Privacy

Last updated October 30, 2026

Serious Courses (seriouscourses.com) is run by Serious Mindware, LLC. This page explains what we store about you, why, who else handles it and how to ask us to delete it. The short version: we keep what the site needs to work, we don't sell anything about you, we don't run ads, and the AI tutor doesn't save your chats.

Questions or requests go to support@seriousmindware.com.

What we store

Your account

You sign in with Google. Google tells us your account ID, email address and name, and we store those with the date you joined. We never see your Google password. One account works across the Serious Mindware sites (seriouscourses.com and seriousmindware.com), so they share these records. If you upload a profile picture, we store that image too.

Your plan and payments

We store which plan you're on and the customer ID that Stripe, our payment processor, gives us. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach our servers.

The AI tutor

We don't save your conversations. A chat lives only in your open browser tab and is gone when you close it. To answer, each question and the chat so far are sent to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude model behind the tutor (see "Who else handles your data" below). Our own logs record only how many words (tokens) a reply used and what it cost, never what anyone typed. Please don't share personal details with the tutor; a first name is fine.

When you ask for research on a topic the site doesn't cover, we do store that request with your account: the topic, who it's pitched at (for example "kids" or "beginner"), the tutor's one- or two-sentence summary of what you want to learn, a suggested search phrase, the dates, and whether we've told you the research is ready. This is how the tutor shows you your requests, counts your monthly allowance and lets us build the research. Research pages themselves don't say who asked for them. Once we've checked one and marked it curated, every signed-in learner can see it.

Comments and likes

If you comment on or like a blog post, we store the comment, the name shown with it and when you posted. Every comment is reviewed before anyone else can see it.

Games

When you play signed in, we save your progress in a game so you can pick up where you left off, and keep your finished results and scores. Some games also keep a save in your own browser.

Visits

Each page you view is recorded with the page address, the page that linked you there, your browser's description of itself (its "user agent"), the time, a random visitor ID kept in a cookie, and your account and plan if you're signed in. We use this to count visitors, apply the daily free limits and see which pages are useful. We don't store your IP address in these records.

Errors

When something breaks, the technical error message is stored so we can fix it. We delete these records once they're 90 days old.

Cookies and browser storage

We only use cookies the site needs. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies of our own.

• Sign-in: keeps you signed in.
• Visitor ID (smw_visitor_id): a random ID for counting visitors, kept for a year.
• Daily limits: counts today's page views and game plays for the free limits.
• Tutor: remembers which tutor you picked, and holds a tutor invite if someone sent you one.
• Browser storage: remembers whether game sound is on and keeps some games' saves.

Embedded YouTube videos and the web fonts we load come from YouTube, Google and jsDelivr, which may set or read their own cookies under their own policies.

Who else handles your data

We never sell your information or use it for advertising. These services handle parts of it for us:

• Google: signs you in.
• Stripe: takes payments and manages subscriptions.
• Anthropic: runs the AI tutor and builds research packages. It receives your tutor questions and chat, and your research topic, but not your name or email from us. Under its commercial terms, Anthropic doesn't use this to train its models.
• Microsoft Azure: hosts the site and its database.
• YouTube, Google Fonts and jsDelivr: serve embedded videos, fonts and a page script.

We'd also share information if the law required it.

How long we keep it

We keep your account, plan, research requests, comments, likes and game results while your account exists. An in-progress game save is removed when you finish that game. Error records are deleted once they're 90 days old. Visit records are kept for our traffic reports.

Your choices

• Email support@seriousmindware.com to see what we hold about you, correct it, or delete your account and everything linked to it.
• Change or cancel your plan any time on Get Started, which opens Stripe's billing page.
• Replace your profile picture on My Profile.
• Clear this site's cookies in your browser to reset the visitor ID and daily counters.

Children

Many of our games are made for kids. Signing in needs a Google account, so children should use the site with a parent or guardian's permission and under their supervision, including the AI tutor. A parent can ask us to delete a child's information at any time at the address above.

Changes to this page

When the site starts storing something new, we'll update this page and the date at the top.