Privacy Policy

This policy explains how Whipline Crane Academy, LLC ("the Academy", "we", "us") handles information about you when you use our website and online training. To reach us about privacy, use the Contact page.

Information you give us:

• Account and profile: your first and last name, display name (shown to other students in forums), date of birth, email address, and a password (stored only in scrambled, hashed form).
• Getting started questions: how you heard about us, the certification you are aiming for, an optional certification or candidate ID, and whether you would like help with scheduling or rescheduling an exam.
• Preferences: for example, whether you want email notifications.
• Things you write and upload: forum posts and replies (including ones you mark anonymous), tutoring questions and messages with any attachments, and messages you send through the Contact form.

Information we record as you use the site:

• Learning activity: courses you enroll in, lessons and walkthroughs you complete, and your progress through the Introduction.
• Answers and scores: your exam attempts, the answers you choose, your scores and pass or fail results, and each answer in exams and drills marked right or wrong, with the topic of the question. We use these to show you what to study and to see which topics students find hard.
• Sign-in records: each time you sign in we record the time, your IP address, and your browser type, plus a running count of sign-ins. Exam attempts also record your IP address. We keep records of some administrative actions in an audit log.

Payment information: Stripe handles all payments. We never see or store your card number. We keep a Stripe customer reference and your subscription status (for example active, past due, or cancelled, and the period dates), so we know whether to give you paid access.

Information from your organization: if your employer or training organization set up your account or seat, we keep that link.

• to create and run your account, keep you signed in, and give you the courses and features you signed up for;
• to check that you are at least 18;
• to take payments, manage your subscription, and send billing emails;
• to score exams, track progress, and show you where to focus your study;
• to answer your tutoring questions, support requests, and contact messages;
• to keep the site secure, catch account sharing and cheating, and investigate problems, using sign-in records and IP addresses;
• to improve our courses and questions, using answer statistics; and
• to follow the law and enforce our Terms of Service.

We send emails to confirm your email address, reset your password, tell you when an instructor replies to a tutoring question or someone replies to your forum thread, and about your subscription (when it becomes active or a payment fails). Our staff also receive an email when you send a tutoring question or a Contact message. You can turn off notification emails in your account settings; emails needed to run your account (such as password resets and billing notices) may still be sent.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only as needed to run the site:

• Stripe, our payment processor, receives your email and payment details to process your subscription. Stripe's own privacy policy applies to what it collects.
• Resend, our email delivery service, receives the email address, subject, and content of the emails we send.
• Hosting and infrastructure providers that store our database and files and serve the website for us.
• Other students can see your display name and the posts and replies you make in forums. If you mark a post anonymous, your display name is hidden from other students, but we still keep a record of who wrote it.
• Instructors and administrators at the Academy can see student profiles, progress, scores, sign-in records, forums, and tutoring messages so they can teach, support, moderate, and run the service.
• Your organization. If your account belongs to an employer or training organization, its administrators can see your profile and your course progress and results.
• Legal and safety. We may disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people's safety or our rights, or as part of a sale or reorganization of the Academy.

We measure how the site is used with a simple counter of our own that stores its data only in our own database. We also run Google Ads, so we use Google's advertising tag to learn which of our ads lead to visits and sign-ups. That tag is not loaded if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.

• Sign-in cookies. Our sign-in system sets secure session cookies so you stay signed in. They are needed for your account to work.
• Sign in with Google. If you choose to sign in or sign up with Google, Google tells us your name and email address, and that it has confirmed the email. We use those to create or find your account. We do not receive your Google password, and we do not keep your Google profile picture. Google handles your sign-in under its own privacy policy. You can also use an email and password instead.
• Visit counter. A first-party cookie holds a random number so we can tell how many different people visit and which pages they look at. For each page we record the page address (without anything after a question mark, apart from campaign tags such as utm_source), the time, the site that sent you, your device type (phone, tablet or computer) and your country. If you are signed in, the view is connected to your account. We do not record your IP address in this counter or share it with anyone. It is not recorded at all if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, and we delete these records after about 13 months.
• Google advertising tag. Google may set its own cookies and receive your browser details and the pages you view on our site, to measure our ads and, where you allow it, show you our ads elsewhere. How Google handles that is described in Google's privacy policy, and you can manage ad personalization at adssettings.google.com.
• Browser storage on your device (local storage): your light or dark theme choice, your read-aloud and sound-effect preferences, saved progress of an exam in progress so you do not lose it if the page reloads, and a few similar settings such as the free demo state. This stays on your device.
• Offline support. The site registers a service worker, a small script that lets the site work as an installable app.
• Read-aloud. The text-to-speech feature uses the voices built into your own browser or device. We do not send lesson text to a speech service for it.

You can clear cookies and site data in your browser at any time, though you may be signed out and lose saved preferences.

The free demos do not need an account. We do not ask you for personal information to try them. Ordinary technical information, such as your IP address, is seen by our hosting provider when you visit any page.

We keep your information while your account is active and for a reasonable time afterward, for example so you can come back, to handle billing, tax, and legal matters, to resolve disputes, and to keep the site secure. Some records, such as payment records held by Stripe or records we must keep by law, may be kept longer. When we no longer need information, we delete it or remove what identifies you.

You can ask us, through the Contact page, to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy;
• correct information that is wrong (you can also edit much of your profile in your account settings);
• delete your account and personal information, subject to records we must keep for legal or security reasons; or
• stop sending you non-essential emails.

Depending on where you live, such as California and some other states, you may have additional rights over your personal information, such as the right to know, correct, or delete it, and the right not to be treated worse for using those rights. We do not sell personal information or share it for advertising. We will ask you to confirm who you are before acting on a request, and we will respond as the law requires.

We use reasonable measures to protect your information: passwords are stored hashed, payments are handled by Stripe, tutoring attachments are kept in private storage that is only served to the people allowed to see them, and access for staff is limited by role. No website is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute security. Please use a strong, unique password and keep it private.

The site is for adults. You must be at least 18 to create an account, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top shows when. If a change is significant, we will try to tell you by email or on the site.

Questions or requests about your information? Use the Contact page. See also our Terms of Service.