The Pizza Research Institute ("PRI," "we," "us," or "our") is committed to being transparent about our data practices. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect information in connection with your use of our website (the "Site").

Before we go further, you should know: this is a fictional institution. It was created as a creative act of reciprocity directed at the marketing team at Next Meters, who executed a workplace prank of considerable ambition. The PRI is the response. Everything on this Site — the research, the faculty, the history, the journal — is invented. This Privacy Policy, however, is written in good faith, because data privacy matters even when the institution collecting it does not technically exist.

We may collect the following categories of information:

Automatically Collected Information: When you visit the Site, our hosting infrastructure may automatically collect standard server log data, including your IP address, browser type, referring URL, pages visited, and the date and time of your visit. This is standard web infrastructure behavior, not anything we engineered specifically to surveil you.

Information You Provide Voluntarily: The Site contains a contact form with fields for your name, email address, subject, and message. If you fill this out, that information is submitted to us. We will not use it to send you unsolicited communications about pizza science, because we are not actually running a pizza science institution.

Cookies: The Site may use cookies or similar tracking technologies for basic functionality and analytics. You can instruct your browser to refuse cookies, though this may affect your ability to use certain features of the Site — specifically the features that we have not built because this is a mock website for a joke.

We use the information collected for the following purposes:

To operate and improve the Site. To respond to inquiries submitted through the contact form. To analyze how visitors interact with the Site in aggregate and anonymous form. To understand whether the Next Meters marketing team has visited the Site, which would be extremely satisfying.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties. We do not use your information to build advertising profiles. We do not run targeted ad campaigns. We are, again, not a real institution, and do not have the operational infrastructure to do most of the things a real institution would do with your data.

We do not sell your personal information. We may share information in the following limited circumstances:

Service Providers: We may share information with third-party vendors who assist in operating the Site (hosting, analytics). These parties are contractually obligated to use your information only as directed by us.

Legal Requirements: We may disclose information if required by law, regulation, or valid legal process. In the event that a subpoena is served regarding this website, we would find that genuinely remarkable given its fictional nature.

Business Transfers: In the unlikely event that this fictional institution is acquired by or merged with another fictional institution, your information may be transferred. We will notify you of any such transfer by updating this policy — again, from a fictional institution, so please calibrate your expectations accordingly.

We retain personal information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, or as required by applicable law. Contact form submissions are retained for a reasonable period to allow for follow-up correspondence.

We do not retain information longer than necessary, because we are not building a surveillance apparatus — we are building a joke website with institutional veneer, and the veneer extends only so far.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the following rights with respect to your personal information:

The right to access the personal information we hold about you. The right to request correction of inaccurate information. The right to request deletion of your information, subject to certain exceptions. The right to opt out of certain data uses. The right to lodge a complaint with a data protection authority.

To exercise any of these rights, you may contact us at info@pizzaresearchinstitute.org. That email address is fictional. If you have a genuine privacy concern, please know that we take this seriously despite the surrounding context, and will make reasonable efforts to respond through whatever channel actually reaches us.

The Site may contain links to third-party websites. This Privacy Policy applies only to the PRI Site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of external sites. Those sites are real and their privacy policies govern their own data collection, unlike ours, which is the privacy policy of a made-up pizza university.

The Site is not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

We would also gently note that a child who navigates to a fictitious academic pizza research institution and begins reading the Journal of Applied Pizzology is, objectively, a remarkable child, and we wish them well in their future endeavors.

We implement reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the information we hold against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. No method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

We can say with confidence that the information most at risk on this Site is the fiction itself — specifically, the risk that someone takes it seriously and cites the cheese melt elasticity coefficient from our fabricated research in a real academic paper. We would appreciate a heads-up if that occurs.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, the law, or the evolving nature of the bit. We will indicate the date of the most recent update at the bottom of this page.

Your continued use of the Site following any update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy. If you disagree with any updates, you are always welcome to close the tab and get on with your day.

For questions, concerns, or requests related to this Privacy Policy, you may reach us at:

Pizza Research Institute 1 Margherita Plaza, New Haven, CT 06511 (fictional) privacy@pizzaresearchinstitute.org (fictional) +1 (475) 480-7492 (also fictional)

If you are from Next Meters and are reading this: your prank was good. This is better. We're even.