Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal data UN Career Academy collects, why, and what rights you have. We collect only what we need to run the Course and we do not sell your data.

1. Who is responsible

The data controller for your account, your progress and the other personal data described in this policy is Farhaan Ahmed, trading as UN Career Academy, at Balistraat 5C, 2585 XK The Hague, Netherlands. You can reach the controller at help@uncareeracademy.org. Payment data is handled by Paddle, which is a separate controller for the sale.

‘We’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ in this policy mean Farhaan Ahmed, trading as UN Career Academy, identified above.

For any privacy question or to exercise your rights, contact help@uncareeracademy.org.

2. What we collect and why

We send only transactional email — your secure login links and your purchase confirmation. We do not run a marketing list and will not email you marketing.

To revisit our regional pricing we measure checkout conversion in aggregate, by country and price tier only. That measurement carries no identifier and does not store your IP address.

We do not publish your feedback as a testimonial without your separate, specific consent.

3. Who else handles your data

Paddle is not one of our providers; it is the seller. Paddle is our Merchant of Record, which means that when you buy the Course your purchase contract is with Paddle rather than with us. Paddle decides for itself how it handles your data for the sale, including payment processing, fraud checks, tax and its own record-keeping, and it is a separate data controller for those purposes, not a supplier acting on our instructions. Your card details go to Paddle and never reach our systems. Paddle passes us what we need to give you access and to keep the records tax law requires. What Paddle does with your data is covered by Paddle’s privacy policy, and you can exercise your rights against Paddle directly as well as against us.

The remaining providers below are ours. Each runs under a data-processing agreement and is permitted to use your data only on our instructions:

• Email delivery — Resend: to send your secure login links and purchase confirmation.
• Website analytics — Plausible Analytics: which counts visits to the public pages without cookies and without storing anything that identifies you, as described under cookies below. It is an Estonian company running on European infrastructure, and it does not receive your account, progress or purchase data.
• Website hosting, database and infrastructure — Cloudflare: which runs the website, stores your account, progress and records in a database held in the EU, stores downloadable resources, and processes technical data such as IP addresses in its logs.

Support email — Apple (iCloud Mail). Messages you send to help@uncareeracademy.org, and our replies, are held in an iCloud Mail mailbox provided by Apple Distribution International Ltd (Ireland). Apple is not one of the providers listed above: it provides this mailbox under its own iCloud terms, not under a data-processing agreement with us, and how Apple stores and transfers that mail is described in Apple’s privacy policy.

We do not sell or rent your personal data to anyone.

4. International transfers

We host data in the EU where offered. Where a provider is based outside the EU, that transfer relies on an approved safeguard (Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework), so your data keeps an equivalent level of protection. This does not cover the support mailbox described in section 3, which Apple holds under its own terms. Paddle is not one of those providers: as the seller it decides its own transfers, and these are covered by Paddle’s privacy policy.

5. Cookies and browser storage

We keep this to a minimum, and we would rather describe it accurately than claim it is smaller than it is.

On our own pages we set a secure cookie that keeps you logged in, and we keep your light or dark theme choice in your own browser so the site remembers it. Cloudflare, which serves this site, also sets a security cookie (cf_clearance, which lasts a year) that protects it from automated abuse. We use no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies of our own.

What you write into a lesson is kept in your browser as you type. If you are a member, it is also saved to your account, so it is there when you come back and on your other devices; we hold it while your account is open and it is deleted if you ask us to delete your account. On the free lessons, which need no account, it stays in that browser and reaches us not at all, so clearing site data clears it. Two limits worth knowing either way. The copy that is kept is whichever saved last, which is what you would expect when two devices are open at once, and is also what happens if a device could not reach us when you opened the lesson and you then carried on typing on it. And every lesson offers a download of what you wrote, which is the copy that is yours rather than ours; if a lesson matters to you, take it.

We do measure how the site is used, and we added this on 3 August 2026. We use Plausible Analytics, a European service chosen because it works without cookies and without building a profile of you. It sets no cookies and stores no name, email or account information about visitors.

Your IP address is never stored. It is used for a moment, combined with a random value that is thrown away and replaced every day, to work out approximately where a visit came from. Because that random value changes daily, visits cannot be matched from one day to the next, and nothing here can follow you to other websites. Being straightforward about the limit of that: within a single day, repeat visits from the same device are counted as the same visitor.

What is recorded is the page you visited, the site or search engine you came from, any campaign tags in the link you followed, an approximate location derived from your IP address which can be as specific as a city, and your device type, operating system and browser. It also records when someone clicks a link that leaves this site, such as an organisation’s own careers portal from our agency directory, and when a file such as the Salary Reference Table is downloaded. In both cases what is recorded is that the action happened and on which page. It is reported to us only as counts and never as a list of people. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in understanding whether the site reaches anyone. Plausible is registered in Estonia and runs on European infrastructure, so this data does not leave the EU. The member area and the administrative pages are excluded from it altogether.

On the checkout page only, and only once you press Continue, Paddle, the seller of record for your purchase, loads its payment script and opens the secure payment window. Paddle’s script runs in our page. Paddle’s script would also fetch ProfitWell, Paddle’s retention service for subscription businesses; we do not sell subscriptions, so we stop it from loading. The payment window itself runs on Paddle’s domain and brings in Stripe, which Paddle uses for payment processing and fraud checks, Sentry, which Paddle uses to catch errors, Localize, which translates the window, and fonts from Google, which means your IP address reaches Google when the window opens. Paddle’s part is governed by Paddle’s privacy policy, and Stripe’s by Stripe’s.

Most of what is stored is needed to take a payment you have asked for: which checkout you are in, how the window should be displayed, whether Apple Pay is available, where to send you afterwards, your language, identifiers Stripe uses to detect fraud, including a device fingerprint and a fraud-prevention cookie on stripe.com (m), and a short-lived Cloudflare security cookie on paddle.com (__cf_bm). Some of it is not needed for the payment itself: a count of visits kept by Localize, records Paddle keeps of how far you got through the checkout, and Sentry’s error metrics.

Nothing here loads until you press Continue. What loads then is, for the most part, storage needed to complete a payment you have asked for, which does not require your consent; the remainder is the measurement described above, which sits inside Paddle’s payment window on Paddle’s domain and which Paddle is responsible for as the seller of record, though we accept that choosing to embed its payment window on our page is our decision and not only Paddle’s. On that basis we do not show a consent banner. We keep this under review.

This section used to promise that we would ask you first if we ever added analytics, and on 3 August 2026 we added analytics without asking. We are saying so plainly rather than quietly rewriting it. The promise was drawn too widely: what it was meant to protect you from is something that stores data on your device or identifies you, and the analytics described above does neither, which is why it requires no consent. That is an explanation rather than an excuse, and the wording should have been narrowed before the tool was added rather than after.

Narrowed, and meant: we will ask you first before adding anything that stores information on your device, identifies you personally, follows you across other websites, or is used for advertising, unless it is strictly necessary for something you have asked for, such as the security and fraud checks on a payment you have started. We added that exception on 1 November 2026, after finding the Cloudflare cookie on paddle.com (__cf_bm) and Stripe’s fraud-prevention cookie (m) described above, which protect a payment you have started; we say so here rather than let the change pass unnoticed. If consent ever becomes required for anything on this page, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

We got this wrong for three months. Our earlier account, dated 2 August 2026, said that nothing on the checkout page loaded until you started a purchase and that no third party had set a cookie of any kind. When we checked again on 1 November 2026 we found that from 2 August Paddle’s script had been loading as soon as the checkout page opened, before you pressed anything. On 1 November that early load also fetched ProfitWell’s script, which sent it your IP address, your browser’s description of itself, our address and our Paddle account’s public key, and, in Chrome and similar browsers, the Cloudflare security cookie on paddle.com, and Stripe’s fraud-prevention cookie appeared once the payment window opened; our 2 August check had recorded neither cookie. We changed the page on 1 November 2026 so that Paddle’s script loads only when you press Continue. That check used Chromium and WebKit test browsers before Continue and Chromium after it, without entering an email address or card details; we have not examined what is stored after those are entered or once a payment is completed. On our own domain, the only cookies are Cloudflare’s year-long security cookie (cf_clearance) and, if you are signed in, the login cookie described at the start of this section.

6. How long we keep it

We keep your account, your progress, your self-audit answers and what you have written into the lessons for as long as your access is active, and delete all of it when you close your account. We keep purchase records for seven years after the relevant tax year, because tax and accounting law requires it — so these are retained even after you close your account. Feedback is kept to improve the Course; if you close your account we anonymise it rather than delete it. Lifetime access to the Course does not mean we retain all of your activity data indefinitely. If you ask for a login link, we keep the address you entered with it for at least seven days after the link expires, and remove it the next time anyone asks for a login link after that. The names you type at checkout are held with your checkout record only until your payment completes, when they move to your account; if you do not complete the payment, they are deleted with that record after 90 days.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR and equivalent laws you have the right to access, correct, erase, port, and object to the processing of your personal data, and to withdraw any consent you have given. Once signed in you can delete your account and personal data yourself from your account page (Your course → Account); this erases your data immediately, subject to records we are required to keep by law. To exercise any other right, email help@uncareeracademy.org.

You also have the right to complain to your data-protection authority. In the Netherlands this is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.

8. How we protect your data

• Encrypted connections (TLS) across the site.
• Passwordless login: we never store a password, removing the highest-value target in a breach.
• No card data on our systems: payment is handled by Paddle as seller of record.
• Encryption at rest and least-privilege access to personal data.

9. California residents

We do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are used under the CCPA/CPRA. You have the right to know what we hold, to request deletion, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. Use the contact address above to make a request.

10. Children

The Course is intended for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The version in force is the one published here on the date shown above; where a change is significant we will tell you.

12. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: help@uncareeracademy.org.