Privacy Policy

Everything below is either something you gave us or something the product recorded as you used it. There is no data brokerage, no enrichment, and no profile bought from anyone else.

Email address

Given when you create an account. It is the only identifier we require, and we use it to sign you in, because FirstTry has no passwords.

Question responses

Which question, which option you picked, whether it was correct, which mode you were in, and when. This is what produces your readiness score and your review-missed queue.

Exam dates

If you tell us when your exam is, so the dashboard and the countdown email can pace you. Optional.

Subscription and entitlements

Which plan you are on and which per-certification passes you hold, so we know what to give you access to.

Streaks and activity dates

The dates you practised, to compute your streak.

Email preferences

Whether you have opted in to study email and product news, and when you opted in or out.

Support messages and issue reports

If you write to us or report a problem with a question, we keep what you sent, plus the question ID and the answer you gave, so we can investigate it.

Server logs

Standard web request records including IP address, kept briefly for security and debugging.

We do not collect your name, your address, your phone number, or your payment card. If you buy something, our payment processor collects billing details and we never see the card.

Each item above exists for a specific job. We do not collect anything speculatively in case it is useful later.

• To run your account. Signing you in, remembering your progress across devices, and giving you the content you paid for.
• To compute readiness. Your responses, weighted by domain and decayed by age, are the readiness score. Without them the product has nothing to tell you.
• To send email you asked for. Sign-in links and receipts always. Study email only if you opted in.
• To improve the questions. If a question is answered wrongly by nearly everyone, that usually means the question is bad, not the candidates. We look at aggregate answer patterns for that.
• To keep the service up. Logs for debugging, abuse prevention, and security.

Our lawful bases, where that framing applies: performing our contract with you (running the account and delivering what you bought), your consent (study and product email), our legitimate interests (security, debugging, improving question quality), and legal obligation (keeping tax records).

• We do not sell your personal information, to anyone, for any price.
• We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• We run no advertising network code, no pixels, and no social media trackers.
• We do not use your practice history for anything except showing it back to you and improving question quality in aggregate.
• We do not email you commercial messages unless you have opted in, and we stop when you ask.

If we are ever acquired, this policy travels with the data, and you would be told before anything about how it is handled changed.

FirstTry is a small operation built on other people’s infrastructure. These are every third party that can touch your data, what they do, and what they see.

Several of these are in the United States, which means your data crosses a border. For readers in the UK and the EEA, transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses those providers publish.

Account record (email, subscription status)

For as long as the account exists. Deleted within 30 days of you asking us to close it.

Practice responses, streaks, exam dates

For as long as the account exists, because they are what produces your readiness score. Deleted with the account.

Purchase and payment records

Seven years after the transaction. Canadian tax law requires us to keep records of sales, and this obligation outlives an account deletion request.

Email delivery logs

90 days, then deleted. Used to diagnose messages that did not arrive.

Server and security logs

30 days, then deleted.

Waitlist email addresses

Until the certification launches, or until you ask us to remove you.

Support messages and issue reports

Two years, so we can see whether a reported problem recurs.

The payment records line is the one exception to deletion on request. Canadian tax rules require us to keep records of sales for seven years, so if you ask us to delete your account we remove everything else and keep the minimum transaction record until that period expires.

You can exercise any of these by emailing hello@firsttry.app from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days and usually within a couple of working days. There is no charge.

Access

Ask what we hold about you and we will tell you, in plain terms, with the actual records.

Export

Ask for a copy in a machine-readable format (JSON) and we will send one, including your full response history.

Correction

If something we hold is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. You can change your preferences yourself from your account page.

Deletion

Ask us to close your account and we delete it and everything attached to it within 30 days, except the tax records described above.

Withdraw consent

Turn off study and product email at any time from your preferences page or the unsubscribe link in any such email. No login required to unsubscribe.

Object or restrict

Tell us you object to a particular use and we will stop unless we have a legal obligation to continue.

Complain

If we handle this badly you can complain to a regulator. In Canada that is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. In the EEA or UK it is your national data protection authority.

FirstTry sets one category of cookie: the session cookie that keeps you signed in. It is set by our authentication provider, it is required for the site to work when logged in, and there is no way to browse a signed-in account without it.

We set no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, and no cross-site identifiers. That is why you have never seen a cookie banner here, and why you will not.

We also store a small amount of data in your browser’s local storage: your progress before you have an account, and which upgrade prompts you have dismissed. That never leaves your device unless you create an account.

Our analytics provider counts page views and product events without cookies and without an identifier that follows you between sites. We can see that a page was viewed. We cannot see who viewed it.

We send two kinds of email and they are governed differently.

Transactional email is sent because you did something that requires a reply: a sign-in link, a purchase receipt, a notice that a payment failed, or a reminder that a subscription renews. You cannot turn these off while you hold an account, because they are how the account communicates with you.

Study and product email is everything else: the exam countdown series, the weekly progress digest, resume nudges, and product news. These require your express consent before we send them, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Manage both from your email preferences, or use the unsubscribe link in the footer of any study or product email. That link works without signing in.

FirstTry is operated from Ontario, Canada and is subject to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

We identify the purpose of collection before or at the time we collect (that is what section 2 of this policy is for), collect only what those purposes require, and use it only for those purposes. Where we rely on consent we make it meaningful: the study email opt-in is unticked by default and separate from the transactional one.

You have a right of access to your personal information and a right to challenge its accuracy. Both are handled through hello@firsttry.app. If you are not satisfied with our answer you can escalate to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Our commercial email practice follows Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation: express consent before commercial messages, clear identification of who is sending, a valid mailing address in every commercial message, and an unsubscribe mechanism that we honour within 10 days.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, the following applies in addition to everything above.

FirstTry is the data controller for the information described in this policy. We are a sole proprietorship based in Ontario, Canada and we are below the threshold that requires an EU representative or a data protection officer. Contact for all data protection matters is hello@firsttry.app.

Our lawful bases are set out in section 2. You have the rights described in section 6, which map to the GDPR rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, plus the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing already carried out.

We do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal effects. Your readiness score is a study aid computed from your own answers, it is shown only to you, and nothing follows from it automatically.

Transfers of data to the United States rely on the standard contractual clauses published by the providers named in section 4.

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA gives you specific rights. Several other states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah and Texas, give substantially similar ones. We apply the following to every reader in the United States rather than asking you to prove which state you are in.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have never done either. There is no opt-out link on this site because there is nothing to opt out of. We do not use your data to build advertising profiles, we run no advertising network tags, and we do not disclose your answers or your results to anyone outside the processors named in section 4.

The categories we collect are listed in section 1, the purposes in section 2, the processors who receive them in section 4, and how long we keep them in section 5. In CCPA terms the categories are identifiers (your email address), commercial information (what you bought), internet activity (which questions you answered and how), and inferences (your readiness estimate, computed only from your own answers). We collect no sensitive personal information as that term is defined: no government identifiers, no financial account numbers, no precise geolocation, no biometrics, and nothing about health, race, religion, union membership, sexual orientation or immigration status.

Your rights to know, to access, to correct, to delete and to obtain a portable copy are exercised the same way as everyone else’s, through the process in section 6. We will not discriminate against you for using them: there is no worse price, no reduced service and no degraded product for a reader who asks us to delete their data. If you want an authorised agent to make a request for you, they should write from their own address and include your written permission, and we will verify with you directly before acting.

FirstTry is built for people preparing for professional IT certifications and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 16. If you believe a child has an account here, write to hello@firsttry.app and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who processes it, we will update the date at the top and, for anything material, tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

Questions, requests, and complaints all go to hello@firsttry.app. A real person reads it.