Privacy Policy

What We Collect

The Ascent collects the information needed to run a guided company training programme: account identity, cohort membership, questionnaire answers, lesson progress, exercise output, feedback, issue reports, media playback signals, and operational telemetry such as page or resource errors.

How We Use It

We use this data to authenticate learners, deliver the course, show progress, tailor exercises, support cohorts, fix broken lessons or media, and report operational issues to the Sherpa team. We do not sell learner data.

Roles: Who Controls What

Where The Ascent runs a cohort for a client organisation, that organisation is the controller of its own learners’ personal data and decides why they take part; Sherpa acts as its processor, handling that data only to deliver the programme under our agreement. For Sherpa’s own operational data — platform audit logs, support triage, and service telemetry — Philip Malamatinas (trading as Sherpa) is the controller. Client learner records are kept separate from Sherpa operational data where the product needs that distinction.

AI Personalization

When personalization is enabled, learner-provided questionnaire answers and exercise output may be sent to Anthropic so The Ascent can extract profile signals and generate tailored exercises. The system sends only the information needed for that personalization task.

Analytics And Cookies

The Ascent uses Google Analytics to understand how the course is actually used: which pages are viewed, how learners move between lessons, how far they scroll, and which outbound links they follow. To do this, Google Analytics stores cookies in your browser — named _ga and _ga_*— which recognise a returning browser and group its visits into sessions. We use this only to improve the course. We do not use it for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles of individual learners.

You can block or delete these cookies in your browser settings, or install Google’s opt-out browser add-on. Doing so does not affect your account, your progress, or any part of the course.

Subprocessors

The Ascent relies on service providers for hosting, authentication, database storage, email delivery, video playback, issue triage, AI processing, and analytics. Current launch subprocessors include Supabase, Railway, Resend, Mux, Linear, Anthropic, Google Analytics.

Retention And Deletion

We keep learner and operational records for as long as needed to provide the programme, support the cohort, maintain audit history, and meet legitimate operational or legal requirements. When a client engagement ends, learner personal data is deleted or returned at the client’s direction, subject to any legal retention we must observe. Learners or client sponsors can ask Sherpa to review, correct, export, or delete personal information where applicable.

To help recover interrupted onboarding, unfinished questionnaire answers are kept in this browser for up to 24 hours. They are scoped to the signed-in learner and are not sent to our servers until submitted. The browser copy is deleted after submission, when the learner clears it, or when it expires.

Contact

For privacy questions, contact the person who invited you to The Ascent or email data@sherpa.consulting.