Data Preferences and Tracking Technologies
Stonebridgegroup uses various tracking technologies to deliver our online education platform effectively and to understand how students and visitors interact with our learning materials. We believe in transparency about the information we collect and why we need it. This page explains what tracking technologies are, how we use them, and most importantly, how you can control them.
Why We Use Tracking Technologies
When you visit our education platform, small pieces of data help us remember who you are and what you're learning. These technologies—commonly called cookies and similar tools—work quietly in the background to make your experience smoother. Think of them as digital bookmarks that remember your progress through a course or keep you logged in between study sessions.
Our platform needs certain trackers just to function properly. Without them, you'd have to log in every time you clicked to a new lesson, and your quiz progress would disappear if you closed your browser. These essential technologies enable basic features like secure authentication, form submissions when you ask questions, and maintaining your shopping cart if you're enrolling in multiple courses at once.
Beyond the essentials, we use functional trackers that remember your preferences and make the learning experience more personal. These remember things like your video playback speed preferences, whether you prefer dark mode for late-night studying, and which language you've selected for interface elements. They also help us show you where you left off in a video lecture or which chapters you've already completed in your coursework.
How Analytics Help Improve Education
We track how students move through our courses to identify where people get stuck or confused. If we notice that many learners rewatch the same section of a video multiple times, that tells us the explanation might need improvement. When students consistently skip certain optional materials, we reconsider whether those resources are truly helpful. This behavioral data doesn't identify you personally—it shows patterns across thousands of learners that guide our content development.
Some tracking helps us personalize course recommendations and learning paths. Based on what subjects you've studied and how you've engaged with different teaching styles, we can suggest courses that match your interests and learning patterns. If you've completed three business courses with a focus on practical case studies, we're more likely to recommend similar hands-on programs rather than purely theoretical ones.
The data we collect benefits everyone in our learning community. You get a smoother, more personalized experience that remembers your progress and preferences. We get insights that help us build better courses, fix technical problems faster, and allocate resources to the features students actually use. And honestly, understanding which courses generate the most discussion helps us foster the kind of active learning communities that make online education effective.
Control Options
You have significant control over how tracking technologies work on your device. European privacy regulations like GDPR give you explicit rights to accept or refuse non-essential tracking, and we honor these rights globally for all our users. You can adjust your preferences at any time without it affecting your ability to access course content you've already enrolled in.
Browser-Level Management
Every modern browser gives you tools to manage cookies and other trackers. In Chrome, you'll find these options under Settings → Privacy and security → Cookies and other site data. Firefox users can navigate to Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data. Safari on Mac puts these controls under Preferences → Privacy, while Edge users should check Settings → Cookies and site permissions. Each browser lets you block all cookies, block only third-party cookies, or clear existing cookies entirely.
Our platform includes a consent management system that appears when you first visit our site. You can accept all tracking, reject optional categories, or customize exactly which types you'll allow. This tool remembers your choice through a small cookie of its own—which is why even if you reject everything else, you'll still see a minimal essential cookie that stores your preferences. To change your choices later, look for the privacy settings link in our footer or user account dashboard.
Disabling different categories has varying effects on your experience. Blocking essential cookies prevents you from logging in or maintaining course progress between sessions. Refusing functional cookies means you'll need to reset your video preferences and interface settings each visit. Declining analytics doesn't affect your ability to learn, but it removes your data from the patterns we use to improve courses. Rejecting personalization cookies means you'll see generic course recommendations instead of tailored suggestions based on your learning history.
- Browser extensions like Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin provide additional control by blocking known tracking scripts before they load. These tools learn which third parties appear across many websites and automatically block them, though you may need to whitelist our education platform if the extensions break essential functions like video playback or discussion forums.
- Many browsers now include enhanced tracking protection features that block cross-site cookies by default. Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection and Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention work automatically without requiring extensions. These built-in protections typically don't interfere with first-party cookies that our platform needs to function, while blocking third-party trackers that follow you across different websites.
Finding the right balance matters more than blocking everything. An education platform works best when it can remember your progress, preferences, and learning patterns. We'd suggest allowing essential and functional cookies while being more selective about analytics and personalization based on your comfort level. You can always start with minimal tracking and gradually allow more categories if you find the experience too generic or inconvenient.
External Providers
We work with selected technology partners who help us deliver and improve our education services. These include video hosting providers that serve our lecture content, payment processors who handle course enrollment transactions, analytics companies that help us understand usage patterns, and communication tools that power our discussion forums and student support chat. Each partner can place their own tracking technologies when you use their services through our platform.
These external providers typically collect information like your IP address, browser type, device identifiers, pages you visit, time spent on different sections, and interaction patterns with their specific services. A video provider, for example, tracks which lectures you watch, how long you view them, and whether you skip sections or rewatch content. Payment processors collect transaction details and billing information necessary to process enrollments. Analytics partners receive aggregated data about user behavior patterns across our entire platform.
Partners use collected data primarily to deliver their specific services and improve their technology. Video hosts analyze playback statistics to ensure content loads quickly and plays smoothly across different connection speeds. Discussion forum providers monitor message patterns to identify spam or harassment. Analytics companies aggregate data from multiple clients to improve their tracking algorithms and reporting dashboards. Some partners may also use data for their own marketing purposes, though our contracts limit how they can use information collected through our platform.
You can control partner tracking through several methods. Most partners honor the Do Not Track signal or similar browser settings that indicate your privacy preferences. Our consent management system lets you block specific partner categories while still allowing core platform functions. Some partners provide their own opt-out mechanisms—for instance, you can usually disable personalized advertising through industry-wide preference centers. And remember, your browser's cookie controls affect partner technologies just as they affect our own tracking systems.
We protect your data through contractual agreements that require partners to handle information securely and use it only for specified purposes. These contracts include provisions requiring encryption during data transmission, restrictions on data sharing with other third parties, requirements to delete data when no longer needed, and obligations to notify us of any security breaches. We periodically review our partners' privacy practices and security measures, though we can't monitor their systems continuously or guarantee their compliance in real-time.
Alternative Technologies
Beyond standard cookies, we use web beacons—tiny transparent images embedded in web pages and emails. These pixels fire when you load a page or open an email, sending a signal back to our servers that confirms delivery and provides basic information about your device and browser. We place these beacons in course completion pages to track your progress, in email newsletters to measure open rates, and in help documentation to understand which support resources students actually reference. They're typically 1x1 pixel GIF or PNG files that you never notice visually.
Local storage and session storage offer more sophisticated data retention than traditional cookies. Local storage persists indefinitely on your device until explicitly cleared, making it perfect for storing your course progress, interface preferences, and offline course materials. Session storage disappears when you close your browser tab, so we use it for temporary data like the current state of a quiz you're taking or form inputs you haven't yet submitted. These storage mechanisms can hold more data than cookies and don't get sent to our servers with every page request, making your experience faster.
Our platform performs device fingerprinting in limited circumstances, primarily for security purposes. This technique creates a unique identifier based on your device characteristics—screen resolution, installed fonts, browser plugins, graphics card specifications, and other configuration details. We use this to detect suspicious login attempts from unfamiliar devices and to prevent automated bots from scraping course content or creating fake accounts. The fingerprint itself doesn't identify you personally, but the unique combination of characteristics makes your device recognizable across sessions even without cookies.
Server logs automatically record technical information about every request your browser makes to our platform. These logs include your IP address, the URL you requested, the date and time of access, your browser's user agent string, the referring page that linked you here, and whether the request succeeded or generated an error. We retain these logs for security monitoring, troubleshooting technical problems, and analyzing traffic patterns to prevent server overload during peak enrollment periods. Most web servers create these logs by default as part of their basic operation.
Managing these technologies requires different approaches than cookie controls. You can clear local and session storage through your browser's developer tools or by clearing all site data for our domain. Browser extensions that block tracking scripts often prevent web beacons from loading or firing. Device fingerprinting is harder to control—you'd need to use privacy-focused browsers like Tor or Brave that deliberately make fingerprinting less effective by standardizing characteristics across users. Server logs can't be disabled since they're generated automatically, but you can use VPNs or proxy services to mask your IP address from being recorded.
Further Considerations
We retain different types of tracking data for varying periods based on its purpose. Essential authentication cookies expire after 30 days of inactivity, forcing you to log in again for security reasons. Functional preference cookies last up to one year so we don't forget your settings between extended breaks from studying. Analytics data is typically aggregated and anonymized within 90 days, with the original detailed records deleted. Video viewing statistics connected to your account remain accessible while you're enrolled in a course but may be summarized or deleted six months after course completion. When you delete your account entirely, we remove all tracking data associated with your profile within 30 days, though anonymized aggregated statistics may remain in our analytics systems.
Security measures protect your tracking data both in transit and at rest. All data transmitted between your browser and our servers travels over encrypted HTTPS connections that prevent eavesdropping. We store cookies and tracking identifiers in encrypted databases with access restricted to authorized personnel who need the information for platform operations. Regular security audits assess our tracking systems for vulnerabilities. We implement rate limiting to prevent automated attacks that might try to extract tracking data through repeated requests. And our staff receives training on handling user data responsibly, including tracking information that might seem innocuous but could reveal patterns about individual students.
Sometimes we combine tracking data with other information sources to create a more complete picture of platform usage. We might correlate quiz scores with video watching patterns to understand which teaching approaches work best. Course completion rates get analyzed alongside forum participation to see if community engagement affects learning outcomes. Survey responses from students get linked to their behavioral data to validate whether self-reported experiences match actual usage patterns. This integration happens within our systems and follows the same privacy protections as other data—we don't sell combined profiles or share them with unrelated third parties.
Our tracking practices comply with GDPR requirements for European users, CCPA standards for California residents, and FERPA regulations since we serve students in educational contexts. We conduct privacy impact assessments before introducing new tracking technologies. Our legal basis for processing tracking data typically relies on legitimate interest for analytics, consent for optional personalization, and contractual necessity for essential platform functions. We maintain documentation of our data processing activities and can provide copies to regulators upon request. If you have concerns about compliance, you can exercise your rights to access, correct, or delete your data through your account settings or by contacting our privacy team.
International users should know that tracking data may be transferred to and processed in countries different from where you're located. Our primary servers are in the United States, though we use content delivery networks that cache course materials globally for faster access. Some of our partners maintain infrastructure in multiple countries. We protect international data transfers through standard contractual clauses approved by regulatory authorities and by choosing partners who participate in recognized privacy frameworks. If you're accessing our platform from the European Union, your tracking data receives GDPR-level protection regardless of where it's processed.