Privacy policy

Pangea Academy is a New Mexico non-profit. This policy covers pangeaacademy.org, including the course system at /learn/. It does not cover any other organization, or any third-party service you reach by following a link from here.

What we collect

Forms you fill in. Each form asks only what it needs:

• Contact - name, email, phone, what you are writing about, and your message.
• Scholarship application - name, email, phone, where you live, what an award would need to cover, how you would describe yourself, and what you are trying to do.
• Chamisa Verde interest - name, email, phone, household size, whether you live or work in Taos County, and when you would be ready to buy.
• Campus and field study - name, email, phone, which program, when you could come, and how much building experience you have.
• Donation, partner and printer-course inquiries - name, email, phone, the organization you are writing for, and what you are asking about.
• Fair housing concern - what you are raising, what happened, when, and how you would like us to respond. Your name and contact details are on the form but you may leave them blank.

A student account, if you create one. Your name, your email, a one-way hash of your password - never the password itself - the courses you open, your progress through them, your quiz answers and scores, and any certificate you earn. A certificate carries your name and its own verification code, and that code is checkable by anyone who has it, which is the point of it.

If you pay us or give to us. We keep a record of what was paid, when, what it was for, and the email address it was paid under. For a donation we also keep the name and postal address you give at the checkout, because the written acknowledgment you may need for your taxes has to be addressed to somebody and has to be able to reach you. We never see or hold your card number - see Paying and giving below.

The student waiver, if you attend a field session: your name, your email, your agreement to the waiver, and your signature.

Ordinary server records. Our host keeps standard web logs - IP address, time, page, browser - for security and troubleshooting.

Analytics

We count visits, using Matomo, which runs on our own server. It records the page you looked at, where you arrived from, your approximate location, your browser and screen size, and any search you ran on the site. That is how we find out which courses people actually read and which pages send them away.

It is set up to collect as little as it can while still doing that:

• No cookies. Matomo sets none on this site - which is also why there is no cookie banner in your way.
• Your IP address is cut short before it is stored. The last two blocks are dropped, so it identifies a region and not a household, and the location lookup is done on the shortened version. The full address is never used for anything.
• Nothing leaves our server. There is no analytics company involved, no advertising network, and no profile of you anywhere else.
• It is not connected to your student account. The course system at /learn/ is a separate application and carries no analytics at all. Which lessons you open and how you did on a quiz are in the course database, visible to us as your school, and are not in the visit statistics.
• Raw visit records are deleted after 18 months. What survives is the aggregate - how many people read a page in a given month.

If you would rather not be counted: turn on Do Not Track (or Global Privacy Control) in your browser's privacy settings and this site will not record your visit. We honour that header, which most sites ignore. The usual click-here opt-out button relies on setting a cookie, and since we set no cookies at all there is nothing for it to set - the browser setting is the real control here, and it works across every site you visit rather than just this one.

What we do not collect

We do not run advertising, advertising trackers, or anything that follows you to another website. We never ask for a card number on pangeaacademy.org - paying and giving both happen on Stripe's own pages, described below. The homebuyer education course fee is paid to eHome America, not to us.

Paying and giving

Most of the curriculum is free. Some things are not - the COBOD BOD2 certification, field sessions - and you can donate to the Academy. All of that is handled by Stripe, which is a payment company, not a part of this site.

• Your card details are typed on Stripe's pages, not ours. When you click to pay, your browser leaves pangeaacademy.org and goes to Stripe. Your card number, expiry and security code are never sent to our server, never written to our database and never appear in our logs - not because we delete them, but because we are never given them.
• What Stripe receives is what it needs to take a payment: your card details, your name, your email, your billing address, the amount, and what you are paying for. Stripe holds that under its own privacy policy, as a company processing a payment for us.
• What comes back to us is the result: that a payment of a particular amount succeeded, the email address it was made under, and - for a donation - the name and postal address you gave. Never the card number. Stripe gives us the last four digits only if we ask, and for donations we do not.
• Donations are acknowledged in writing immediately. That acknowledgment names you and the amount, and sits at a private address of its own that only someone with the link can open. It is not indexed by search engines and is not listed anywhere public.
• Stripe sets no cookies on this site. Its pages are its own, on its own domain.

Why we hold it

To answer you; to run the scholarship, admissions and homebuyer processes; to record who completed which course, which is what a certificate is for; and to meet the reporting obligations that come with being a non-profit and with public funding.

Sensitive answers

Two of these forms ask things people are right to be careful about. The scholarship application asks about money, and the Chamisa Verde interest form asks about your household. Those answers are read by the people running that specific process and are not circulated further, not used to market anything to you, and not shared with the Town of Taos or any lender except where you have asked us to refer you.

The fair housing form exists so that someone can tell us about discrimination. You may use it anonymously. If you do give your name, we will not pass it to the person or organization you are raising a concern about without asking you first - except where the law requires us to report, which we would tell you about.

Who else sees it

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, and we never have. It reaches other companies only where one is doing a job for us:

• Brownrice Internet, in Taos, hosts the site and therefore holds everything stored on it.
• Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a form submission comes from a person rather than a script. Your browser contacts Cloudflare when a form loads.
• Stripe takes every card payment and donation, on its own pages. It is the only company here that ever sees a card number, and we never do.
• Our email provider carries the messages the site sends - a reply, a password reset, a newsletter.
• Pangea Mail, which we run ourselves on this server, keeps the newsletter list if you subscribe. It records your email address, the exact wording you consented to and when you gave it, so we can show what you agreed to. Nothing is sent to you until you confirm by email.
• eHome America runs the homebuyer education course, on their own site, under their own policy.

Matomo is not on that list on purpose. It is software we run on the same server as the site, not a service we send your visit to. Nobody outside Pangea Academy receives it.

Beyond that, only where the law requires it, or where a grant we have accepted requires reporting - and grant reporting is counts and outcomes, not names.

How long we keep it

• Inquiries - three years from your last contact with us, then deleted.
• Scholarship applications - three years, for audit and for grant reporting.
• Student accounts and certificates - for as long as the account exists. A certificate has to stay verifiable to be worth anything, so if you close your account we keep the certificate record and the code, and remove the rest.
• Waivers - for as long as the relevant claim period runs.
• Donation and payment records - seven years. A non-profit has to be able to show what it received and what it acknowledged, and the acknowledgment we gave you has to stay reachable for as long as it might be asked about.
• Server logs - on our host's own schedule, measured in weeks.
• Raw analytics records - 18 months, then deleted. The aggregate counts remain.

Cookies

Two, both necessary, neither used for tracking. A session cookie at /learn/ keeps you signed in while you work through a course; it is set only after you sign in and only for that part of the site. Cloudflare Turnstile sets one on pages with a form.

The analytics sets none. Neither does anything else here, and neither does Stripe - paying happens on Stripe's site, not this one. There is no advertising cookie on this site and nothing follows you to another one. That is why you have never been asked to accept cookies on pangeaacademy.org, and why you will not be.

Your choices

Write to info@pangeaacademy.org and ask to see what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted. Ask us to stop emailing you and we will - every newsletter also carries an unsubscribe link. You can delete your student account yourself from your account page.

Children

The courses and the field sessions are for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects information already collected, we will say so here and change the effective date at the top.