Privacy Policy

Last Updated: January 2025

At Stonebridgegroup, we believe your privacy deserves respect and transparency. This document explains what information we gather when you use our online learning platform, why we need it, and what we do to keep it safe. We've written this in plain language because legal jargon shouldn't stand between you and understanding how your data gets handled.

When you sign up for courses or interact with our educational content, certain information naturally comes our way. Some of it you provide directly—like when creating an account—while other data gets collected automatically as you navigate through lessons and materials. We're committed to being upfront about all of it.

Data We Collect About You

Running an effective online education platform means we need different types of information to serve you properly. The data we collect falls into several categories, each serving specific purposes in delivering your learning experience. What you share with us directly forms the foundation of your account and helps us personalize your journey through our courses.

Think of this collection as layers. The first layer is what you intentionally provide, the second is what gets generated through your interactions with our platform, and the third comes from technical necessities of operating a web-based service. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Registration and Profile Information: Your name, username, password, and any biographical details you choose to add create your unique identity on our platform. We also store your chosen learning preferences and accessibility settings to make your experience smoother.
Course Activity and Progress Data: Every lesson you complete, quiz you attempt, and assignment you submit gets recorded so we can track your advancement through programs. This includes your scores, completion rates, time spent on materials, and any notes or annotations you create within course content.
Communication Records: When you contact our support team, participate in discussion forums, or interact with instructors, those exchanges get stored. This helps us provide context for ongoing conversations and improve our responses over time.
Device and Technical Information: Your browser type, operating system, IP address, and device identifiers help us ensure our platform works correctly on your specific setup. We also collect data about how you navigate through pages, which features you use most, and where you might encounter difficulties.
Payment and Transaction Details: If you purchase courses or subscriptions, we process information necessary to complete those transactions securely. While we don't directly store full credit card numbers, we maintain records of purchases, billing history, and payment methods you've authorized.
Cookies and Tracking Technologies: Small data files stored on your device help us remember your preferences, keep you logged in, and understand how people use our platform collectively. These range from essential cookies that make the site function to analytics cookies that help us improve.

Use of Your Information

Collecting data serves no purpose unless we put it to work in ways that benefit your learning experience. We process your information to deliver the educational services you've signed up for, but also to make those services better over time. Every piece of data has a job to do—whether that's personalizing your course recommendations or ensuring you can pick up exactly where you left off.

Our use of your information isn't random or arbitrary. We've built specific systems that rely on different data types to function. Here's how we actually put your information to work across our platform:

Account Management and Authentication: Your login credentials and profile data keep your account secure and accessible only to you. We use this information to verify your identity, manage your subscription status, and maintain the integrity of your learning records across devices.
Course Delivery and Progress Tracking: Your activity data powers the features that make online learning effective—saving your place in video lectures, marking completed lessons, tracking quiz attempts, and generating progress reports. We analyze this to identify where students commonly struggle so instructors can provide additional support.
Personalization and Recommendations: By examining which courses you've completed and which topics you engage with most, we suggest relevant programs that match your interests and skill level. This extends to customizing your dashboard, adjusting difficulty levels, and curating content that fits your learning style.
Platform Improvement and Analytics: Aggregated data about how students interact with our platform reveals patterns that guide development decisions. We might discover that certain features go unused, indicating they need redesign, or that specific course formats generate higher completion rates.
Communication and Support: Your contact information enables us to send course updates, respond to support requests, share important account notifications, and occasionally inform you about new offerings that align with your interests. You control the frequency and type of these communications through your account settings.
Security and Fraud Prevention: Technical data like IP addresses and device information helps us detect suspicious login attempts, prevent unauthorized access, and identify potential security threats before they affect your account.
Legal Compliance and Business Operations: Some data processing happens because regulations require it or because we need records for accounting, tax purposes, and resolving disputes. We maintain these records only as long as legally necessary.

Data Collected Through External Tools

Modern online education doesn't happen in isolation—it requires connecting various specialized services that each do one thing exceptionally well. We integrate third-party tools for video hosting, payment processing, analytics, and communication because building all these capabilities ourselves would be impractical and potentially less secure. When you use our platform, you're actually interacting with a carefully orchestrated ecosystem of services working together.

Each external tool we incorporate operates under its own privacy policy, though we're selective about which partners we trust with your data. These services receive only the information necessary to perform their specific function. Here's what gets shared and why:

Video and Content Delivery Networks

Course videos and large educational resources get delivered through specialized content delivery networks that cache materials closer to your location for faster loading. These services collect data about playback quality, buffering events, and viewing patterns to ensure smooth streaming. They might see your IP address, device type, and which videos you watch, but they don't receive your personal profile information.

Analytics and Performance Monitoring

We use analytics platforms to understand how people navigate our site, which pages load slowly, and where users encounter errors. These tools create anonymized reports about traffic patterns, popular content, and technical issues. While they track your journey through our platform, this data gets aggregated with thousands of other users to reveal trends rather than individual behavior.

Payment Processors

When you make a purchase, your payment details go directly to our payment processor through encrypted connections. We never see your full credit card number—instead, we receive confirmation that a transaction succeeded and a token we can use for future authorized charges. The payment processor handles all the sensitive financial data according to strict industry standards.

Email and Communication Services

Course announcements, password resets, and other messages get sent through email service providers who handle delivery at scale. These services know which emails you opened and which links you clicked, helping us understand what communications resonate with students. They see your email address and name but don't access your full account details.

Cloud Storage and Infrastructure

Your data lives on secure cloud servers managed by infrastructure providers. These companies maintain the physical hardware and network connections but don't access the actual content of your information. They provide the computing power and storage space while we control who can read, modify, or delete your data.

External Website Links

Throughout our courses, you'll occasionally encounter links to external websites—whether it's a reference article, supplementary reading, or tool recommendation. Once you click through to these outside sites, you're no longer on our platform and our privacy practices no longer apply. We can't control how these third parties handle data, even if we trust them enough to reference them in our educational materials.

Some external sites might have privacy policies similar to ours, while others might collect information in ways you wouldn't expect. Before providing personal information to any website we link to, take a moment to review their privacy practices. Just because we've included a link doesn't mean we've endorsed their data handling—it simply means we found the content educationally valuable.

Data Security and Privacy

Protecting your information isn't something we treat casually—it's built into every level of our platform's architecture. We've implemented multiple layers of security controls, from encryption that scrambles data in transit to access restrictions that ensure only authorized personnel can view sensitive information. But security isn't just about technology; it's also about the policies and procedures that govern how our team handles data daily.

No system can guarantee absolute security—that would be dishonest to claim—but we've taken extensive measures to make unauthorized access extremely difficult. Here's what that actually means in practice:

Encryption Standards: All data traveling between your device and our servers gets encrypted using industry-standard protocols. Your password never gets stored in readable form—we keep only a cryptographic hash that lets us verify you entered the correct password without actually storing the password itself. Sensitive information in our databases receives additional encryption at rest.
Access Controls and Authentication: Not everyone at Stonebridgegroup can access all data. We grant access based on job requirements, and even then, actions get logged for audit purposes. Multi-factor authentication protects administrative accounts, and we regularly review who has access to what systems.
Regular Security Assessments: Our security team conducts ongoing vulnerability scans, penetration testing, and code reviews to identify potential weaknesses before they become actual problems. We also monitor for suspicious activity patterns that might indicate a breach attempt.
Data Minimization and Retention: We don't keep information longer than necessary. Once data no longer serves a legitimate purpose—whether that's a completed course, expired promotional campaign, or closed support ticket—it gets deleted according to our retention schedule. This reduces the amount of potentially vulnerable information we're responsible for protecting.
Employee Training and Policies: Every team member who handles user data receives training on privacy best practices and our security policies. We've established clear protocols for responding to potential security incidents, and employees know how to escalate concerns quickly.
Third-Party Security Standards: The external services we integrate must meet our security requirements before we'll work with them. We verify they maintain appropriate certifications, conduct regular audits, and will notify us promptly if they experience a data breach.

Your Data Rights

The information we hold about you remains fundamentally yours. You have rights regarding how that data gets used, stored, and shared, and we've built tools to help you exercise those rights without jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Depending on where you live, specific regulations might grant you additional protections beyond what we describe here.

Exercising these rights is usually straightforward through your account settings, though some requests require manual processing to ensure we're responding to the actual account holder. Here's what you can do:

Access Your Information: You can view and download most of the data we've collected about you directly through your account dashboard. This includes your profile details, course history, progress records, and communication preferences. For a comprehensive data export, you can request a complete copy of everything we have about you.
Correct Inaccurate Data: If your profile contains outdated or incorrect information, you can update it anytime through account settings. For data that's not directly editable, you can submit a correction request and we'll make the changes after verifying your identity.
Delete Your Account: You have the right to request complete deletion of your account and associated data. We'll remove your information from active systems, though some records might persist in backups for a limited time or get retained where legally required. Be aware that deletion is typically permanent—we can't restore your course progress or certificates after removal.
Restrict Processing: In certain situations, you can ask us to limit how we use your data. For example, if you're disputing the accuracy of information, we can mark it as restricted while we investigate. Your account remains active but the contested data won't be used for decisions.
Object to Processing: You can opt out of certain uses of your data, particularly for marketing communications or personalized recommendations. Essential processing required to deliver the service itself—like tracking course progress—can't be disabled without making the platform unusable.
Data Portability: Beyond simply accessing your information, you have the right to receive it in a structured, commonly used format that you could potentially transfer to another service. Our data exports use standard formats like JSON or CSV for this purpose.

We take these rights seriously and aim to respond to requests within a reasonable timeframe. If you're unsatisfied with how we've handled your request or believe we've violated your privacy rights, you have the option to file a complaint with relevant data protection authorities in your jurisdiction.