Who we are

Level Effect, LLC, a Texas limited liability company, runs the Level Effect website and Guardian Foundry, our cybersecurity training platform. This notice explains what information we collect when you visit our websites, create an account, train, manage a team, buy a plan, or contact us, and how we use it.

For questions or requests about your information, email info@leveleffect.com or write to Level Effect, LLC, 2186 Jackson Keller Road #3021, San Antonio, TX 78213, United States.

Information we collect

  • Account and profile. Your name, email address, sign-in details, and any profile information you add. If you sign in with Google, GitHub, or Discord, we receive the basic account details needed to connect it.
  • Training activity. Enrollments, assignments, progress, answers, reports and files you submit, feedback and grades, badges and certificates, and your support conversations with us.
  • Organization details. If you train through an employer or team, the organization, your role, invitations, groups, and assignments, provided by you or an authorized team contact.
  • Purchases. Your plan, subscription status, invoices, and payment status. Stripe processes card payments. We don’t receive or store full card numbers; we may show your card brand and last four digits, which we get from Stripe.
  • Device and usage. Browser and device information, IP address, pages and features used, errors, and the campaign or referral that brought you to us.
  • Messages. What you send when you contact us, join our community, or use a connected service such as Discord.

How we use information

  • Provide your account and training, save your work, and give you feedback and support.
  • Let organization owners and managers assign training and follow their learners’ progress.
  • Process purchases, invoices, and refunds.
  • Send service emails about your account, training, and billing.
  • Keep our services secure and working, and fix problems.
  • Understand how people find and use our websites and product, so we can improve them.
  • Tell you about Level Effect training and offers. You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time.
  • Meet our legal obligations.

We may use learners’ work, with names and other identifying details removed, to create sample data and product examples, including screenshots.

AI feedback

We use an AI provider, xAI, to give feedback on some exercises and to help our instructors review submitted reports. For those, we send your answer or report text and the exercise instructions to xAI. Under xAI’s API terms, it does not use this content to train its models, and it may keep it for up to 30 days for security and abuse monitoring. Level Effect does not use your submissions to train or fine-tune AI models. AI feedback is separate from reviews by our instructors.

Who can see your information

  • Your organization. If you train through an organization, its owners and managers can see the training information their permissions allow, such as your assignments, progress, completions, and submitted reports with instructor feedback.
  • Our team. Instructors and authorized staff see what they need to teach, grade, and support you.
  • Links you share. If you create a link to your portfolio or share a certificate’s verification link, anyone with the link can view that page. You can turn off a portfolio link at any time.
  • Service providers. Companies that help us run our services process information on our behalf: hosting and data storage (Vercel, Supabase), payments (Stripe), email (Resend, Beehiiv), usage and advertising measurement (PostHog, Google), AI feedback (xAI), website content (Sanity), and internal team notifications (Slack). Optional features such as YouTube videos, Discord, and third-party lab tools are provided by those services under their own privacy policies.
  • Legal and business reasons. We may disclose information when the law requires it, to protect people’s safety or our rights, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of our business.

We do not sell your personal information.

Cookies and similar technologies

We use cookies and similar browser storage to:

  • keep you signed in and remember your preferences, such as theme and filters;
  • measure how our websites and product are used, with Google Analytics, PostHog, and Vercel;
  • measure our advertising, with Google Ads; and
  • remember the campaign that brought you to our website, so we can credit it if you sign up. Our le_attr cookie keeps this for up to 90 days.

Videos on our website load from YouTube only when you choose to play them. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, though signing in needs essential cookies. You can also opt out of Google Analytics with Google’s browser add-on.

How long we keep information

We keep your account and training information while your account is open. If you delete your account in Guardian Foundry, we remove it after a 30-day grace period. We keep some records longer when we need them for legal, tax, accounting, or security reasons, such as invoices and payment records. Backup copies are removed as our backups are replaced, and our service providers keep data according to their own retention settings.

Your choices and rights

  • Update your profile in your Guardian Foundry account settings.
  • Unsubscribe from marketing emails with the link in any marketing email or in your account settings. We’ll still send service emails about your account.
  • Delete your account from your account settings.
  • Ask for a copy of your information, or ask us to correct or delete it, by emailing info@leveleffect.com from the address on your account. We’ll respond within 30 days.

Depending on where you live, you may have other rights. Contact us and we’ll help.

If you’re in the United Kingdom

We rely on these legal bases: performing our contract with you when we provide the service; our legitimate interests in keeping it secure, improving it, and measuring our marketing; your consent, where required, such as for marketing emails; and our legal obligations. You can ask to access, correct, delete, restrict, or move your information, object to how we use it, or withdraw consent. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you’re in Canada

You can ask to access or correct the personal information we hold about you. If you’re not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Where we process information

We’re based in the United States, and our service providers process information in the United States and other countries. If you use our services from outside the United States, your information is transferred there. Where required, we rely on our providers’ data protection terms, including standard contractual clauses, to protect it.

Security

We protect information with encryption in transit, access controls, and role-based permissions. No system is completely secure. If you think your account has been compromised, contact us right away.

Changes to this notice

We’ll post updates on this page and change the effective date. If we make significant changes, we’ll let account holders know by email or in Guardian Foundry.