Privacy policy

Who runs this

This course is published by Orion Media Ministry, a Seventh-day Adventist supporting ministry, a registered non-profit organisation, EIN 41-2644335. We are the people responsible for the information described on this page. If you want to reach a human about anything here, reply to any email the course sends you and it comes to us.

What we collect

When you enrol

• Your first name and email address. That is all that is required. The name is used to address you personally; the email address is how lessons and replies reach you.
• Your country, only if you choose to give it. It is optional and the course works identically without it.
• Where you came from, such as whether you arrived from a video, a booklet or a direct link. This tells us which of our own efforts actually reach people. It is not bought from anyone and it does not identify you to anyone else.

As you study

• Your answers to the lesson questions, including the two written answers in each lesson where you reply in your own words.
• Which lessons you have opened and completed, and when.
• Your responses to the decision questions. These are recorded but never scored. Answering "not yet" or "I have a question about this first" is a normal answer and changes nothing about your access to the course.
• Any notes we make while replying to you, so that the next reply remembers the last conversation instead of starting over.

Only if you ask for the printed track

• Your postal address. If you study online you are never shown an address field and we never hold one for you.

What we deliberately do not collect

• No date of birth, no phone number, no financial information. The course is free, so there is nothing to pay and no payment details exist.
• No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics scripts, no social media pixels, no cookies that follow you to other websites.
• We do not buy information about you from anyone, and we do not add you to anything you did not ask for.

Cookies

One cookie, and it does one job: it keeps you signed in so that when you come back your place in the course is still there. It is not shared with anyone and it is not used to track you anywhere else. If you clear it, you can get back in using the personal link shown when you enrolled.

Why we hold it, and on what basis

We hold your information for one purpose: to run the course you asked for and to reply to you personally. You gave us this information by choosing to enrol, and you can withdraw that at any time by deleting your account.

Your written answers are read so that a real person can reply to what you actually said. That is the entire point of the course, and it is the reason those answers exist.

Automated help with replies

We are honest about this rather than quiet about it. Some of what the course sends is generated automatically: the lesson that arrives when you enrol, the results after you submit, a certificate when you finish a course, and reminders if you go quiet. Those are clearly routine messages and no person writes them individually.

We also use an automated assistant to read submitted answers and summarise them, so that whoever replies can see quickly what you said and what you asked. Where a reply is personal, it is either written by a person or written by a person from a draft. An automated message will never be signed as though a person wrote it when none did.

If you write about something serious or distressing, a person reads it. That case is never handled automatically and there is no setting that changes it.

The assistant we use is operated by Anthropic and processes the text of your answers to produce those summaries and drafts. It is not used to train anyone's models on your writing.

Who else sees your information

Nobody, unless you specifically ask. To be concrete:

• We do not sell your information. There is no circumstance in which we would.
• We do not rent, swap or share our student list with other ministries, churches, or organisations.
• We do not pass your details to a local congregation unless you tick a separate box asking us to. That box is worded on its own, is never bundled into signing up, and is off unless you turn it on. If you do ask, we tell you what we are sending and to whom.
• The company that delivers our email necessarily handles your email address in order to deliver it. That is the only routine third party.
• We would disclose information if the law actually required it, which has never happened.

How long we keep it

• While you are studying, and afterwards, so your certificates stay verifiable and a later conversation can pick up where the last one ended.
• If you unsubscribe, we stop sending immediately and keep only what is needed to make sure we do not email you again by mistake.
• If you delete your account, it goes. See below.

What you can do, at any time

• Get a copy of everything. One button in your account downloads all of it: your details, every answer you wrote, every message we sent you.
• Delete your account. One button, no email required, no one to ask. It removes your details, your answers and your message history. Where a certificate has been issued, the verification record may remain so that anyone holding that certificate can still check it, but it will no longer be linked to your contact details.
• Stop the emails. Every message has a working unsubscribe link and it takes effect immediately, not "within ten days".
• Correct something. Change your name or email in your account, or reply and ask.
• Object or complain. Reply to any message from the course. If you are in the UK or EU you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

Where your information lives

On a server we rent in the United States. It is not copied to other services for marketing or analysis.

Children

This course is written for adults. We do not knowingly enrol anyone under 16. If you believe a child has enrolled, tell us and we will delete the account.

Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Access to student information is limited to those running the course. We hold no payment details, because there are none to hold. No system is perfect, and we would tell you promptly if something went wrong that affected you.

Changes to this policy

If we change how any of this works, we change this page and update the date at the top. If a change genuinely affects you, such as a new category of information or a new recipient, we will tell you directly rather than quietly editing the page.