Tracking Technology Usage Policy

Purpose of Our Tracking Methods

Our platform stores small text files on your device and uses similar technologies to remember your preferences and understand how students interact with our courses. These files contain identifiers that help our servers recognize your browser when you return, which means you don't have to log in every single time you want to watch a lecture or check your grades. The data stored includes things like your language preference, your progress through course modules, and whether you prefer video subtitles enabled by default.

Some of these technologies are absolutely necessary for basic functionality. Without them, you couldn't stay logged into your student account, submit assignments, or access protected course materials. When you click "remember me" at login, that instruction gets saved so our system knows to keep your session active. Course progress tracking relies on these methods—imagine having to restart every video from the beginning each time you visited, or losing your quiz scores because the system couldn't remember who you are.

We also collect analytics about how students move through our platform and which features get used most frequently. This isn't about watching individual students—it's about patterns across thousands of learners that help us improve. For example, if we notice that most students abandon a particular quiz halfway through, we might discover it has unclear instructions or technical problems. We track metrics like how long students spend on different lesson types, which supplementary resources they download, and where they tend to struggle in the curriculum. This information directly shapes how we develop new courses and refine existing ones.

Beyond the basics, we store preferences that make your educational journey feel tailored to you. Your dashboard layout, notification settings, bookmarked lectures, and study schedule preferences all get saved so your learning environment feels consistent across sessions. If you've adjusted video playback speed to 1.5x because you like to move quickly through familiar material, that preference travels with you. Some students prefer dark mode for late-night studying—these choices persist because of stored local data.

The entire ecosystem of these technologies works together in coordinated ways. Authentication systems verify your identity, session management keeps you logged in while you're actively studying, preference storage customizes your interface, and analytics systems run quietly in the background measuring engagement without interrupting your work. When you switch from watching a lecture on your laptop to reviewing notes on your phone, synchronized storage helps maintain continuity across your devices.

Control Options

You have significant control over how our platform can store data on your device and track your activity. Privacy regulations including GDPR give you specific rights to access, delete, or restrict the processing of your information. You can adjust settings at multiple levels—through your browser's built-in controls, through our platform's preference center, and through third-party privacy tools if you want additional protection.

Most browsers let you block or delete stored data through their settings menus. In Chrome, you'll find these controls under Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Other Site Data, where you can block all tracking, block only third-party elements, or allow everything. Firefox offers similar options under Settings > Privacy and Security, with several preset levels from Standard to Strict. Safari users can navigate to Preferences > Privacy to adjust tracking prevention, while Edge has comparable settings under Settings > Privacy, Search, and Services. Each browser also maintains a list showing which sites have stored data, and you can selectively clear information from specific domains.

When you first visit our platform, or when significant changes are made to our tracking practices, you'll encounter our consent management interface. This tool breaks down different categories of tracking and lets you approve or reject each type individually. You can revisit these choices anytime by clicking the privacy preferences link in our footer. The interface explains what you're enabling or disabling for each category, helping you make informed decisions about your privacy versus functionality tradeoff.

Blocking different categories has varying effects on your educational experience. Rejecting strictly necessary items will prevent login, course access, and assignment submission—the platform essentially becomes unusable for enrolled students. Disabling analytics means we lose valuable feedback about course effectiveness, but your learning experience continues normally. If you block preference storage, you'll face minor annoyances like having to reset your dashboard layout and video player settings each visit, but all core educational functions remain available. Blocking functional items might log you out frequently and forget your progress through longer learning modules.

Third-party browser extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, or Ghostery can provide additional control layers beyond what browsers and our platform offer natively. Privacy Badger learns to block trackers based on their behavior across sites, while uBlock Origin gives you granular filtering control. These tools can be powerful but sometimes overly aggressive—they might break legitimate educational features if configured too strictly. We recommend testing carefully after installation and whitelisting our Ionyxaarion if you encounter problems accessing course materials.

Finding the right balance means understanding your priorities as a student. If you're deeply concerned about privacy and willing to trade some convenience, you might block everything except strictly necessary items and accept the inconvenience of resetting preferences regularly. Most students find that allowing functional and preference items while blocking third-party advertising creates a good middle ground. Remember that our analytics genuinely help improve courses—blocking them doesn't protect much personal information but does remove our ability to identify and fix problems in the curriculum.

Alternative Technologies

Web beacons, sometimes called tracking pixels or clear GIFs, are tiny transparent images embedded in our pages and emails that communicate with our servers when they load. On our educational platform, these help us understand which announcement emails students actually open versus which get ignored, and whether embedded resources from external educational sites are loading correctly for everyone. A pixel might tell us that 65% of students opened our email about an upcoming deadline, or that a particular embedded simulation from a partner institution is failing to load for students on mobile devices.

Local storage and session storage are browser features that let us save more complex data structures than traditional methods allow. Session storage holds temporary information that disappears when you close your browser tab—like the answers you've typed into a multi-page assignment form so you don't lose your work if you accidentally navigate away. Local storage persists longer and might contain things like your course completion percentages, bookmarked lecture timestamps, or your history of forum posts for quick reference. We typically retain session data only during active use, while local storage might persist for months or until you manually clear it.

Device fingerprinting involves collecting technical details about your browser, operating system, installed fonts, screen resolution, and other configuration specifics to create a unique identifier. We use limited fingerprinting primarily for security—detecting if someone from a completely different device configuration suddenly tries accessing your account suggests unauthorized access. This isn't about tracking you across the internet; it's about noticing when your "digital signature" suddenly changes in suspicious ways that might indicate account compromise.

Our web servers automatically generate logs recording every request made to our platform, capturing IP addresses, timestamps, requested URLs, browser user agents, and referring pages. These logs serve multiple purposes: debugging technical problems when students report errors, analyzing traffic patterns to prevent server overload during exam periods, and detecting potential security threats like automated bot attacks or brute-force login attempts. We typically retain detailed server logs for 90 days, after which they're either deleted or aggregated into anonymized statistical summaries.

Managing these alternative technologies requires different approaches depending on the type. Most web beacons can be blocked by disabling images in emails or using browser extensions that prevent tracking pixels from loading. You can clear local and session storage through the same browser menus that control other stored data—the process varies by browser but is usually found alongside cache clearing options. Fingerprinting is harder to control since it passively collects information your browser naturally broadcasts, though privacy-focused browsers like Brave or Tor reduce the uniqueness of your fingerprint. Server logs can't be prevented without blocking access entirely, but you can mask your IP address using VPNs or proxy services if that's a concern.

Additional Provisions

We retain different types of collected data for varying periods based on their purpose and legal requirements. Session information typically expires within hours or a few days of your last activity. Preference data persists for up to two years of account inactivity before automatic deletion. Analytics data gets anonymized after 14 months, with only aggregated statistical patterns retained longer. Course progress tracking remains available throughout your enrollment period plus seven years afterward to accommodate transcript requests and academic record requirements. When you delete your account, we immediately remove personal identifiers while maintaining anonymized learning analytics that can't be traced back to you.

Security measures protecting collected data include encryption during transmission using TLS protocols, encrypted storage of sensitive authentication tokens, regular security audits by third-party specialists, and strict access controls limiting which staff members can view student data. Our development and analytics teams work with pseudonymized datasets where your real identity is replaced with random identifiers. Database servers are isolated from public internet access, protected by multiple firewall layers, and monitored continuously for suspicious access patterns. We maintain incident response procedures for quickly addressing any potential data breaches.

The information gathered through tracking technologies integrates with our broader privacy framework described in our main privacy policy. Data flows from your browser to our application servers, gets processed according to your privacy settings, combines with information you explicitly provide during registration and course work, and ultimately populates your student profile and our analytics databases. Third-party educational tools integrated into our courses—like interactive simulations or video platforms—operate under their own privacy policies, though we vet partners for adequate data protection standards before integration.

Our compliance efforts address regulations that specifically affect educational institutions and online learning platforms. GDPR requirements shape how we handle data for European students, requiring explicit consent for non-essential tracking and guaranteeing rights to access and deletion. FERPA governs educational records for U.S. students, imposing strict limitations on disclosure and requiring security safeguards. We also comply with COPPA when offering courses to younger students, obtaining parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Various state-level privacy laws including CCPA add additional requirements for California residents, giving them specific rights regarding their information.

International data transfers occur when students from different countries access our platform hosted on servers in specific geographic regions. We protect cross-border data flows through standard contractual clauses approved by relevant regulatory authorities, ensuring that data transferred outside your home region receives equivalent protection to what your local laws require. Some data, particularly video content and downloadable resources, may be delivered through global content delivery networks that temporarily cache materials on servers worldwide for faster access—these systems are configured to respect regional privacy requirements and delete cached data according to predetermined schedules.