Privacy Policy
Last Updated: January 2025
We at Casterina believe your privacy matters—not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental part of how we build and run our educational platform. This policy explains what information we collect when you use our services, why we need it, and what we do to keep it safe. We've tried to write this in plain language because privacy policies shouldn't require a law degree to understand.
Personal Information We Gather
When you sign up for Casterina, we ask for certain details to create your account and personalize your learning experience. This includes your name, email address, and a password you choose. We also collect your preferred language settings and time zone so course materials display correctly for you. If you're an instructor, we'll need additional information like your professional background and teaching credentials to verify your qualifications.
As you navigate through our platform, we automatically gather information about how you interact with courses and content. This includes which lessons you complete, how long you spend on different materials, quiz results, assignment submissions, and discussion forum participation. We track your progress through learning paths and note which features you use most frequently—all of this helps us understand what's working and what needs improvement.
Information You Choose to Share
Beyond the essentials, you might decide to add more details to your profile. A profile photo, biographical information, educational background, or professional experience can help you connect with other learners and instructors. When you participate in forums or group projects, the comments and materials you post become part of your educational record on our platform. You control how much or how little additional information you want to provide.
Technical Data Collection
Our systems automatically log technical information when you access Casterina. We record your IP address, browser type and version, device identifiers, operating system, and referring URLs. We also collect timestamps for your sessions and track which pages you visit within the platform. This technical data helps us troubleshoot problems, detect security threats, and ensure the platform runs smoothly across different devices and browsers.
Data Usage Purposes
The information we collect serves multiple purposes—all centered around delivering quality education and maintaining a secure, functional platform. First and foremost, we use your data to provide the core educational services you signed up for. This means enrolling you in courses, tracking your progress, issuing certificates, facilitating communication between students and instructors, and personalizing your learning dashboard based on your interests and performance.
We analyze usage patterns to improve course design and platform functionality. By understanding how students interact with different types of content—videos, readings, interactive exercises—we help instructors create more engaging materials. If we notice students consistently struggling with a particular concept, that signals an opportunity to enhance explanations or add supplementary resources.
Platform Enhancement and Research
Your aggregated, anonymized data contributes to educational research and platform development. We study completion rates, engagement metrics, and learning outcomes to identify what teaching methods work best. This research never includes personally identifiable information—we look at trends across thousands of users, not individual student records. These insights drive product improvements and help us build better tools for both learners and educators.
Communication and Support
We use your contact information to send important updates about courses you're enrolled in, changes to platform policies, and responses to your support requests. You'll receive notifications about assignment deadlines, new course content, and messages from instructors. We also send occasional emails about new courses that match your learning interests, though you can adjust these preferences anytime through your account settings.
Third-Party Data Collection Tools
Running a modern educational platform requires partnerships with specialized service providers. We've carefully selected third-party tools that help us deliver better experiences while maintaining strong privacy standards. Each provider we work with signs agreements that limit how they can use your information.
Analytics and Performance Monitoring
We use analytics services to understand how people use our platform and identify areas for improvement. These tools collect data about page views, session duration, navigation patterns, and feature usage. The information helps us spot technical issues quickly and make data-informed decisions about which features to prioritize. Analytics providers process this data on our behalf but don't own it or use it for their own purposes.
- Web Analytics Platforms track visitor behavior across our site, showing us which pages are most popular and where users encounter difficulties. We've configured these tools to respect do-not-track signals and anonymize IP addresses where possible.
- Application Performance Monitoring helps us maintain platform stability by alerting us to errors, slow page loads, and server issues before they significantly impact your experience. These systems collect technical data about application performance but don't access the content of your coursework.
- Video Hosting Services deliver course videos efficiently and collect viewing statistics like play counts, completion rates, and buffering events. This data helps instructors understand which video segments students watch multiple times or skip, informing content improvements.
Payment Processing Partners
When you purchase courses or subscriptions, payment processors handle your financial information. We never store complete credit card numbers on our servers. Instead, payment providers securely process transactions and send us only confirmation that payment succeeded along with basic transaction details needed for accounting and refund processing. These processors comply with strict financial industry security standards.
Educational Technology Integrations
Casterina integrates with various educational tools that enhance learning experiences. Virtual classroom software enables live instruction, collaboration platforms facilitate group projects, and assessment tools grade assignments and quizzes. Each integration shares only the minimum data necessary—typically your name, email, and course enrollment information. You'll receive notice when a course uses external tools that collect additional data.
Data Protection and Confidentiality
Protecting your information isn't just good practice—it's central to our mission. We've implemented multiple layers of security controls that work together to safeguard the data you trust us with. Our security approach combines technical measures, organizational policies, and regular assessments to address evolving threats.
All data transmitted between your device and our servers travels through encrypted connections using industry-standard TLS protocols. When information sits in our databases, we encrypt sensitive fields so they remain protected even if someone gained unauthorized access to our systems. We regularly update our encryption methods to stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities.
Access Controls and Monitoring
Not everyone on our team can access your personal information. We restrict data access based on job roles, ensuring employees only see information necessary for their specific responsibilities. Student support staff might access your profile to help troubleshoot account issues, but they can't view other students' data without legitimate reason. We maintain detailed logs of who accesses what information and when, enabling us to detect unusual activity patterns.
Our security team continuously monitors systems for suspicious behavior like unauthorized login attempts, unusual data access patterns, or potential malware. Automated alerts notify us immediately of possible security incidents so we can respond quickly. We also conduct regular security audits and penetration testing where ethical hackers attempt to find vulnerabilities before malicious actors do.
Data Minimization and Retention
We collect only information genuinely needed to provide our educational services. If we can deliver the same quality experience without gathering a particular data point, we don't ask for it. We also limit how long we keep your information—when data no longer serves an active purpose, we delete or anonymize it according to established retention schedules.
Course completion data and certificates remain accessible indefinitely since you might need to prove your credentials years later. However, we delete detailed interaction logs after reasonable periods unless they're part of ongoing educational research. When you close your account, we remove your personal information from active systems, though we may retain anonymized data for analytics and some information for legal compliance purposes.
Your Rights and Choices
You maintain significant control over your personal information on Casterina. Through your account dashboard, you can view, edit, or delete most of the data we hold about you. You can update your profile details, change communication preferences, and adjust privacy settings that govern how other users see your information. If you want to know exactly what data we've collected about you, you can request a complete copy of your information in a portable format.
You're free to opt out of promotional emails while still receiving essential communications about courses you're enrolled in and important platform updates. Within discussion forums, you can edit or delete your posts, and you control whether your profile is publicly visible or restricted to fellow course participants. Should you decide Casterina isn't right for you, you can delete your account entirely, triggering removal of your personal data from our active systems.