A consumer account with lessons attached: ordinary commercial terms, so marketing, ad targeting and profiling apply in full, and the course providers you studied with get your data to market their own products. No retention number, except where tax rules force one.
A modest but personal learning record. Worth listing.
Enrolment and completion records persist for years; marketing profiles linger until you object.
Most courses ask only for an email; certificates may verify identity.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
What you studied says what you were trying to fix or become: a career change, a gap you were closing, a subject you would not raise. Leaked with the card that paid for it, it reads as a plan you never announced.
They watch how you study, not just what you finish
The purchase is the small part. The platform logs what you started, what you dropped and how long you spent, question by question, and that trail shapes what it sells you next. Take a verified certificate and an ID check adds your face.
A consumer account with lessons attached
You signed yourself up, so this runs on ordinary commercial terms: marketing, ad targeting and profiling apply in full. Nothing in the learning framing narrows them, and no records law sits over the file.
The course providers get you too
Learner data is passed to the content providers and partners whose courses you took, so they can market their own products to you. The policy frames that as sharing things that may interest you, rather than as a handover.
No number, except on the parts they must bound
Most policies give no retention figure at all and keep your record as long as they judge necessary. The exceptions are narrow: the purchase sits under tax rules for about six years, and face data from a certificate check is capped at two years.
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
Course choices can imply beliefs and interests.
Two kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a ground the company grants itself.
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
The value here is intent. What you are learning is a reliable signal of what you are about to buy, become, or leave behind, which makes the profile worth targeting against and worth passing to the companies whose courses you took. Expect the usual reservation to keep aggregated and de-identified data with no end date on it.
Learning interest and intent are strong marketing signals.
Coursework and questions train tutoring models.
Anonymised is their word. Your written answers carry a style that language models attribute at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
Four card transactions identify 90% of people in payment data (de Montjoye et al., Science, 2015).
Language models infer where a person lives, their income, and their sex from their writing alone, at near-human accuracy and at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
Browser and device fingerprints were unique for 84% of visitors in the first large study (Eckersley, 2010), and sparse histories of what people viewed re-identified them against public reviews (Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2008).
THE STUDIES Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)·Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata (Science 347 (6221), 2015)·Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models (ICLR 2024, 2024)·How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010), 2010)·Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008)
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation, and increasingly AI training can all ride under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already covers it.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line: use your data to run the service, not to improve, target, or train on it.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Often technically true, and still misleading. It usually means no cash changes hands. Data can still flow to ad networks, analytics firms, and partners: on their definition, sharing is not selling.
THE MOVE Flip the do-not-sell switch where one exists. The written objection on top of it goes on your record.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
How data leaves the building with no name attached. Recipients are listed by what they do, never who they are. You cannot send a request to a company you cannot name, which is the point.
THE MOVE An access request can ask for the recipients by name, not just the categories. UK and EU law put that choice with you. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Stripping the name does not strip the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies grant themselves free, indefinite use of this data because in their telling it is no longer about you.
THE MOVE If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for: legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits, their own business reasons. None of them carries a firm end date. Deletion becomes a negotiation, not an event.
THE MOVE Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own. Their reply goes on your record.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
A contract term, not a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. The careful version ends with your account. The broad version can be passed on, never expires, and survives deletion.
THE MOVE Whether the licence ends with the account is written in their terms, not yours. Closing the account goes on your record.
“content providers and other business partners, so they may share information about their products and services that may be of interest to you”
The companies whose courses you took receive your details and market to you directly. It is worded as an interest match rather than a handover, and it runs under the ordinary commercial terms of an account you opened yourself.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line and asks which partners already have your details. Their reply goes on your record.
“deleted upon successful completion of verification and in any event no later than two years after collection”
A real limit, and a narrow one. It covers the face data and documents from a certificate check, not the course record around them, and two years is the outside date rather than a promise about the usual one.
THE MOVE A request asks what the check produced and whether it is still held. Their reply goes on your record.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →