Privacy Policy

The short version

We collect as little as we can. A username you invent is enough to join — no email, no real name. If you choose to sign in with LinkedIn or Google, we receive your name, email and photo from them. Anything you upload — including your voice or your face — is reviewed by a human before anyone sees it, and you can delete your account, and everything in it, yourself at any time. No ads. No tracking cookies. We never sell data.

1. Who we are

Shared Area is a registered charity in England and Wales (charity number ), providing free, human-verified educational videos for learners of all ages. We are the "data controller" for the personal information described here, and we are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data protection fee payer.

Contact us: hello@sharedarea.org — for anything involving safety or a child, safeguarding@sharedarea.org.

2. What we collect

A username account (the standard way to join)

• Your chosen username (we tell you not to use your real name) and a password, stored only as a secure hash we cannot read.
• Behind the scenes our sign-in system requires an email format, so it creates an internal placeholder address from your username. It is not a real mailbox. We have no way to email you, and no way to reset a forgotten password — keep it safe.

If you choose LinkedIn or Google sign-in (intended for adults and professionals)

• The provider sends us your name, email address, profile photo link and account identifier.
• We show your name and (only if you switch it on) your photo. Your email stays inside our sign-in system (run for us by Supabase): it is never shown publicly, never copied into the platform's own records, and never used for marketing.

Things you create

• Videos you upload or import, with their titles, descriptions and licence details.
• Voice recordings — narrations you record, and audio used to generate captions (transcribed for us by Cloudflare's AI service).
• Sign-language and presenter recordings, which show a person's face.
• Practice questions, answers and reviews in learning events.
• Your voice and your likeness are personal data. Everything above is checked by a human verifier before publication, and you can have it permanently erased (section 8).

Your activity on the platform

• XP, achievements, badges, avatar choices, saved videos and roles, ratings you give, and a log of the actions that earned you XP.
• Event participation: memberships, vouches, scores and review decisions.
• Share links carry a code so we can count visits and award Influencer XP. We count; we do not build profiles of the people who click.

Messages you send us

• The contact, report, suggestion, verifier-application and employer forms store what you type, including your name and email where the form asks for it, so that we can reply and act. Reports about content are linked to the video concerned.

Technical information

• Our providers briefly process IP addresses to run and protect the service: our authentication provider records the IP address and browser type of sign-ins in its security log, and our hosting network keeps short-lived request logs. We do not use this to identify or track you, and we store none of it in the platform database.

3. What we deliberately do not do

• No advertising, and no advertising or tracking cookies — we set no cookies at all (see Cookies & Storage).
• No selling or sharing of data for anyone else's purposes.
• No profiling and no behavioural tracking.
• No marketing emails — for username accounts we could not send any even if we wanted to.
• No date of birth, no payment details, no precise location.

4. Why we can use this data (UK GDPR lawful bases)

• Contract — providing your account and the platform's features.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the platform secure, reviewing and verifying content, preventing abuse, answering your messages, and running a safe service. We minimise data precisely so this balance stays in your favour.
• Consent — where you choose something optional: social sign-in, showing your provider photo, recording your voice or face, or keeping your contributions on the platform after you leave.
• Legal obligation — safeguarding and online-safety duties.

5. Children

Shared Area is designed to be safe for learners of any age, and we follow the ICO Children's Code:

• The highest privacy protections are the default and the only option — there is no tracking to opt out of.
• Username accounts need no email and no real name. If you are under 13, we encourage a parent, guardian or teacher to help you set up your account. Social sign-in is intended for adults and professionals — if you are under 18, please use a username instead.
• Every video, narration and recording is checked by a trained human before anyone can see it.
• If you appear or speak in something on Shared Area and want it removed, you (or a parent or guardian) can ask at any time: safeguarding@sharedarea.org. This applies no matter how long ago it was published.

6. Who helps us run the platform

These providers process data only on our instructions. We do not sell data to anyone, and there are no advertisers.

Your browser also fetches some resources directly from third parties when pages load: fonts from Google Fonts, two open-source libraries from the jsDelivr and cdnjs networks, video details and preview images from YouTube or Vimeo when links are imported, and your profile photo from LinkedIn or Google if you switched that on. Those services see the standard technical information any web request carries (such as your IP address); we send them nothing about you.

7. How long we keep things

8. Your rights, and deleting your account

You can ask us to access, correct, delete, restrict or export your data, or object to how we use it — email hello@sharedarea.org with your username. For account actions we will ask you to confirm from inside your logged-in account so nobody can impersonate you.

Delete your account yourself: Dashboard → Account → Delete my account. You choose what happens to your contributions:

• Erase everything (the default): your videos, voice recordings and appearances are permanently removed from the platform and our storage.
• Leave your contributions for other learners: they stay, credited to "a former contributor". You can still have them removed later — just ask.

Because username accounts have no email, a lost password cannot be reset; the account cannot be accessed again and you may create a new one, or contact us to discuss removal of the old account's content.

9. Security

Row-by-row database access rules, hashed passwords, encrypted connections (HTTPS), server-side checks on every upload and every privileged action, rate limiting, UK/EU data hosting, and human review before anything is published.

10. Complaints

Talk to us first: hello@sharedarea.org. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office — ico.org.uk or 0303 123 1113.

11. Changes

We will update the date above, and flag significant changes with a notice on the site.