Data We Collect About You

Running an effective online cooking education platform means we need different types of information at various stages of your experience. Some data you give us directly when creating an account or enrolling in a course. Other information gets collected automatically as you interact with our lessons, videos, and recipe modules.

Here's what we gather and why each piece matters for your culinary education:

• Registration and Profile Information: When you sign up, we collect your name, email address, username, password, and any profile details you choose to share like cooking skill level or dietary preferences. This foundational data lets us create your personalized dashboard and tailor course recommendations to match your culinary interests.
• Course Interaction Data: We track which lessons you've completed, video timestamps where you paused or replayed techniques, quiz scores, recipe ratings, and comments you leave on course materials. This helps us understand your learning patterns and shows instructors which cooking concepts might need clearer explanation.
• Payment and Transaction Records: If you purchase premium courses or subscriptions, we process billing information including credit card details (through secure payment processors), transaction history, and purchase receipts. We need this to fulfill your orders and maintain accurate financial records.
• Device and Technical Information: Our systems automatically log your IP address, browser type, operating system, device identifiers, screen resolution, and mobile carrier information. This technical data helps us troubleshoot issues when recipe videos won't load properly or when interactive cooking timers malfunction on certain devices.
• Usage Analytics: We monitor how you navigate our platform—which pages you visit, how long you spend watching demonstration videos, search terms you enter when looking for specific recipes, and features you use most frequently. These insights guide our decisions about which new courses to develop and which existing content needs improvement.
• Communication Records: When you contact our support team, submit feedback about a cooking class, or participate in community forums, we retain those conversations and posts. This includes any photos of dishes you've prepared and shared with fellow students.
• Social Media Connections: If you link your Kitchen‑Cooks account to Facebook, Instagram, or other social platforms, we may receive basic profile information like your name, profile picture, and friend list. This makes it easier to share your culinary achievements and discover which friends are also learning to cook with us.

How We Use Your Personal Data

Data collection means nothing without purpose. Every piece of information we gather serves specific functions that either improve your educational experience, keep our platform running smoothly, or help us meet legal obligations. We're not interested in hoarding data for its own sake—each use case connects directly to delivering quality culinary education.

Your information flows through our systems in these ways:

• Delivering Educational Services: This is our core purpose—we use your data to give you access to cooking courses, stream video lessons, track your progress through certification programs, issue completion certificates, and enable you to save favorite recipes. Without processing this information, we simply couldn't provide the online learning platform you signed up for.
• Personalizing Learning Experiences: We analyze your course history, skill assessments, and stated preferences to recommend relevant cooking classes, suggest recipes matching your dietary needs, and adjust difficulty levels. If you're crushing advanced pastry techniques, we'll suggest molecular gastronomy next rather than basic knife skills.
• Platform Improvement and Development: Your interaction patterns show us which video formats work best, which recipe instructions confuse students, and which features get ignored. We use this feedback loop to redesign confusing interfaces, add requested features like ingredient shopping lists, and fix bugs that interfere with learning.
• Communication and Support: We send you course updates, respond to your questions about sourdough starters or knife sharpening, notify you when new lessons become available, and alert you to special offers on advanced culinary programs. Your email preferences control most of these communications.
• Security and Fraud Prevention: We monitor login patterns to detect unauthorized account access, verify payment information to prevent fraudulent transactions, and analyze user behavior to identify bots or spam accounts trying to scrape our premium recipe content.
• Legal Compliance: Sometimes laws require us to retain records, respond to valid legal requests, enforce our terms of service when users violate community guidelines, or protect intellectual property rights of our culinary instructors.
• Marketing and Research: With appropriate consent, we may use your data to test new course formats, conduct surveys about desired cooking topics, and send promotional materials about kitchen equipment partnerships or seasonal recipe collections.

Data Collected Through External Tools

Here's something important—we don't operate in isolation. Like most modern platforms, Kitchen‑Cooks integrates various third-party services to handle specialized functions. These external tools help us process payments securely, analyze user behavior, deliver video content efficiently, and communicate with students. Each of these partners collects their own data according to their privacy policies.

• Payment Processors: When you purchase a course, your credit card information goes directly to our payment partners—never to our servers. These processors handle sensitive financial data under strict PCI-DSS compliance standards. They collect billing addresses, payment card numbers, expiration dates, and CVV codes to complete transactions and prevent fraud.
• Video Hosting Services: Our cooking demonstration videos live on specialized streaming platforms that collect data about video views, buffering issues, playback quality, and device compatibility. This helps us deliver smooth video experiences whether you're watching on a tablet in your kitchen or a phone on your commute.
• Analytics Platforms: We use analytics tools to understand how students navigate our site, which buttons get clicked, where people drop off during enrollment, and how long users spend on different pages. These services set cookies and collect device information, location data, and browsing patterns.
• Email Service Providers: Our email communications run through specialized platforms that track delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe requests. This data helps us improve our messaging and respect your communication preferences.
• Customer Support Tools: When you chat with our support team, those conversations happen through helpdesk software that maintains ticket histories, response times, and satisfaction ratings. These systems may use chatbots that process your questions using natural language analysis.
• Social Media Integrations: If you share your cooking achievements on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, those platforms receive information about your Kitchen‑Cooks activity. They may use this data for their own advertising and analytics purposes beyond our control.

We maintain agreements with these providers requiring them to protect your data and use it only for specified purposes. But we can't guarantee their practices—they operate under their own privacy policies, which we encourage you to review. When possible, we configure these tools to minimize data collection and anonymize information.

Security of Your Information

Protecting student data isn't just a legal checkbox for us—it's fundamental to maintaining trust in our educational community. We've built multiple layers of protection into our systems, combining technical safeguards, organizational policies, and regular security assessments. That said, no online platform can promise absolute security, so we focus on reducing risks to acceptable levels while being transparent about limitations.

Our security approach includes both preventive measures and detection systems:

• Encryption Technologies: All data traveling between your browser and our servers gets encrypted using TLS protocols—the same technology banks use for online banking. Sensitive information like passwords gets encrypted in our databases using industry-standard hashing algorithms. Even if someone accessed our servers, they'd find scrambled data rather than readable text.
• Access Controls: Not everyone on our team can access all data. We enforce role-based permissions so customer support staff can't see payment details, marketing employees can't access individual student records, and only senior administrators can view certain sensitive systems. Every access attempt gets logged for audit purposes.
• Infrastructure Security: Our servers live in professional data centers with physical security measures like biometric access controls, surveillance systems, and redundant power supplies. We use firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and network segmentation to prevent unauthorized access from the internet.
• Regular Security Assessments: We conduct vulnerability scans, penetration testing, and code reviews to identify potential security weaknesses before attackers find them. Third-party security firms periodically audit our practices to provide independent verification of our controls.
• Incident Response Procedures: Despite our best efforts, breaches can happen. We maintain detailed response plans outlining how we'll detect security incidents, contain damage, investigate causes, notify affected users, and prevent recurrence. Our goal is to respond quickly and transparently if something goes wrong.
• Employee Training: Human error causes many security problems. We train our staff on data protection principles, phishing recognition, password security, and social engineering tactics. Employees sign confidentiality agreements and undergo background checks before accessing sensitive systems.
• Secure Development Practices: Our developers follow secure coding guidelines to prevent common vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and authentication bypasses. We review code changes, test security features, and patch known vulnerabilities promptly.

You play a role in security too. Choose strong, unique passwords for your Kitchen‑Cooks account. Don't share login credentials with others. Log out when using shared devices. Be skeptical of emails asking for sensitive information—we'll never request your password via email. Report suspicious activity to us immediately.

Legal Basis for Data Processing

If you're in the European Union or other jurisdictions with comprehensive privacy laws, you might wonder what legal justification we have for processing your personal data. We don't just collect information because we want to—we need valid legal grounds for each processing activity. Different types of data collection rest on different legal foundations.

• Contractual Necessity: When you enroll in courses, we need certain information to fulfill our agreement with you. We can't provide cooking lessons without knowing who you are, tracking your progress, or processing your payment. This data processing happens because it's essential to delivering the educational services you purchased.
• Legitimate Interests: We have valid business reasons for some data uses that don't require explicit consent—like analyzing aggregate usage patterns to improve our platform, conducting fraud prevention checks, or maintaining network security. We balance these interests against your privacy rights and don't process data in ways you'd find unexpected or intrusive.
• Legal Obligations: Sometimes laws require us to collect or retain information. Tax regulations demand we keep transaction records. Copyright laws necessitate identity verification for user-generated content. Court orders may compel us to preserve specific data. We process information to comply with these legal requirements.
• Your Consent: For certain activities—like sending marketing emails, sharing data with non-essential partners, or using cookies for advertising—we ask for your explicit consent. You can withdraw this consent anytime, though that might limit some platform features.

Cookie Usage

Let's talk about cookies—not the chocolate chip kind, but the digital trackers that websites place on your device. Kitchen‑Cooks uses cookies and similar technologies to remember your preferences, keep you logged in between sessions, analyze how you use our platform, and deliver personalized content. Some cookies are essential for basic functionality, while others enhance your experience or help us understand our audience better.

• Essential Cookies: These cookies make our platform work properly. They remember your login session so you don't get kicked out every time you navigate to a new page. They maintain your shopping cart during checkout. They enable security features that protect your account. You can't really disable these without breaking core functionality.
• Preference Cookies: These remember your choices like language settings, video quality preferences, and whether you prefer metric or imperial measurements in recipes. They make return visits more convenient by recalling how you like to use Kitchen‑Cooks.
• Analytics Cookies: We use these to understand which courses attract the most students, which features confuse users, where people abandon the enrollment process, and how long students spend on different lesson types. This aggregated data guides our development priorities.
• Advertising Cookies: If you see Kitchen‑Cooks ads on other websites after visiting us, that's retargeting cookies at work. These track your browsing across sites to serve relevant ads and measure campaign effectiveness. You can opt out of these through your browser settings or ad industry opt-out tools.

Most browsers let you control cookies through their settings. You can block all cookies, delete existing cookies, or get notifications before websites set new ones. Just know that blocking essential cookies will prevent you from using key features of Kitchen‑Cooks. Our cookie banner lets you customize which non-essential cookies you accept.

Changes to This Policy

Privacy practices evolve as technology advances, regulations change, and our platform grows. We'll update this policy periodically to reflect new data practices, clarify existing terms, or comply with legal requirements. When we make substantial changes that affect how we collect or use your information, we won't just quietly post a new version and hope you notice.

Here's how we handle policy updates: We'll post the revised policy on our website with a new "Last Updated" date at the top. For significant changes, we'll send email notifications to active users or display prominent notices when you log into your account. If legally required, we'll ask for your renewed consent before implementing changes that expand our data uses. Continuing to use Kitchen‑Cooks after we post changes constitutes acceptance of the updated terms, though you can always close your account if you disagree with new provisions.

Special Provisions

Certain parts of our platform operate under additional rules that supplement this general privacy policy. These special provisions address specific situations, user groups, or data practices that need extra explanation.

• Children's Privacy: Kitchen‑Cooks isn't designed for children under 16, and we don't knowingly collect data from kids. If we discover a child's information in our systems, we'll delete it promptly. Parents who find their children have created accounts should notify us immediately.
• Instructor Data: Professional chefs and cooking instructors who create courses for our platform have separate agreements governing how we handle their recipes, videos, personal brands, and student interaction data. These terms balance our platform needs with instructors' intellectual property rights.
• Corporate Training Programs: Businesses that purchase Kitchen‑Cooks subscriptions for employees may receive aggregated progress reports and completion statistics. We don't share individual employee learning details without explicit consent, but corporate administrators can view enrollment data for accounts they sponsor.
• Contest and Promotion Rules: When we run cooking competitions, recipe challenges, or giveaways, those activities may involve additional data collection like video submissions, voting records, or winner verification details. Each promotion includes specific terms explaining what information we gather and how we'll use it.