What we store, and why each field exists.

Creating an account stores:

• Your email address, lowercased. It identifies the account and is where verification and password-reset links are sent.
• A password hash, if you set a password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash. Accounts that sign in with Google have no password and no hash.
• A display name, if you give one, and a handle, which is generated for you at signup from your name or email and can be changed. The handle is what appears on a score card, a duel or a board when you choose to be visible.
• A time zone and a daily target, which decide when your day rolls over and how long a session is planned for.
• An avatar URL, if you upload a picture. See the third-parties section below.

Using the track stores what you did and how it was marked: your answers and whether each was correct, your session and module progress, module test results, mock exam sessions and their scored outcomes, spaced-repetition scheduling state, and any score cards, duels or board memberships you create.

This exists because it is the product. A programme that gates the next module on the last one's test cannot work without remembering the test, and a board ranked on a measured score cannot rank without the score.

Signing in creates a session row holding when it was created, when it expires, when it was last used, and the browser user-agent string and IP address it was created from. Those last two exist so a session you do not recognise can be identified and revoked, and for rate limiting sign-in attempts.

Sessions are kept in a cookie that holds a session identifier and a signature, not your identity or any personal data. Email verification and password reset links are stored as a SHA-256 hash of the token, never the token itself, so a database read cannot yield a working link.

Three third parties are involved, and no others:

• A PostgreSQL database host, which stores everything described above.
• Google, if and only if you choose to sign in with Google. Parcours receives your Google account identifier, email and name. Google is not told anything about your study.
• Cloudinary, if and only if you upload an avatar. It hosts the image file.

There is no advertising network, no analytics or tracking product, no third-party cookie, no session recorder, and no data broker. The site loads two web fonts from Google Fonts, which Google serves directly to your browser. Nothing about your account or your answers is sold or shared for marketing, by anyone, ever.

By default nothing about you is visible to anyone else. You are ranked on your boards from the start but unlisted: you see your own position and nobody else sees your row.

Appearing by name is opt-in, one surface at a time. Publishing a profile at your handle, minting a score card, or making yourself visible on a board each makes that specific thing readable by anyone holding the link. Those pages are marked as not for indexing so they do not turn into a searchable directory of who scored what, but a link is a link — anyone you send it to can pass it on. Each of them can be withdrawn, after which the URL answers as though it never existed.

Ask and the account is deleted. Every row described on this page is attached to the account with a cascading delete, so removing it removes your answers, sessions, scores, cards, duels and board memberships with it.

One exception, and it is deliberate: a handle you have used is kept in a tombstone list after it is released, so that somebody else cannot claim it and inherit links that pointed at you. That record holds the handle string and nothing else about you.

To delete an account, or to ask what is held on yours, write to @jefedcreator.

The date at the top of this page moves when what the page says changes. If a future version starts collecting something materially different, that is a change worth telling account holders about directly rather than by editing a page quietly.

Related: terms of use and what Parcours does and does not measure.