Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data Datacenter Training collects, how we use it, and the choices you have.

Who is responsible

The controller for the processing described here is Datacenter Training, operated by Ali Gökgül, Rietholzstrasse 26, 8125 Zollikerberg, Switzerland. For any question about your data, or to exercise the rights listed below, write to getdatacentertraining@gmail.com.

What we collect

• Email address, when you subscribe to the newsletter or contact us. A subscription only counts once you open the confirmation link we send; before that, nothing is sent to the address.
• Account data, if you create one: email address, login method, your training progress and your plan status. The first mission runs in guest mode without an account, with progress stored only in your browser; from the second mission on an account is required.
• Payment data, if you buy a plan: handled by Stripe. We never see or store card numbers; we receive only the plan, payment status and a customer reference.
• Reach analytics: pages viewed, referring site, approximate region, device type. Collected in aggregate and not used to identify you.
• Learning analytics: how the course itself is going; which missions and scenes you open, how many attempts a task takes, how long a scene takes, whether an automatic hint appeared. Recorded per event. If you allow it in the banner, under a random identifier stored on your device, and linked to your account only while you are signed in; if you do not, only while you are signed in, under your account, with nothing stored on your device for it. Never a name, an address or free text, and never anything about payments. Described in full under “How we measure the course”.
• Anything you choose to include in a message you send us.

Why we use it

• To send occasional product updates and tell you when new missions ship.
• To answer questions you send us.
• To understand which pages are useful so we can improve them.

Accounts, payments and disputes

• Account: your email address, a hashed password (or your Google sign-in), and your training progress; the missions you have completed with their scores, the answers you typed, and any name you enter for your training record. Without an account none of this progress reaches our servers: guest progress stays in your browser. The learning analytics described below are the one exception, and only if you allow them in the banner: then they run without an account too, under a random identifier and never under your name.
• Purchase: Stripe processes the payment and holds the card data; we never see it. We keep the customer and subscription identifier, the plan, the amount, the date and the country needed for tax, plus the confirmation that you accepted the terms and asked for immediate access.
• Disputes and chargebacks: if you open a dispute with your bank, we may pass Stripe the evidence of your purchase; order data, the terms you accepted, and whether the content was accessed. This is how a dispute is defended and it is the reason we keep the acceptance record.
• Administrative log: when access is granted or withdrawn, a payment is refunded, a second factor is reset or an account is deleted, we record who did what, to which account and when. Deletion records deliberately outlive the account; otherwise we could not prove that we deleted it. They hold the account identifier and the email address, never progress or payment details.
• Retention: account and progress data until you delete the account; administrative log entries for three years; payment and tax records for as long as accounting law requires (in Switzerland ten years). The record of the terms you accepted outlives the account for the same reason the deletion record does: it is what we would have to show if a payment were disputed afterwards. It holds the date, the version you accepted and what you bought; no progress, no payment details.

How we measure the course

To find out where a course is confusing we record what happens while you work through it: which mission and scene you open, how many attempts a task takes, how long a scene takes, whether you retry after falling below the pass mark, and whether an automatic hint appeared. This is our own measurement on our own servers; no cookie, no advertising network, no third country.

It is pseudonymous. If you allow it in the banner, your browser gets a random identifier that we generate and that means nothing outside this service; while you are signed in, the record also carries your account so that one person is counted once rather than twice. If you do not allow it, nothing is stored on your device for this measurement: while you are signed in the record carries only your account, and while you are signed out nothing is recorded. We never record a name, an email address, free text you typed, or anything about a payment; what you bought is known from the payment records, never from your browser. Analyses in our operator console show counts and rates only, and anything covering fewer than five learners is withheld.

Twelve months after an event was recorded we remove the link to your account and replace the random identifier on those records with a fresh one, so that nothing ties them back to you or to the browser you still use; only the anonymous row remains, and the course statistics survive while the connection to you does not. Deleting your account removes these records for you straight away, and you can request a copy of them at any time. The random identifier depends on the same choice in the banner as Google Analytics and Google Ads: the banner asks once for all three, and choosing “Only what's necessary” or taking your consent back removes the identifier from your device straight away.

Your certificate is public

If you buy a certificate, it carries the full name you enter and confirm in the issuance step; not a name taken from your profile, and not one we guess. That name, together with the course, the issue date and whether the certificate is still valid, is shown by the public verification address printed on the certificate itself. Anyone holding that address can see it, which is the point: a certificate nobody can check is worth nothing. We publish nothing else there; no email address, no account identifier, no payment details and no score.

The basis for publishing it is your own confirmation at issuance, which is why we ask for it in a separate step and say plainly what happens. The name cannot be changed afterwards, because a credential that can be silently rewritten is not a credential; a correction means we revoke the certificate and issue a new one. If a certificate is refunded or revoked, the verification address reports it as no longer valid and stops offering the file. Your progress and your free Training Record are separate and are not affected.

Deleting your account

You delete your account yourself, in the account screen: we ask you to sign in again, cancel an active subscription, and then delete your login and everything keyed to it in one step. Time already paid for is forfeited, so cancel instead of deleting if you want to use the rest of the period. Progress stored only in your browser is cleared on that device as well; export it first if you want to keep it.

• Deleted with the account: your login, your synced progress, your entitlements and any access we granted you, your single-course purchases and the record of the paid missions we delivered to you, your company memberships and seats, and the learning-analytics records carrying your account.
• Your certificates are deleted too, with the name printed on them. Their verification address then answers that no such certificate exists, so download a certificate first if you still need it.
• Kept after deletion: the administrative log entry that records the deletion, the record of the terms you accepted (both described above), anything you sent us through the contact form, feedback or the newsletter, which is kept under your email address, and the payment and tax records Stripe holds for the statutory period; that is a legal obligation we cannot waive.
• If you own a company account that has other members or has ever been billed, the deletion waits: we transfer the ownership first, then your account can go. A company account with no other member and no billing history is deleted with you.

Legal basis and retention

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies, we rely on your consent for newsletter emails and for Google Analytics and the Google Ads conversion measurement described below, for the random learning-analytics identifier described above, on our legitimate interest in improving the course for the learning analytics recorded under your account while you are signed in, on the performance of our contract with you for the account and the paid plan, on our legitimate interest in defending payment disputes, and on legal obligation for accounting records. Your consent is recorded when you open the confirmation link we email you: until then your address is stored but never written to, and if you never confirm, it never receives anything. Addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them, and for no more than 24 months of inactivity after that.

Swiss data protection law

We are based in Switzerland, so the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) applies to the processing described here, alongside the GDPR or the UK GDPR where those apply to you. The rights listed below are available under the FADP as well, and you can lodge a complaint with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) in Bern.

Processors

We use third-party providers, each bound by a data processing agreement and processing data only on our instructions. Where personal data is transferred to a country that is not recognized by Switzerland as providing an adequate level of data protection, we rely on safeguards permitted under applicable Swiss data-protection law, such as recognized standard contractual clauses. For transfers to U.S. organizations certified under the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, that framework may provide the applicable basis for the transfer.

Where the GDPR applies, a transfer relies on an adequacy decision of the European Commission or, where there is none, on safeguards under Article 46 GDPR, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses; for U.S. organizations certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, that framework may provide the applicable basis. Where the UK GDPR applies, a transfer relies on UK adequacy regulations, including the separate UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework where the U.S. recipient is eligible and actively certified for that extension, or on safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a transfer through the contact details in this policy.

• Vercel (hosting and cookieless page analytics): our server functions run in Frankfurt, Germany; pages are delivered through Vercel's global network.
• Supabase (accounts, progress sync, entitlements and certificates): Frankfurt, Germany.
• Stripe (payment processing): Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, Ireland; data may also be processed in the United States.
• Resend (transactional email): Ireland.
• Upstash (rate limiting: a short-lived counter keyed to your IP address or account identifier that expires after at most one day): Frankfurt, Germany.
• Google Ireland Limited (analytics and advertising measurement, and only if you allow it): Ireland; Google may also process data in the United States and other countries where it operates.
• Ahrefs (cookieless page analytics): Singapore.

Your rights

• Access a copy of the data we hold about you; signed-in users can download it themselves, in machine-readable form, from Account → Data and account. No request, no waiting.
• Correct anything inaccurate.
• Delete your data, including every waitlist record.
• Withdraw consent at any time: every email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and the choice you made in the banner is taken back with the button under “Cookies and analytics”.
• Lodge a complaint with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) in Switzerland or with your local data protection authority.

Cookies and analytics

We set no cookies of our own: your theme preference, your analytics choice, your sign-in session, your course progress and the random learning-analytics identifier, only if you allow it in the banner (stored as “dc-analytics-id”, with “dc-analytics-session” and “dc-analytics-started”), are all kept in your browser's local or session storage, on your own device. Cookies can still reach you through the services we embed; Google Analytics and Google Ads only after you allow it, as described below, and Stripe on the pages where you enter card details, where the payment form is provided by Stripe and any cookies are theirs, not ours. While you are signed in, that same progress is also synced to your account on our servers, so you can pick it up on another device; it is stored only for you and is never sold or shared for advertising.

We also run Google Analytics 4 to see which pages help people learn, and Google Ads conversion tracking to see which ads lead to a purchase. Both store data on your device only if you allow it. Until you do, Google Consent Mode keeps analytics and advertising storage denied, so no _ga cookie is set and no identifier is stored. The measurement tag itself does load on every page, and until you allow it, it sends only cookieless signals: click identifiers are stripped from those requests, and the click information is passed through the address bar instead. Choosing “Allow” in the banner sets that cookie and sends usage data to Google Ireland Limited; you can take the choice back at any time with the button below, which brings the banner back. The same choice covers the random learning-analytics identifier described under “How we measure the course”: “Allow” lets us store it on your device, and taking the choice back removes it. When you complete a purchase, we also report that purchase to Google Ads: the amount, the currency, an identifier for the product and the payment reference, so that a sale can be attributed to an ad. When you create an account or complete a purchase, and you have allowed advertising measurement, we additionally send Google a one-way fingerprint of your email address: it is scrambled in your browser with SHA-256 before it leaves, so Google receives a string of letters and digits and never the address itself. This helps Google recognize that an advert led to that sign-up or sale. If you have not allowed advertising measurement, we do not send it at all. So that no sign-up or purchase is reported twice, we keep a short list of those already reported (stored as “dc-reported-purchases”, for 30 days); with your consent it lies on your device, without it only in the open page, and taking your consent back removes it. We never send your name, your actual email address or your card details. Alongside all of this we use cookieless analytics (Vercel, Ahrefs) that never identifies individuals.

Contact

Most requests need no request at all: if you have an account, you can download your data and delete your account yourself, at any time, under Account → Data and account. For anything else (correction, objection, or a question about this notice) use the contact form; it reaches the operator directly (see the legal notice). We answer as soon as we can and in any case within the statutory deadline, which is one month.