Cookie Policy
Operated by Caresoft Foundation. Read with the Privacy Policy. The Content Policy follows at the end of this page.
The short version. A handful of cookies keep you signed in, remember your language and keep the Platform secure. Analytics run only if you choose to allow them.
There are no advertising, retargeting or social tracking cookies anywhere on The CIO Club. No ad network pixels, no Meta pixel, no LinkedIn Insight Tag. Nothing that follows you off this site.
1. Cookies we set
| Cookie | What it does | Type | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
cio_session | Keeps you signed in | Strictly necessary | Session |
cio_csrf | Protects forms against cross-site request forgery | Strictly necessary | Session |
cio_consent | Remembers your cookie choice so we stop asking | Strictly necessary | 12 months |
cio_rate | Rate limiting, to stop abuse of public forms | Strictly necessary | 24 hours |
cio_lang | Remembers your chosen language | Functional | 12 months |
cio_prefs | Display preferences, saved posts, dismissed notices | Functional | 12 months |
| Analytics cookies | Aggregate measurement of which features are used — only with consent | Analytics | 13 months |
Strictly necessary cookies are set without consent because the Platform cannot work without them. Everything else waits for your choice.
2. Analytics
- Analytics run only if you allow them, and declining changes nothing about your membership or what you can read.
- They tell us which parts of the Club are used — which spaces are active, where people drop out of a journey, whether a feature was worth building.
- IP addresses are truncated before storage where the provider supports it.
- We do not analyse what you post, who you message, or which members you look at. Aggregate feature usage only.
- We do not track you across other websites and do not build a profile of you.
3. No advertising cookies
We place no advertising, retargeting or social media tracking cookies anywhere on this Platform.
Sponsorship funds the Club, but sponsors get placement, not data. No sponsor pixel runs on any page, and no sponsor can tell who saw their placement.
4. Third-party cookies
| Where | What |
|---|---|
| Video and webinar sessions | The platform we use for live sessions sets its own cookies when you join one. Necessary for the session to work |
| Embedded video in an article | Loads only after you press play, never on page load |
| Payment pages | Our payment processor sets cookies for fraud prevention, where you pay for something |
| Links out | Once you click through to another site, its cookies are its own |
5. Changing your choice
- Use the cookie settings link in the footer, any time.
- "Essential only" and "Allow analytics" are the same size and side by side. No pre-ticked boxes, no hidden decline, no second screen to say no.
- Your browser can block or clear cookies. Blocking strictly necessary cookies will break sign-in.
- Clearing cookies signs you out and resets your language. Nothing else is lost.
6. Global Privacy Control
If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we honour it automatically as a refusal of all non-essential cookies. We do not override it, do not re-ask, and do not show the banner again on that browser.
7. Consent records
We record what you chose, when, and which banner version you saw, so we can show consent was properly obtained. Kept 12 months, with no advertising identifier.
8. Changes and contact
We may update this page. Any change to §3 would be emailed to every member in advance — not made quietly.
Questions: [email protected]
Caresoft Foundation, 311 - Mahesh Industrial Estate , Silver Park, Mira Road East , Thane -401107, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Content Policy
This Policy covers what members publish on The CIO Club — articles, posts, comments and session material. It sits alongside the Community Guidelines, which govern conduct. Where the two overlap, the Guidelines prevail.
The point of this Policy is to let you publish freely, not to stop you.
Most of what follows is about protecting you — from your own employer's policy, from a vendor's lawyer, and from the small number of mistakes that are genuinely hard to undo once a post is indexed.
C1. Public or members-only
| Members-only post | Public article | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sees it | Members only, never indexed | Anyone, indexed by search engines |
| Attribution | Your name, to members | Your name, to the world, with your employer if shown |
| Chatham House | Applies — others may not quote or attribute it outside | Does not apply. It is public |
| Review | Moderated after posting | Reviewed before publication |
| If you leave | Stays in the discussion, as a former member | You can unpublish any time |
Choose deliberately. A public article is a professional publication with your name on it, findable by your board, your vendors and your next employer. A members-only post is a conversation. The same sentence can be fine in one and unwise in the other.
C2. Before you publish publicly — four checks
- Your employer's policy. Most organisations have one on external publication and speaking. Most CIOs have not read it recently. Check before, not after.
- Commercials. Nothing about what you pay a vendor, ever — Guidelines §1. This applies with more force publicly.
- Security. Nothing that would help someone attack a named organisation, including yours — Guidelines §4.
- Patient data. Nothing, in any form, including in a screenshot you think is redacted.
C3. What makes a good article here
The posts members actually value have one thing in common: they describe something that went wrong and what the author learned.
- Specific beats general. "Our data migration took nine months, not the four we planned, and here are the three things we underestimated" is worth more than a thousand words on digital transformation.
- Say what it cost you in time and effort — not in money (C2).
- Name the constraint. Bed count, country, system, team size. Context is what makes advice usable.
- Admit the parts that failed. Nobody learns from a case study where everything worked.
- Write for a peer, not a board. You can assume the reader knows what an integration engine is.
C4. Writing about vendors
Honest first-hand experience is welcome and will not be removed because a vendor complained. That is written into our moderation rules (Terms §15).
| Write this | Not this |
|---|---|
| "Their support took eleven days to respond to a P1 in our case" | "Their support is useless" |
| "In my experience the integration needed more custom work than we were led to expect" | "They lied about the integration" |
| "We found the product did not handle [specific scenario]" | "The product is broken" |
| "In my view, this is not suitable for an organisation our size" | "Nobody should buy this" |
- Distinguish fact from opinion. "In my view" costs nothing and protects you.
- Do not allege fraud, dishonesty or illegality unless a regulator or court has found it, and then cite it.
- Do not post about a vendor you are in active dispute or litigation with. Speak to your own counsel first.
- Disclose any financial interest you or a family member hold in a company you discuss, in the post.
- If an NDA stops you saying it, this Club does not change that.
- The same rules apply to any company connected to the Foundation. No special protection, and moderators may not remove criticism of it.
C5. Right of reply
Where an article makes a substantive criticism of a named company, we offer that company a right of reply — a comment or a short response published alongside.
- We do not take the article down to accommodate them, and we do not edit it to soften it.
- Where they point out a factual error, we ask the author and correct it if it is wrong.
- Where they simply disagree, their reply is published and readers decide.
- We tell the author before publishing any reply.
C6. Rights and attribution
- You own what you write and may republish it anywhere, including on your own blog or LinkedIn.
- You grant us a licence to host and display it here, and to share publicly published articles externally with your name attached — Terms §14.
- You must hold the rights to everything you include — text, images, charts, data, quotes.
- Do not reproduce a research report, a paywalled article or a vendor's material without permission. Link to it instead.
- Quote others briefly and with attribution.
- Where you adapt something you wrote for your employer, make sure you are entitled to. Work product often belongs to them.
C7. AI-assisted writing
Label it where an article or substantial post was drafted with AI. One line at the top.
- You are responsible for accuracy either way. A fabricated citation or a hallucinated statistic is your error, not the model's — and it is the fastest way to lose the respect of a room of CIOs.
- Never paste confidential, employer, security or patient information into a public AI tool and then post the output. The input was the disclosure.
- Volume AI-generated posting for visibility is treated as spam and removed.
- We do not use anything you post to train AI models (Privacy §9), and we do not permit our providers to.
C8. Sponsored and promotional content
Members may not publish promotional content. Not for your employer, not for a vendor, not for a venture you are involved in.
- Writing about a project you led is fine. Writing a case study that reads like marketing is not.
- Disclose any commercial relationship relevant to what you are writing about, in the piece.
- Sponsored material appears only where the Foundation publishes it, clearly labelled as sponsored, and never under a member's byline.
- Where a member's article is later found to have been commissioned or paid for by a third party, it is removed and the member's position is reviewed.
C9. What we will remove
| Content | Action |
|---|---|
| Vendor pricing or commercial terms | Removed on sight, before assessment — Guidelines §1 |
| Patient-identifiable information | Removed immediately; member told so they can report it |
| Security detail endangering a named organisation | Removed immediately |
| Confidential or NDA material | Removed on notice |
| Material non-public information about a listed company | Removed immediately |
| Allegations of fraud or illegality without a cited finding | Removed; author asked to rewrite |
| Infringing material | Removed on notice |
| Promotional content (C8) | Removed |
| Harassing or discriminatory content | Removed; conduct review |
| Content quoting another member outside Chatham House | Removed; conduct review |
Three things moderators may never do: remove a post because it criticises a sponsor or a company connected to the Foundation; remove honest first-hand experience at a vendor's request; or act on a complaint without telling you what was said about your post.
C10. Corrections
- You can edit your own posts and articles at any time. Substantial edits to a published article show an edit note.
- Where a factual error is pointed out, correct it and say what changed. A visible correction costs you nothing among peers; a quiet edit found later costs a lot.
- Where we correct something ourselves, we tell you first and explain why.
- Report an error in someone else's piece to [email protected], or comment on it — usually faster and more useful.
C11. Unpublishing
- You can unpublish your own public article at any time. We do not require a reason.
- Search engine caches and copies elsewhere may persist. We cannot remove those, and nobody can promise otherwise.
- Posts in shared discussions stay as part of the conversation (Privacy §8) — but ask us about a specific one and we will consider it properly.
- Where you unpublish because of pressure from a vendor or an employer, tell us. We cannot overrule your employer, but we should know it happened.
C12. Appeals and contact
- Where we remove or decline something, we tell you what rule applied and why.
- Appeal within 15 days to [email protected], marked "Appeal". Reviewed by someone not involved in the original decision, answered within 10 working days.
- Appeals involving a sponsor or a company connected to the Foundation go to the member advisory group, not to club staff.
- Where a decision is reversed, the content is restored and the record corrected.
Content questions and appeals: [email protected]
Grievance Officer: Rajeev Pillai, [email protected] — 24 hours to acknowledge, 15 days to resolve