About this site and its method

Who writes this

This site is written by Konrad Michels. I spent over 12 years at Facebook, hired in 2008 as its first technical hire outside the US, and worked across site reliability engineering, infrastructure, engineering management, and technical program management, including application security along the way. After Facebook I led infrastructure at Very Good Security, a startup whose product is protecting sensitive data. These days I work with independent educational consultants. Reading edtech privacy policies became part of that work more by accident than by design: privacy is something I care about, consultants I work with had privacy concerns, and the two coincided. This site collects the questions and patterns that reading has surfaced, so consultants who do not have a security background can ask the same questions.

How examples are chosen

Every example clause on this site is a pattern that genuinely exists in published privacy policies, then reworded so it points at no specific company. The goal is to show what a concerning clause actually looks like in practice, not to catalog any one vendor's language word for word.

The only things named directly are public enforcement actions and documented incidents: settlements, regulatory findings, breach disclosures, and similar events that are already a matter of public record. When this site references one of those, it is checked against a primary source (a regulator's press release, a court filing, a company's own disclosure) before it is published, and the reference links back to that source wherever possible.

Why no vendors are named or rated

This site does not name or rate individual platforms. A rating goes stale the moment a vendor updates its policy, and a scoreboard invites exactly the kind of gaming this site is trying to help consultants see past. The job here is to teach the reading skill: what to look for, what questions to ask, what a vague answer usually means. That skill travels to a platform this site has never heard of, which a rating never does.

Vendor-neutral also means no partnerships, no referral fees, and no sponsored placement of any kind, for any platform, category, or example on this site.

What this site does with your data

Nothing, because it does not collect any. There are no cookies, no trackers, no accounts to create, and no newsletter to sign up for. The only measurement this site will ever use is privacy-respecting page counts: no cookies, no cross-site tracking.

Disclaimer

Everything here is general information about how to read a privacy policy, not legal advice for any specific practice, student, or contract. If a real decision is riding on how a clause should be interpreted, that question belongs in front of a lawyer, not a website. This site has no affiliation with any platform its examples might happen to resemble.