What is stored, and what is not

The short version

• The orientation module of each course reads with no account, and a signed-out reader is not recorded on the server. Reading further needs a free account.
• There is no analytics, no advertising and no third-party tracking code anywhere on the site. Fonts are served from this site, so reading a lesson makes no request to Google.
• An account stores an email address and your study record. Nothing else about you is collected, and none of it is sold or shared for marketing.
• Sign-in records carry no IP address and no user agent. Those columns do not exist in the database.

If you never sign in

Nothing about you is stored on the server. Your progress, flashcard schedules, quiz attempts, streak, XP, theme and sound preferences are written to your own browser's local storage, under keys beginning learn-ai:. They never leave the device, which is also why they do not follow you to another browser.

You can export that data as a JSON file, re-import it, or clear it, from the progress page. Clearing your browser storage for this site removes all of it.

If you create an account

Your account

A name, an email address, whether that address has been verified, the account's role, and the times the record was created and last changed. Your password is stored only as a hash by the authentication library, never as text. Verification and password-reset links are stored as short-lived tokens with an expiry and are deleted when they lapse.

Verification is required, so the address has to be one you can receive mail at. Roles exist because some material is internal; they are set directly in the database and nothing in the application can raise your own.

Sign-in sessions

A session record holds a token, the account it belongs to, and an expiry, and your browser holds the matching cookie. That is the whole record.

Your study record

Once you have an account, the things you do while studying are stored against it:

• Lesson progress: which lesson, whether you marked it complete and when, how far down the page you reached, and when you last opened it. Completion is only ever something you click; it is never inferred from scrolling.
• Flashcard schedules: for each card, the number of repetitions, the current interval, the ease factor, the number of lapses, when it was last reviewed and when it is next due. The grades themselves are not kept as a history, only the schedule they produced.
• Study days: one row per calendar day you studied, in your own local date, with how many actions you took and how much XP you earned. The streak is worked out from these rows rather than stored as a counter, so a wrong local midnight can be recounted later.
• Quiz and exam attempts: when you started and finished, your score, the scaled score and whether it passed, which questions were served, which options you selected for each and whether that was right, and when you answered.
• Question history: a running tally per question of how many times you have seen it, how many times you got it right, and whether the last attempt was correct. It is what stops a practice paper serving you the same items over and over.
• Exam papers: for each paper issued to you, the question ids drawn, the shuffle seed, and when it was issued, when it expires and whether it was submitted or abandoned. This is what makes a paper gradeable exactly once.
• XP, levels and achievements: an XP ledger with a reason for each entry, and the achievements you have unlocked with their timestamps.
• Preferences: sound on or off, reduced effects on or off, and a theme choice if you have made one.
• Progress imports: if you import browser-stored progress into an account, a record of when, how large the file was, a checksum of it and whether it applied. The checksum exists so importing the same file twice is visible rather than silently doubling your streak. The file's contents are not kept as a separate copy.

All of it exists to do the thing you asked for: show your progress, schedule your cards, mark a paper once, stop repeating questions you have answered, and keep a streak that is actually true.

Administrative records

Administrative actions are written to a separate, append-only audit log: what was done, when, the account that did it, its email and role, what it was done to, and an identifier for the request. That log deliberately never records a password, a token, a signed exam handle or an answer key.

Audit rows are not linked to the account record by a foreign key, and they are not deleted when an account is. An audit entry is a record of what an administrator did, and it has to outlive the account it describes for the log to mean anything.

Email

TechGuild sends transactional email only: address verification and account messages such as a password reset. There is no newsletter and no marketing email. Mail is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service, so Amazon Web Services processes your address in order to deliver it.

Cookies and browser storage

One cookie, set when you sign in, which identifies your session. There are no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies, because there is no advertising and no analytics.

Beyond that cookie, the site uses your browser's local storage for the theme you picked and, if you are not signed in, your progress. That is storage on your own device rather than data sent anywhere.

Who else sees it

Your data is not sold, rented or shared for marketing, and there is no advertising network, data broker or analytics vendor involved. Two providers necessarily handle data to run the service: whoever hosts the application and its database, and Amazon Web Services for sending email. Data may also be disclosed where the law requires it.

Keeping it, exporting it and deleting it

Study data is kept for as long as the account exists, because it is the account. Closing an account removes the account record and everything that hangs off it: progress, schedules, study days, attempts and answers, question history, exam papers, XP, achievements and preferences. The audit entries described above survive, as does any record required for security or legal reasons.

Your rights over your data

A copy of what is held about you, and deletion of your account with it, are both buttons on the progress page rather than requests. For a correction, or anything those buttons do not cover, ask through the contact page. Depending on where you live you may have further rights under data protection law, including the right to complain to your national regulator.

Children

This is study material for working engineers and certification candidates. It is not designed for or aimed at children, and accounts are not knowingly created for them.

Changes to this notice

This notice changes when what the site stores changes. The date at the top is when it was last rewritten. If a change means collecting something materially new, it will be said here rather than folded in quietly.