Privacy & Cookie Policy

• Account & profile: email, password (stored hashed by our auth provider), name, and any firm, title, bio, or avatar you add.
• Sign-in: if you use Google or LinkedIn single sign-on, we receive your name, email, and profile picture from them.
• Email lists: the email address you submit, the lists you join (the case digest, job or case alerts, course news, a waitlist), and when you confirmed or left each one.
• Learning activity: courses and lessons viewed, progress, time spent, and points/levels (gamification).
• AI assistant: the questions you ask and your conversation history, which we store to provide and improve the assistant.
• Subscriptions & payments: your subscription status. Card details are collected and processed by Stripe — we never see or store full card numbers.
• Technical & usage: IP address, approximate location, browser/device, pages visited, and performance metrics, collected through Vercel’s analytics and Google Analytics (see section 6 for when).
• How you found us (see section 6 for when): the ad or source that brought you to the site (for example a Google Ads click ID, campaign, keyword, or a link’s utm tags), saved with your sign-up, account, or purchase.
• Your reading history on this site (see section 6 for when): which of our pages your browser opened (section 3).
• Your profile with us: what you tell us and what we work out from your activity here (section 4).
• Email measurement: whether our emails reached you, were opened, bounced or were marked as spam, which of our links you clicked, which email you unsubscribed from, and whether you signed up or paid after clicking (section 5).

• To provide the service — accounts, courses, the AI assistant, and subscriptions (performance of a contract).
• Security, fraud prevention, and improving the product (legitimate interests).
• Analytics, advertising measurement and remarketing, and marketing emails: on the basis of your consent, which you can withdraw at any time; in the United States outside California, with notice and your right to opt out at any time (section 6).
• Tailoring the emails we send you to what you told us and what you read here (for the reading history in section 3: consent outside the United States, notice and opt-out inside it; you can ask us to stop profiling you at any time, section 11).
• Tax, accounting, and other legal obligations for payments (legal obligation).

When reading-history cookies are on for you (section 6), we give your browser a random ID (plu_vid) and record which pages of this site it opens: the kind of page (a case post, a topic page, a guide, a job-board page, a course page) and which one. We do not record your IP address, your browser or device details, what you type into forms, or pages on other websites.

While you have not signed up, that history is not linked to you. When you confirm an email sign-up, create an account or sign in in that browser, we attach its earlier history on this site to your email address, so the emails we send you can reflect what you read here.

We do not do this for people we know are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland: their browsing is not linked to them and we send them only the emails they chose, without tailoring.

Choosing Decline or Opt out in the cookie banner (now, or later through Cookie Preferences) deletes the ID, and we keep no page history for that browser.

When you sign up we keep a profile with your email address and:

• what you tell us: for example your role, practice areas and technologies, and the lists you join;
• what you do on this site: sign-ups, the pages your browser read (section 3), tools and courses you used, purchases;
• how you reached us: the campaign or link that brought you here (“How you found us”, section 1), and, if you signed up through someone’s referral link, who shared it (we do not tell them who you are);
• what we work out from those: your employer when your email address is at a law firm or company domain we know; the topics you read most; interest scores (for example, interest in the ITC course) and a stage such as “subscriber” or “customer”. Each inferred item shows how we got it.

We never infer or record health, immigration or citizenship status, religion, politics, sexual orientation, union membership or your precise location, and we do not buy information about you or look you up elsewhere.

You can see, correct or delete your profile, or ask us to stop profiling you, by emailing patentlawjoellc@gmail.com. You can leave any list, or all of them, from the link at the bottom of every email.

Our course and marketing emails (campaigns and automated emails) record, for each person who gets them:

• whether the email was delivered, bounced or was marked as spam;
• whether it was opened: our emails contain a tiny image that your mail program loads from our email provider, Resend, when you open the email. This is an estimate: some mail programs (for example Apple Mail) and security scanners load every email’s images, and many programs block images;
• which of our links you clicked (the link passes through Resend first);
• which email you unsubscribed from, when you use an email’s own unsubscribe link;
• whether, after clicking, you joined another of our lists or made a payment on your account within 30 days, so we can see which emails are useful.

The daily case digest, job and case alerts, and sign-in and confirmation emails record only delivery, bounces and spam reports: they carry no open image and their links are not rewritten. Readers we know are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, and anyone who asked us to stop profiling them, get our marketing emails from an address without open or click tracking, and we never record opens or clicks by them. We use these records to stop emailing addresses that bounce or complain, to see which emails and subject lines work (including testing two subject lines against each other), to send a second email to people who did not click the first, and as one input to the interest scores in section 4. To stop it: leave the list (the link at the bottom of every email), set your mail program not to load images, or email patentlawjoellc@gmail.com to ask us to stop profiling you.

When non-essential cookies are on depends on where you are. In the United States outside California, we load analytics (Vercel Web Analytics, Google Analytics) and the Google Ads tag, set the “How you found us” cookie and the reading-history ID from your first visit, and show a notice with an Opt out button; opting out turns them off and deletes our cookies. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, we ask you first instead. In California and everywhere else (including the EEA, the UK, Switzerland and Canada), and whenever we cannot tell where you are (including a US visitor whose state we cannot determine), we load them only after you click “Accept”. You can change your choice anytime via Cookie Preferences. When it is on, the Google Ads tag records which ad brought you here, measures the sign-ups and purchases that follow, and adds your browser to remarketing audiences so our ads can reach you on other sites. You can stop remarketing at any time without declining cookies: Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Separately, our pages measure their own speed (how long a page, a quiz result or a chat answer takes to appear) and send those timings to us anonymously: no cookies, and nothing personal is stored with them (no account, no IP address, no exact page address). Our pages also count visits anonymously, for everyone: how the visit arrived (an ad, a search engine, an email from us, a social network or another site’s domain, and the link’s tags), the page you landed on, your country and device type, and whether you saw or used a sign-up form. No cookies, no IP address, nothing that links one visit to another or to you.

Sources: you (forms and your account), your use of this site (sections 3 and 5), and Google Ads (the ad click ID in the link you followed, “How you found us” in section 1).

We do not sell your personal information for money. When advertising cookies are on for you (section 6) and you have not opted out of sale/sharing, we share limited data with Google Ads for advertising: cookie and ad-click identifiers, the pages you visit, and, when you sign up or buy, a hashed (scrambled) copy of your email so Google can match the conversion to an ad. California law treats this as “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising; you can opt out below (section 11) or with Global Privacy Control. We also use the service providers (“processors”) below to operate the site; each processes data only on our instructions and may not use it for itself:

We may also disclose data where required by law or to protect our rights.

Our providers process data in the United States and other countries. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA/UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses through our processors’ data-processing terms.

Account, learning and payment records are kept while your account is active and as long as tax, accounting or security rules require, then deleted or anonymized. You can request account deletion by emailing patentlawjoellc@gmail.com, or unsubscribe at any time.

We do not sell your personal information for money. We do not buy data about you. We do not try to identify anonymous visitors (for example by IP address, device fingerprinting or company lookups). We do not record your screen, your mouse movements or what you type into our pages (no “session recording”).

If you are in the EU/UK (GDPR): you may request access, correction, deletion, restriction, or portability of your data; object to processing; and withdraw consent. You may also lodge a complaint with your data protection authority.

If you are in California (CCPA/CPRA): you may request to know, access, delete, or correct your personal information, and opt out of the sharing described in section 7 (we do not sell it for money). We honor Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

Objecting to marketing: you can object to our marketing emails at any time, free of charge: use the unsubscribe link in any email (one click, no sign-in) or email patentlawjoellc@gmail.com. Every marketing email carries that link.

To exercise any right, email patentlawjoellc@gmail.com. You can manage your profile and email subscriptions from your account page.

We use industry-standard measures (encryption in transit, access controls, hashed passwords) to protect your data. No method is perfectly secure.

The service is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

We may update this policy; we will revise the effective date above and, for material changes, provide notice.

Questions or requests: patentlawjoellc@gmail.com — PatentLawJoe LLC.