Privacy & your data
We ask for as little as we can: an email address so you can sign in, whatever you choose to put on your public profile, and the record of what you've enrolled in, posted, or paid for. We don't sell any of it, and we don't track you across other sites.
If you have two accounts, our staff can combine them at your request. Everything from the old account moves to the one you keep, and the old account is deleted. Where both accounts hold the same thing, such as two applications, we keep one and delete the other.
If we ban an account for spam, we delete its comments, endorsements and email subscriptions, replace its public profile, and sign it out. The account and its email addresses stay, so the same addresses can't be used to sign up again. When a comment is deleted, for spam or by a moderator, all replies to it are deleted too, including replies from other people.
Where your data is stored
This site runs on servers in the United States, rented from a third-party cloud provider, and our backups are held there too. If you're in the UK, the EU or anywhere else outside the US, using this site means your data is transferred to and stored in the US.
Two other companies handle parts of it on our behalf: Stripe, which takes any course payment (your card details go straight to them and never touch our servers), and the provider that delivers our email. Both are bound to use it only for that. Donations don't come through this site at all — they go to Outreach International, so whatever you give them is covered by their privacy policy, not ours.
Our visitor statistics stay with us and they can't identify you. We don't use analytics cookies, and we don't keep your IP address — it's scrambled into a code that we throw away and replace every night, so we can count how many people visited without being able to tell who they were or follow them from one day to the next.
Deleting your account
Deleting your account is permanent and can't be undone. Here's exactly what it does.
What's removed
- Your account itself — every email address on it, the sign-in, all of it.
- Your public profile: call sign, bio, links, and the avatar file.
- The name shown on any comments you've posted.
- Your email subscriptions, so we stop sending you anything.
- Any application you submitted, and any endorsement you wrote.
What stays
- Comments you've posted stay on the site so conversations still make sense, but they're no longer attributed to you — they show as an anonymous member.
- Course enrollments and assessment attempts stay on record, detached from any personal details.
- Payment records, which we're required to keep for accounting and tax purposes. Stripe keeps its own copy for the same reason.
- A one-way fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash) of each of your email addresses — not the addresses themselves — so our import from the old PBI and blog sites never re-creates your account.
It happens immediately — you'll be signed out as soon as you confirm. Signing up again later starts a completely fresh account; nothing from the old one comes back.
Sign in to delete your account. If you'd rather not, just get in touch and we'll do it for you.
If you've only written to us
Messages sent through the contact form aren't attached to any account, so deleting one doesn't touch them. We delete them automatically 180 days after they are submitted.
Questions, or anything else
You can also ask us to correct something, to stop using your data a particular way, or for a copy of what we hold. Use the contact form and pick Privacy & data protection — it goes straight to the person who handles it.