Privacy Policy

Certified Architect is an independent, community-built practice platform for the Claude Certified Architect (CCA) exam. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic. This policy explains what data we collect, why, and what rights you have.

1. What we collect

We only collect data that is necessary to run the site and to give you a personalized study experience.

• Account data. If you sign up with email and password, we store your email address, a display name, and a salted hash of your password. Plain-text passwords are never stored.
• Google Sign-In data. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, name, and Google profile identifier. We never receive your Google password.
• Study activity. To power mistake tracking, progress dashboards, and study plans, we store your exam attempts, question results, articles you have read, and any flags or notes you have created.
• Purchase records. If you buy a pass, we store the plan you bought, purchase and expiry dates, payment status, and the customer/order identifiers our payment providers assign. We never see or store your card number — card details go directly to the payment provider.
• Session cookies. We set a first-party session cookie when you are signed in so that you stay logged in across pages. We also use a short-lived session-cache cookie for performance.
• Basic server logs. Our hosting provider may record standard request metadata (IP address, user agent, timestamp) for security and abuse prevention. We do not use these logs to build behavioral profiles.

Advertising and analytics. The site is free to use and supported by advertising. We use Google Analytics to measure traffic and Google AdSense to show ads. These Google services set third-party cookies and may collect your IP address, device and browser information, and the pages you visit; Google may use that data to personalize the ads you see based on your visits to this and other sites. Section 3 explains how to opt out. We do not run behavioral fingerprinting or social-media pixels.

2. How we use your data

• To authenticate you and keep you signed in.
• To save your progress, mistakes, exam history, and study plan so they persist across sessions and devices.
• To send transactional emails you have asked for, such as password reset links.
• To protect the site against abuse and debug technical issues.

We do not sell your data. Ads are served by Google AdSense using its own cookies (sections 3 and 4); we do not hand your account or study data to advertisers. We do not use your data to train machine-learning models.

3. Service providers

To run the site we rely on a small number of third-party processors. They only receive the data they need to perform their function.

• Database host. Stores your account and study activity records.
• Resend. Delivers transactional email (password reset, email verification). Receives your email address and the message body.
• Google Sign-In. If you use Google Sign-In, Google handles the authentication step and returns your basic profile.
• Google Analytics. Measures page views and traffic sources. Receives your IP address, device and browser information, and the pages you visit.
• Google AdSense. Serves the ads that keep the site free. Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies (including the DoubleClick cookie) to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website and other websites. You can opt out of personalized advertising at Google Ads Settings or www.aboutads.info.
• Payment providers (Stripe, Waffo). Process checkout and card payments. They receive your email address and billing details you enter on their hosted checkout pages; we receive back only order status and identifiers, never your card number.

Each of these providers has its own privacy policy. You should review them if you have concerns about cross-border data transfer.

4. Cookies

We set first-party cookies that are necessary for the site to work: an authentication session cookie and a short-lived session-cache cookie. In addition, Google Analytics and Google AdSense set third-party cookies for analytics and advertising, as described in section 3. If you are in the EU, UK, or Switzerland, personalized ads are only shown after you give consent through the Google-managed consent message; elsewhere you can opt out of personalized ads through the links in section 3. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings; the site keeps working, but you will need to sign in again.

5. Your rights

You have the following rights regarding the data we hold about you:

• Access. You can see your account profile and study activity by signing in and visiting your profile page.
• Correction. You can update your display name and password at any time.
• Deletion. You can delete your account from the profile settings. Deletion removes your account record and associated study activity from our database. Some residual data (for example, recent server logs or email-delivery records at Resend) may persist for a short retention window before being purged by the underlying provider.
• Portability. If you want an export of your study activity, contact us and we will provide it.

If you are in the EU, UK, or a jurisdiction with comparable data-protection laws, you also have the right to object to processing and to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.

6. Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your jurisdiction). We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

7. Data retention

We keep your account and study activity for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, your records are removed from our database. Transactional email logs at Resend are retained according to Resend's own policies.

8. Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy we will update the “Last updated” date above and, where practical, notify signed-in users. Continued use of the site after the update means you accept the revised policy.

9. Contact

Questions about this policy or about your data? Email us at contact@certified-architect.com, or reach out through the community page. We will respond as soon as we can.