Privacy Policy
Last updated: 1/8/2025
Data Flow Visualization
This visualization shows how your personal information flows through iCourses - what data we collect, how we use it, and who we share it with.
Understanding the Graph
- Pink Boxes: Organizations that handle data (e.g., iCourses, Google)
- Blue Boxes: Types of information we collect and process
- Arrows with "COLLECT": Show what data is collected and for what purpose
- Arrows with "SHARE": Indicate data shared with third parties
- Plain Arrows: Show relationships between different types of data
This visualization and privacy policy are automatically generated from iCourses' backend source code using the PoliGraph methodology. PoliGraph is an approach that represents privacy policies as knowledge graphs, capturing how personal information flows between entities and the purposes of data collection.
iCourses uses PoliGraph's representation and LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to automatically:
- Generate the Mermaid graph above from our backend code
- Extract and organize the detailed privacy policy document below
- Ensure consistency between our code and privacy disclosures
For more details about PoliGraph, please refer to the paper:
"Automated Privacy Policy Analysis using Knowledge Graphs"
Hao Cui, Rahmadi Trimananda, Athina Markopoulou, Scott Jordan
University of California, Irvine
Detailed Privacy Policy
How we collect, use, and protect your personal information
User Information Collection and Use
We collect and process the following user information:
- Email Address: Used for account verification, password recovery, and important notifications about your account
- Username: Public identifier for your reviews and interactions on the platform
- Password: Securely stored in hashed form for account protection
- Avatar: Optional profile picture to personalize your account
- Last Login Time: For security monitoring and account protection
Authentication and Security
To provide secure access to your account, we process:
- Google ID: When you choose to sign in with Google, used only for authentication
- Access Tokens: Temporary tokens to keep you securely logged in
- Verification Tokens: One-time tokens for email verification and account security
Instructor Information
We display publicly available instructor information to help students make informed decisions:
- Full Name: Public information from university sources
- Title: Academic or professional title
- Department: Academic department affiliation
- Homepage: Link to official university profile
- Bio: Professional biography from public sources
Note: All instructor information is collected from public university sources. Instructors can request updates or removal of their information.
Review Information
When you submit course reviews, we collect:
- Review Content: Your written feedback about courses
- Ratings: Numerical course evaluations
- Review Metadata: Timestamp and course information
- Anonymous Status: Whether you chose to post anonymously
- Engagement Metrics: Upvotes and comment counts to measure helpfulness
Problem Reports
When you report issues, we collect:
- Report Type: Category of the reported issue
- Description: Details about the problem
- Reported URL: Location of the reported content
- Reporter Email: Optional contact for follow-up
Data Sharing
We share data with third parties in limited circumstances:
- Google Authentication: When you choose to sign in with Google, we share authentication data with Google to verify your identity
Note: We never sell your personal information to third parties. Data sharing is limited to what is necessary for providing our services.
Contact Us About Privacy
If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy practices, please contact us at: contact@icourses.com
- Data Access Requests: To request access to or removal of your personal data
- Information Updates: To update or correct your personal information
- Privacy Policy Updates: We will notify you of any material changes to this policy via email if you have registered iCourses with an email address