We use industry-standard security measures to protect your information from loss, unauthorized access, use, alteration, or disclosure. Data is stored on secure servers with firewalls, and payment transactions are encrypted via SSL. 

Your role is crucial in safeguarding your information. If you have a password for our services, please keep it private and avoid sharing it. Be cautious about sharing information in public areas like message boards, as it can be viewed by any user. While we prioritize your security, internet data transmission cannot be guaranteed as 100% secure, and we cannot be responsible for breaches of privacy settings or security measures on our website.

• It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

• Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name. You may provide us with more information — like your email, role, industry, demographic data,  organization and geographic information — but we don’t require that information to create an account.
• Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. Your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
• Payment and contact information: There are various ways in which you may provide us payment information and associated contact information. For example, if you purchase a subscription, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made.
• Content information: You might provide us with information about you in uploaded documents, content drafts, or published content (e.g., documents about learners, textbooks, style guides).
• Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you communicate with our support team, respond to surveys, or post in our public forums. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications.

Support Information: You may provide us with information when you complete our online forms, call, or email for the purposes of general inquiries, support requests, or to report an issue.

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, login information, IP address, unique device identifiers, user identification, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services.

Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on our platform — in other words, who did what and when. We use tools like PostHog, LangSmith, and Google Analytics to track user activity to help us understand and improve our Services.

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

Third-party services: If you create or log in to your account through another service (like Google and/or Microsoft), we’ll receive associated login information (e.g., your username, email address). We also use APIs to pass input data to third-party services, including large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude.

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services: For example, to set up and maintain your account, generate learning content, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
• To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services: For example, by providing automatic upgrades, monitoring, and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features, products and technologies that we think our users will enjoy.
• To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing: For example, by targeting our marketing messages, analyzing the results of our campaigns, and understanding user retention.
• To protect our Services, our users, and the public: For example, by detecting security incidents, protecting against malicious or illegal activity, complying with our legal obligations, and protecting the rights and property of Learning Design Alliance and others.
• To fix problems with our Services: For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
• To customize the user experience: For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and recommendations.
• To communicate with you: For example, by emailing you to ask for feedback, share tips, or keep you up to date on our services. If you opt out of marketing communications, we’ll still send you important updates related to your account.

To protect our legitimate business interests and legal rights. For example, by using information about you in connection with legal claims, compliance, regulatory and audit functions, court orders, government, and law enforcement requests and disclosures in connection with the reorganization, acquisition, merger or sale of a business where required by law or where we believe it is necessary to protect our legal rights, interests, and the interests of others.

For users in the European Union, our legal grounds for processing your information under EU data protection laws are as follows:

2. Contractual necessity: The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements.
3. Legal obligation: The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation.
4. Vital interests: The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person.
5. Security and Protection: The use is necessary to provide you with secure, stable and protected services, ensuring security and integrity of our systems, detecting and preventing unauthorized access.
6. Legitimate interests: We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services, improve user experience, communicate with you, receiving, and acting upon, your feedback, issues, or inquiries, manage and promote our brand and to safeguard our Services.
   
   

Consent: You have given us consent for specific uses — for example, before we place certain cookies on your device.

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below:

• Other service users: we share certain information about you with other Service users for the purposes of collaboration and to participate in community forums.
• AI product functionality: Our Services incorporate advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that are developed by Learning Design Alliance  incorporating language models licensed from third-party licensor(s) (“LDA AI Features”). LDA AI Features do not collect personal information unless they are enabled by you before use through an opt-in process. Third-party licensor(s) are selected by us for their enterprise-grade security and privacy controls with whom we have signed agreements in place to ensure your personal information is fully protected. Your personal information will not be used to train, retrain or improve models of third-party licensor(s). If you opt-in to use LDA AI Features and enter or upload personal information, LDA AI Features uses your personal information and data for the purposes of generating enhanced text, images, and other outputs.
• Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
• Research partners: We may disclose information about you to universities, non-profits or government agencies.
• Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment processors, authenticators, website and application development, virtual infrastructure, third party websites, cloud storage services, and customer support services), those that assist us with marketing efforts, and those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
• Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request including to meet national security requirements and to enforce our agreements, policies, and terms of service. Additionally, if required, we may share your information to comply with applicable laws and regulations.
• To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Learning Design Alliance, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we believe there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or otherwise reorganize our business, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information, and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
• With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so.
• Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.

Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.

That means information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on our Services, and your interactions (such as comments or "Likes") on other websites using our Services are all available to others.

For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar. Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, displays alongside the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your account. Your Gravatar and public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on websites that use our Gravatar service, if the email address associated with your account is the same email address you use on the other website.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

This section explains how we, and our partners, deploy cookies, as well as the options you have to control them.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data, stored in text files, that are stored on your computer or other device when websites are loaded in a browser. They are widely used to "remember" you and your preferences, either for a single visit (through a "session cookie") or for multiple repeat visits (using a "persistent cookie"). Cookies ensure a consistent and efficient experience for visitors and perform essential functions such as allowing users to remain logged in. Cookies may be set by the site that you are visiting (known as "first-party cookies") or by third parties, such as those who provide analytics services on the website ("third-party cookies").

How we use cookies

We use cookies for a number of different purposes, primarily to provide essential functionality for our services and to gather analytics on how users interact with our website. These cookies help us ensure our services are functioning as intended and help us improve them over time.

Where we place cookies

We set cookies in a few different locations across our services, including:

• On our website (learningdesignalliance.org)
• In the administrative dashboards of our services
  
  

Types of Cookies

The following table explains the types of cookies we use on our website and why we use them:

We generally retain information about you for as long as you are an active user of our Services and as needed to fulfill the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — unless we are legally required to keep it for a longer period.

If you close your account or your account becomes inactive, we will follow the retention periods below:

• Active deletion: When you actively delete your account or content, we retain customer content for 30 days.
• Passive deletion: If your account remains inactive, we retain your information for 180 days after passive deletion.
• Subscription termination: If your subscription is terminated, we retain your information for 90 days after termination.

Web server logs that record information about visitors to our Services, like IP addresses, browser types, and operating systems, are retained for approximately 30 days. This retention period helps us analyze traffic and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

As another example, when you delete a document, post, or comment from our platform, it stays in your Trash folder for 30 days in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

If you are a job applicant, we will keep your personal data during the application process, and for a certain period thereafter. To determine that period, we take into account a number of factors, like our legal and regulatory obligations (such as equal opportunity obligations) and whether we may need to retain personal data for internal business purposes like analyzing our applicant pool.

After the retention timeframes set out above, we will either delete or de-identify your information or, if this is not possible (for example, because the information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your information and isolate it from any further use until deletion is possible.

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable our advanced security settings, like Two Step Authentication.

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible. If you are a job applicant and you choose not to provide certain data elements to us, we may not be able to proceed with the recruitment process.
• Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like geotagging for photographs.
• Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
• Set your browser to reject cookies: You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using our Services, with the drawback that certain features may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Opt out of our internal analytics program: You can do this through your user settings. By opting out, you will stop sharing information with our analytics tool about events or actions that happen after the opt-out, while you’re logged in to your account.

Close your account: If you no longer want to use our Services, you can close your account. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including some US states and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Laws in some US states require us to provide residents with additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. You’ll find that information in this section (if you are a California resident, please note that this is the Notice at Collection we are required to provide you under California law).

In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information, depending on the Services used:

• Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
• Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
• Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us or you may choose to voluntarily disclose your race or veteran status as part of your job application);
• Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take as an administrator of a site);
• Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
• Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one);
• Professional or employment-related information (for example, your company and team information if you are a user, or information you provide in a job application); and
• Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

If you are a job applicant, we may have also collected:

• Education information, such as the education you disclose in your job application.

You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above.

We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. We retain this information for the length of time described in our How Long We Keep Information section.

In some US states, you have additional rights subject to any exemptions provided by your state’s respective law, including the right to:

• Request a copy of the specific pieces of information we collect about you and, if you’re in California, to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, and the categories of third parties we share it with;
• Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Request correction of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information;
• Receive a copy of your information in a readily portable format; and
• Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.

This California Privacy Rights Statement explains how we collect, use, and disclose personal information relating to California residents covered by the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2021 (“CCPA”) and the California Civil Code section 1798.83 (“Shine the Light” law). 

Scope 

For the purposes of this California Privacy Rights Statement, unless otherwise specified, “Personal Information” refers to information that identifies, relates to, describes, or can be reasonably associated with or linked, directly or indirectly, to a specific consumer or household. 

This California Privacy Rights Statement outlines the following details about your Personal Information over the past 12 months: 

• The categories of Personal Information we have collected, 

• The categories of sources from which we obtained Personal Information, 

• The categories of third parties with whom we disclosed Personal Information, 

• The business purposes for which Personal Information may be used or disclosed, 

• Confirmation that there has been no “sale” or “sharing” of Personal Information, and 

• A description of your rights. 

Personal Information excludes:

• Publicly available information obtained from government records. 

• De-identified or aggregated consumer information. 

• Other information that falls outside the scope of the CCPA, such as: 

• Health or medical information protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA), or clinical trial data.

• Personal information governed by sector-specific privacy laws, including the Fair Credit 

Reporting Act (FCRA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), the California Financial Information Privacy Act (FIPA), and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Additionally, this Statement does not cover Personal Information we handle as a “service provider” under the CCPA in connection with our products and services used by our business customers. Our responsibilities as a service provider are defined in the agreements between us and our customers.

Under California Civil Code Section 1798.83, known as the “Shine the Light” law, California residents may request and receive, once per year and free of charge, information regarding the categories of personal information (as defined by the law) that we disclosed to third parties for their direct marketing purposes in the previous calendar year. This disclosure requirement applies only if we share personal information with third parties for the purpose of their direct marketing to you, rather than for assisting us with our business operations. If you are a California resident and would like to submit such a request, please contact us as outlined below under the “How to Reach Us” section.

We never directly sell your personal information in the conventional sense (i.e., for money).

We may share your information as necessary with our third-party service providers to provide our services to you. To the extent that we share your information with certain advertising, marketing, or analytics vendors, this can be considered a “sale” or “share” in certain U.S. states, which you may have the right to opt out of.

You can learn more about this sharing and how to opt out by clicking the “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link in the footer of our websites, or from the settings page within our apps. Note that in some instances this link will only display to individuals visiting our sites from within the relevant states.

Our opt-out is managed through cookies, so if you delete cookies, your browser is set to delete cookies automatically after a certain length of time, or if you visit sites in a different browser, you’ll need to make this selection again.

We also respect the GPC browser signal and will treat it as a valid means of communicating your desire to opt out.

We do not collect or process your sensitive (and potentially sensitive) personal information except where it is strictly necessary to provide you with our service, where the processing is not for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you, or for other purposes that do not require an option to limit under California law. We don’t knowingly sell or share personal information of those under 16.

Our mission is to democratize publishing and commerce, and that means making our Services accessible to as many people as possible. We show ads on some of our users’ sites as well as some of our own sites, and the revenue these ads generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services so that money doesn’t become an obstacle to having a voice. Our ads program also allows our users to earn revenue to support and grow their own sites. As part of our advertising program, we and our users do use cookies to share certain device identifiers and information about your browsing activities with our advertising partners, and those advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads on some of our users’ sites and some of our own.

The personal information we share includes online identifiers; internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address); and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address). These disclosures may be considered a “sale” or “share” of information under some US state privacy laws. We do not sell (or share) information through our ads program that identifies you personally, like your name or contact information. Learn how you can opt out by going to Advertising on WordPress.com Sites and Sites in the WordAds Program.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to, well, find out how to reach us.

When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

In some circumstances, we may deny your request to exercise one of these rights. For example, if we cannot verify that you are the account owner we may deny your request to access the personal information associated with your account. As another example, if we are legally required to maintain a copy of your personal information we may deny your request to delete your personal information.

In the event that we deny your request, we will communicate this fact to you in writing. You may appeal our decision by responding in writing to our denial email and stating that you would like to appeal. All appeals will be reviewed by an internal expert who was not involved in your original request. In the event that your appeal is also denied this information will be communicated to you in writing. Please note that the appeal process does not apply to job applicants.

If your appeal is denied, in some US states you may refer the denied appeal to the state attorney general if you believe the denial is in conflict with your legal rights. The process for how to do this will be communicated to you in writing at the same time we send you our decision about your appeal.

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the "Your Rights" section above, please contact us via email at contact@learningdesignalliance.org. This is the fastest way to get a response to your inquiry.

Because our Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA), UK or Switzerland who work for us, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the "How and Why We Use Information" section above.

When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, UK or Switzerland we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy and applicable law. These measures include entering into European Commission-approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA, UK or Switzerland and relying on the European Commission’s and the Information Commissioner’s Office’s adequacy decisions about certain countries, as applicable or other accepted transfer mechanism. If you would like more information concerning our attempts to apply the privacy principles applicable in one jurisdiction to data when it goes to another jurisdiction you can contact us using the contact information below.

If you’d like to use third-party plugins or embeds, payment solutions, or other third-party software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself to those third parties. For example, some third-party services may request or require access to your data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We do not own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.

Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We encourage visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to this Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification through email). Your continued use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

In connection with your use of LDA AI Features, you have: a. the right to be informed of the use of profiling and automated decision making; b. the right to access information about the personal data processed by LDA AI Features, including details about how your data is used and the specific outputs generated and c. the right to object to the use of LDA AI Features, especially in cases where solely automated decision-making may produce legal or similarly significant effects on you.

LDA AI Features may involve solely automated decision-making processes; however, these processes are not intended to produce legal or similarly significant effects on users. Should you wish to learn more about the underlying logic and algorithms used in these automated processes, you have the right to request this information, and we will provide a summary of the AI’s decision-making mechanisms. If you choose to object to the use of LDA AI Features, you can opt-out and LDA will automatically disable the AI functionalities associated with your personal information.

The AI models used in LDA AI Features operate on principles of pattern recognition and prediction. The AI analyzes input data to generate outputs, such as predictive text or image enhancements. While the AI is sophisticated, it operates within defined parameters and does not alter or modify your personal information beyond generating the specified output. The consequences of using LDA AI Features are typically limited to enhancing the efficiency and quality of your interactions with the Service. Note that this policy provides general information about your use of LDA AI Features. If you would like to review more specific details about how your personal information is being used or request details about the AI’s outputs, you can get in touch with us through the information under the “How to Reach Us”’ section above. We are committed to providing you with clear and transparent information about how our AI-driven tools operate including details about how your personal information is used and the specific outputs generated. LDA AI Features are designed to assist and enhance your experience by providing automated outputs based on the data and personal information you input. However, these AI tools are not infallible and should not be relied upon for critical decision-making processes that involve legal, financial, or similarly significant outcomes. By opting to use LDA AI Features, you acknowledge that outputs generated by the AI are intended to support, rather than replace, human judgment. LDA disclaims any liability for decisions made solely based on AI-generated outputs. All AI processes are governed by strict security protocols to prevent data infringements and unauthorized access, and your data and personal information is processed solely for the purpose of generating the outputs you request. Should you have concerns about the usage of your personal information, you retain the right to withdraw your consent and disable LDA AI Features at any time

This Privacy Policy applies only to LDA services and does not apply to: 1.  the services and/or websites offered by partners, or any other third parties, 2. your use of our products or services on behalf of an organization (e.g., your employer), in which case, your use is administered and provisioned by your organization under its policies, 3. personal information processed by LDA subject to a separate agreement and/or data protection agreement