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.

When you join a video meeting, we keep a technical log so we can fix problems with cameras, microphones and connections. It records your account, your browser and device type, the names of your cameras and microphones, and how the connection performed. It never contains your video, your audio or your chat messages. Only our administrators can read it, and we delete each entry automatically 90 days after it was recorded.

Some recorded meetings also record high-quality audio. The meeting tells you before you join. Then your browser records your microphone while the recording is on, keeps the audio in the storage of this site in your browser, and uploads it to us. Your browser deletes each part as soon as we have it. The audio goes into the recording of the meeting, with the same access as the other files of the recording. If an upload stops, we send you one email to ask you to finish it.

Deleting your account

Deleting your account is permanent and can't be undone. Here's exactly what it does.

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.

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.