Information We Collect

When you join Zistinella, we gather different types of information to create your personalized learning experience. Some of this you provide directly — like when you sign up or update your profile. Other data comes from how you interact with courses, videos, and learning materials across our platform.

• Payment information when you purchase courses or subscriptions, though financial details are processed through secure third-party payment processors who maintain their own records according to payment industry standards.
• Verification documents for instructors who create courses on our platform, including credentials, certifications, or proof of expertise in their teaching subjects.
• Communications you send us through support channels, feedback forms, or surveys, along with any attachments or screenshots you provide to help resolve issues.
• Social media profile data if you choose to connect your accounts or sign in through social authentication services, subject to the permissions you've granted those platforms.

How We Use Your Personal Data

Everything we collect serves a purpose in delivering and improving your educational experience. We don't gather data just to have it — each piece of information plays a role in how Zistinella functions and grows.

Personalization makes learning more effective, and your activity data drives these customizations. The courses you've taken, topics you've explored, and skills you're building inform our recommendation algorithms. We analyze your learning patterns to suggest next steps in your educational journey, highlight courses that align with your goals, and surface content from instructors whose teaching style matches how you learn best.

Platform improvements depend on understanding how thousands of learners interact with our features. We examine aggregated usage patterns to identify which tools help students succeed, where people get stuck, and what features go unused. This analysis shapes our development priorities — we build what learners actually need, not what we assume they want. Your feedback through surveys and support interactions provides qualitative insights that numbers alone can't capture.

• Protecting platform security by monitoring for suspicious activities, preventing unauthorized access, and detecting fraudulent transactions or account takeovers that could compromise your data or learning progress.
• Communicating about your courses, including enrollment confirmations, deadline reminders, instructor announcements, and community discussions you've joined or might want to follow.
• Processing payments and maintaining financial records for purchases, refunds, and subscription renewals, while coordinating with payment processors to ensure transaction accuracy.
• Meeting legal obligations such as responding to valid legal requests, enforcing our terms of service, resolving disputes, and maintaining records required by applicable regulations.
• Conducting research and analytics to understand learning outcomes, measure course effectiveness, and identify trends in online education that inform our content strategy.

Data Collected Through External Tools

Running a modern educational platform means integrating specialized services that each do one thing exceptionally well. We partner with third-party providers for video hosting, payment processing, analytics, communication tools, and infrastructure. Each service accesses certain data to perform its function, and we're selective about who we work with.

• Email delivery services that send transactional messages, course notifications, and account updates, tracking delivery rates and open rates to ensure our communications reach you reliably.
• Customer support platforms that store your support conversations, help us track issues to resolution, and maintain a history of how we've assisted you in the past.
• Cloud infrastructure providers who host our databases and application servers, maintaining the underlying technology that keeps Zistinella running securely and reliably.
• Authentication services if you choose to sign in through social accounts, which may share basic profile information based on permissions you've granted those platforms.

Data Protection and Confidentiality

Securing your information isn't an afterthought — it's woven into how we build and operate Zistinella. We employ multiple layers of protection, from encryption to access controls, and we regularly assess our security measures to stay ahead of emerging threats.

All data transmitted between your device and our servers travels through encrypted connections using industry-standard protocols. Your password is hashed using strong cryptographic algorithms — we can verify your password is correct without ever storing the actual password itself. Sensitive data at rest in our databases is encrypted with keys that are rotated regularly and stored separately from the data they protect.

Access to user data is strictly limited based on job function and necessity. Our engineers and support staff can only access the information they need to perform their specific roles. We maintain detailed logs of who accesses what data and when, and we review these logs for unusual patterns. Background checks and confidentiality agreements are standard for anyone who might handle user information.

• Regular security assessments by internal teams and external specialists who test our defenses, identify vulnerabilities, and verify that our protections work as intended against real-world attack scenarios.
• Automatic security monitoring that watches for suspicious activities like unusual login patterns, unauthorized access attempts, or abnormal data transfers that might indicate a security incident.
• Data minimization practices where we only collect information we actually need, delete data that's no longer necessary, and anonymize information whenever possible for analytics and research.
• Incident response procedures that ensure rapid detection, containment, and resolution of security events, with clear protocols for notifying affected users if a breach occurs.
• Employee training programs that keep our team updated on security best practices, privacy principles, and how to handle user data responsibly in their daily work.

External Website Links

Throughout Zistinella, you'll encounter links to external resources — instructor websites, course references, learning materials, and partner platforms. Once you click these links and leave our platform, you're subject to those sites' privacy policies and practices. We choose our partners carefully, but we can't control how third-party sites handle your information. Before sharing personal data on external sites, take a moment to review their privacy practices, especially if you're entering sensitive information.

Data Protection Compliance

We've designed Zistinella to comply with major privacy regulations and data protection frameworks worldwide. Our practices align with principles of transparency, user control, data minimization, and security that underpin these regulations. We regularly review changes to privacy laws and update our practices accordingly. When regulations require specific protections — like obtaining parental consent for younger learners or providing data portability — we've built these capabilities into our platform. Our legal and compliance teams monitor the global privacy landscape to ensure we meet obligations regardless of where our learners are located.

Changes to This Policy

Online education evolves, and so do privacy practices. We'll update this policy periodically to reflect new features, regulatory changes, or improvements in how we protect your data. When we make significant changes, we'll notify you through email and prominent notices on the platform before the changes take effect. Continuing to use Zistinella after we've announced updates means you accept the revised policy. We'll always post the effective date at the top of this document, and we maintain archives of previous versions so you can review what changed. Minor updates that don't affect how we collect or use data might be made without individual notification, but we'll still update the effective date and publish a summary of changes.

Additional Policies

Certain Zistinella services or user groups have supplementary rules that work alongside this main privacy policy. If you're under 18, additional protections apply to how we collect and use your information, with requirements for parental involvement in account creation and communication. Enterprise and institutional customers who bring groups of learners to Zistinella operate under separate data processing agreements that define how we handle organizational data. Instructors who create courses agree to additional terms about student data access and educational record privacy. These supplementary policies are provided when you access the relevant services, and they specify which terms apply to your particular situation. When supplementary policies conflict with this main policy, the more specific terms for your situation take precedence.