Privacy Policy

The current learning website

Beyond the Login is an independent educational project based in Arizona, United States. This policy explains how we handle information on this learning website. You can read its lessons and complete its quizzes without creating an account.

Your account

When you register, we collect your first name, last name, country, email address, and password. We store a salted password hash instead of your password. Cloudflare hosts the account database. Your profile displays your name, country, email address, and the date you joined.

Zoho delivers every email we send from [email protected]: registration and password reset messages, sign-in links and codes, codes that confirm an email address, notices when your password, sign-in methods or email address change, links that unlock a locked password sign-in, and security alert and access review notices for tenants you manage. Tenants send their own users the same kinds of messages through Zoho. We send Zoho the recipient's email address and the message, with email open and click tracking disabled. Registration and reset codes and links expire after one hour, and using either one invalidates both. Account pages do not load our optional analytics script. If registration is requested for an existing account, we send a sign-in notice without changing the account.

Necessary cookies keep you signed in, for seven days unless our administrators set a different period of up to 30 days, and connect registration to your browser for up to three hours and ten minutes. A separate pending-link cookie lets you refresh a verification page without reopening the email. It lasts until ten minutes after that link's expiry, for at most 70 minutes, but cannot extend the link's verification window. Another cookie remembers the email address that last signed in on your browser, for up to a year, so the sign-in page can fill it in; it stays in your browser, and the X at the end of the sign-in page's email field removes it. We store session digests and keyed counters derived from email addresses and IP addresses to limit automated attempts. Expired sessions, registration records, and counters are removed in bounded cleanup batches. Registration records become eligible for deletion one day after their verification window expires. Account details remain until the account is deleted. You can delete your account yourself, as described below, or contact us to request access, correction, or deletion.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account on the Account tab of your profile by typing your email address to confirm. You are signed out everywhere at once. We delete your account and your personal tenant with everything in it, including its users, settings, Audit and Logs; your lesson and lab progress, lab keys and practice notes; your saved preferences and Discord connection; the ideas you submitted with their votes, and your votes on other ideas; and your support tickets with their messages and files. If your account created or belongs to another tenant, hand that tenant over or leave it first. BTL staff accounts are not deleted this way.

Our records of the deletion name the account only by its ID, never its email address. They follow the normal 30-day retention for account activity, and the deletion's own record is removed 90 days after it finishes.

Account and tenant activity

We record authentication attempts and account email submissions to investigate problems and protect accounts. These records include the time, action, outcome, request ID, account identifiers, IP address, and browser and operating-system categories. A keyed digest of a submitted email address lets us find attempts made before an account existed. Email-provider acceptance does not confirm arrival in your inbox. We do not record passwords, verification codes, links, cookies, or API keys in activity records.

Your account activity page shows your retained history. BTL Admins can search account history for support; that access is recorded. Tenant creation and role assignments are also recorded. Searchable activity expires after 30 days and is deleted in scheduled batches. Your tenant membership and resource records remain while the tenant exists.

Your sign-ins and security events are also recorded in the Audit of your home organization, your personal tenant, where you, its authorized administrators and BTL Admins can read them. These records keep the browser and operating system as short names, the country Cloudflare reported, and a keyed digest of your network, never the IP address itself. The home organization chooses how many days, from 1 to 30, that context is kept; the records themselves expire after 30 days. An administrator of the organization can place a legal hold that keeps records from a past period, with their context, for up to 365 days or until the hold is released.

A necessary password reset cookie remembers the selected email link for up to 70 minutes, including ten minutes to check the result after the one-hour reset window expires. Reset requests become eligible for deletion ten minutes after expiry.

Labs and the practice service

When you start a lab, we record which lab you started and when, and later whether you completed it. Technical Foundations labs use our practice service, which receives the requests you choose to send it from your own terminal. Anyone can send it requests; nothing on your computer is watched or collected.

A lab key tells the practice service which account a request belongs to. We store a SHA-256 digest of each key, its name, its first four characters, and when it was created, last used, and expires; never the key itself. With your key, the practice service records which lab steps you completed and when, and keeps any practice notes you create for one day after their last change. Challenge answers are checked and not stored. Its logs record the endpoint, the status, the time taken, and your home organization when a key identified you, never your headers, request bodies, query values, or key. Expired and revoked keys are deleted 90 days after they stop working, and all of this is deleted with your account.

Discord

You can join our Discord server, and connect your Discord account on your profile to receive roles that show your lab rank and section badges. Discord is a separate service with its own Privacy Policy; what you post in the server is handled by Discord.

When you connect, Discord asks you to let us read your Discord user ID and username and add you to our server. We store that ID and username with your account and use your approval once to add you to the server; we keep no Discord sign-in token. We then give your Discord account roles based on how many labs you have completed. The public role-updates channel mentions your Discord account when you earn a rank or badge, with its lab milestone or achievement. It does not share individual lab history or answers. We keep achievement receipts until your BTL account is deleted so repeated role refreshes do not announce the same milestone again. When you use our slash commands in the server, we read your lab totals to answer you, and only you see the answer.

Members who join the server without connecting an account receive a BTL Guest role. To give it, we check the server's member list each minute and keep a member's Discord user ID only until their role is updated, or for up to 30 days if Discord keeps refusing the update; we do not store the member list.

Disconnecting on your profile, or deleting your account, removes the connection and the roles we gave you, and your Discord account receives the BTL Guest role. Our records of connecting and disconnecting follow the same retention as your other account activity.

Website tickets are copied to private Discord channels, including their subject, replies and files. The server's Co-Founders can see every ticket; a connected Discord account can see only its own tickets. Replies and ticket status sync in both directions. New website account IDs are announced in a separate channel visible to Co-Founders.

You can also open a ticket in Discord without a website account. That conversation stays in Discord and is removed after 30 days. Connecting an account later does not copy that earlier ticket to the website. Disconnecting removes access to website ticket channels before the connection is removed. Deleting your website account also queues removal of its Discord ticket channels.

Support tickets and ideas

When you open a support ticket, we store its subject, category and your messages, BTL Support's replies, and the browser and operating-system categories of the browser you used. If you choose, the ticket also names the page you opened Support from. You can attach PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, PDF or plain text files of up to 5 MB each, which Cloudflare stores with the ticket. BTL staff who handle support can read your tickets and files with your name and email address. Please do not attach passwords, keys, tokens or other people's personal records.

When you submit an idea, we store its title, area and description with your account, and the review decision. BTL Admins see who submitted it. Approved ideas appear on the Ideas board for signed-in visitors without your name. We store which ideas you voted for so you can change your vote. Tickets, ideas and votes are kept until your account is deleted.

Tenants and their users

Your account comes with a personal tenant, an identity service you configure for learning and labs. The people who manage a tenant decide which users it holds, and can add them directly, through SCIM provisioning or by letting people register on the tenant's own address. For each tenant user, the tenant stores what its administrators or the user provide, such as name, email address and other attributes, groups and roles, a salted password hash, passkeys and other sign-in methods, the applications they connected, and their sign-in sessions. Each tenant's data is kept in its own store, hosted by Cloudflare, and is never shared with another tenant.

A tenant that turns on identity proofing also keeps each tenant user's proofing results: the assurance level reached, the claims it verified, such as name and date of birth, and, unless the tenant chooses none, a description of the evidence used. The proofing routes use made-up sample documents and selfies, never real ones. A result is valid for 365 days unless the tenant chooses between 30 and 1,825 days, each user keeps at most their ten newest results, finished applications are deleted after 30 days, and deleting the user deletes all of them.

The tenant's Audit records its users' sign-ins and its administrators' changes, with the same browser, country and network context described above, under the same retention and legal holds. Its Logs record how each request to the tenant was handled, for 30 days. Tenant users sign in only to their tenant: their accounts never give access to Beyond the Login or to another tenant. Tenant users' data is deleted when the tenant is deleted or reset, though a reset can keep the tenant's Audit and Logs history. If you are a tenant user, contact the people who manage that tenant about your data, or contact us below.

Tenant addresses set necessary cookies of their own to keep tenant users signed in and to complete sign-in steps. Our Cookie Policy lists them.

Checking new passwords

We check new registration and reset passwords against Have I Been Pwned's Pwned Passwords service. We send only the first five characters of a SHA-1 hash and compare the returned candidates on our server. We do not send your password, full hash, email address, or browser cookies to that service. If the check cannot be completed, registration is temporarily unavailable; existing sign-in continues to work. Password storage uses Argon2id, separately from this check.

Preferences in your browser

The website uses your browser's local storage to remember your light or dark theme, the computer you chose for lesson and lab instructions, which menu links to show, whether you paused the home page's motion, and your choice about analytics. When you are signed in, the computer you chose is also saved on your account so every device shows the same steps. Our Cookie Policy lists every value the site keeps in your browser and how long it stays. You can remove them by clearing this website's site data in your browser.

Quiz and lab progress

When you are signed out, lesson quizzes remember the questions you answered correctly in this browser only. The quiz code does not send those answers or that progress to us, and it does not sync between devices. Practice again resets a lesson's quiz, and clearing this website's site data removes all of it.

When you are signed in, each quiz answer is sent to our server, which checks it. We store the questions you answered correctly, and the lessons you completed and when, with your account. Wrong answers are not stored. While you are signed in, each open tab keeps a copy of which lessons you started or completed and how many of their questions you answered, so moving between lessons shows your progress immediately. The copy holds none of your answers, is replaced by your account's progress on every page, and is removed when you close the tab or sign out. Lab progress is stored with your account in the same way and is not kept in your browser. The Learning tab on your profile shows this progress. Practice again clears a lesson's saved answers but keeps the record that you completed it.

The Lab's Quizzes page checks your answers in your browser and does not send them to us. When you are signed in, each answer you check adds to two counts stored with your account: how many Lab quiz questions you have answered and how many of them you answered correctly. The page shows them as your all-time share of correct answers, and they are deleted with your account.

If your browser has quiz progress from before you signed in, the site offers to add it to your profile. It is sent to us only when you choose to add it, and it is then removed from the browser.

Lesson and lab progress is kept for as long as your account exists and is deleted with your account. Completing a lesson, clearing its answers and adding progress from your browser are also recorded in your account activity, which expires after 30 days.

Delivering and protecting the website

Cloudflare hosts and delivers the website. When you visit, Cloudflare processes technical request information such as your IP address, the URL requested, and browser or device information to deliver traffic and protect its services. This is separate from the lesson progress described above.

Cloudflare operates a global network, so information may be processed outside your country. Its handling of information is described in Cloudflare's Privacy Policy.

When you contact us

If you email us, we receive your email address and the information you include. We use that information to respond, investigate issues, and manage the conversation. Our email provider also processes the message to deliver and store it. Please do not send passwords, private keys, access tokens, or sensitive personal records.

We keep correspondence only as long as needed for those purposes or to meet legal obligations. Information may also be disclosed when required by law or necessary to address abuse or protect people's rights and safety.

Analytics and advertising

When configured and with your permission, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand visits and improve site performance. It reports page views, referrals, browser and device categories, and performance measurements. It does not receive your quiz answers or saved progress from our quiz code. You can reject analytics or change your choice using Cookie settings in the footer. Our Cookie Policy explains these choices and the browser storage used by the site.

We do not currently show advertising or use advertising trackers. If we introduce partnerships or advertising, we will update these policies before introducing new data uses and provide any required choices. Allowing analytics does not authorize advertising tracking.

Your choices and questions

Contact [email protected] to ask about information you have shared with us or request access, correction, or deletion. The rights available to you depend on applicable law. We may need to verify a request before acting on it. We cannot retrieve quiz progress that exists only in your browser. Progress stored with your account is shown on your profile and deleted with your account, which you can do yourself from your profile.

We will revise the date above when this policy changes and describe material changes in the changelog.