytics and advertising cookies: analytics and advertising measurement providers (Google, Meta, Yandex).
• Competent public authorities and our legal advisers, only where necessary.

The controller is established in the UAE. The recipients above may be located in the UAE, in Europe (including the European Union), in the United States and, only if you accepted analytics and advertising cookies, in Russia (Yandex); the universities you apply to may be in Türkiye or elsewhere. Your data is therefore transferred abroad.

Transfers abroad are subject to KVKK Article 9, which permits them on the basis of an adequacy decision, appropriate safeguards such as the standard contracts published by the KVKK Board, or, for incidental transfers, the grounds in Article 9(6), for example where the transfer is necessary to perform a contract with you or where you give explicit consent after being informed of the risks. Transfers covered by the PDPL are subject to its adequacy and appropriate-safeguard rules. To learn which recipient, in which country and on which ground your data is transferred to, write to privacy@sitconnect.net.

Retention depends on the application stage, service, statutory periods and the need to establish or defend rights. Ask privacy@sitconnect.net for the period or criterion for your records or to request deletion; requests are assessed against applicable legal duties.

Mr. SIT is an AI assistant that answers your questions and never claims to be a person. Universities decide admission, eligibility and scholarships; Mr. SIT decides none of these. You can ask to speak to a consultant at any time.

Our services are for people applying to higher education. If you are under 18, please fill in our forms with the knowledge and approval of a parent or legal guardian.

• To learn whether your personal data is processed and, if so, to request information about it;
• To learn the purpose of the processing and whether the data is used for that purpose;
• To know the third parties, in Türkiye or abroad, to whom your data is transferred;
• To ask for incomplete or inaccurate data to be corrected;
• To ask for your data to be erased or destroyed under the conditions of KVKK Article 7;
• To ask for a correction, erasure or destruction to be notified to the third parties the data was transferred to;
• To object to an outcome against you that results solely from automated analysis;
• To claim compensation if you suffer damage from unlawful processing;
• To withdraw any explicit consent you gave, at any time, with effect for the future.

To exercise your rights, send an application that identifies you and states your request clearly, as set out in the Communiqué on the Procedures and Principles of Application to the Data Controller, by one of these means:

• By email to privacy@sitconnect.net from the email address you used with us and that is registered in our system;
• With a document signed by secure electronic signature or mobile signature, to the same address;
• In writing, with a wet-ink signature, to our registered address (Shams Business Center, Sharjah Media City Free Zone, Al Messaned, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates).

We conclude your application as quickly as its nature allows and within thirty days at the latest, free of charge; if the request involves an additional cost, the fee schedule set by the KVKK Board may apply. If your application is refused, you find the answer insufficient or we do not answer in time, you may complain to the Personal Data Protection Board (www.kvkk.gov.tr) within thirty days of learning of our answer and in any case within sixty days of your application.

Messages about your own enquiry are not commercial electronic messages. We send campaign, promotional or newsletter messages only if you approved them in advance, as Law No. 6563 requires. You can withdraw that approval at any time, without giving a reason and free of charge: use the opt-out in the message, reply "STOP" on WhatsApp, or email us.

Because Sit Consultancy LLC is established in the UAE, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 (PDPL) also applies to the processing of your personal data. Under the PDPL you have the right to be informed, to access and obtain a copy of your data, to rectification, to erasure, to restrict and to object to processing, to data portability where applicable, to withdraw consent, and to object to automated processing that has legal or serious effects. To exercise these rights, write to privacy@sitconnect.net; you may also complain to the UAE Data Office.

Details about cookies are in our Cookie Policy, and the detailed privacy policy for every SIT Connect site is at sitconnect.net/privacy. We may update this notice; the current version and its date are always published on this page.