Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and what this covers

Rekindle Training (“Rekindle”, “we”, “us”) provides a fire-service learning management system: courses, skills assessment, and audit-ready training documentation. This policy covers https://rekindletraining.com, the Rekindle web application, and the email we send you about your account.

It explains what we collect, why, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do about it. Your use of Rekindle is also governed by the Terms of Service.

The contracting entity is [registered entity name — e.g. Rekindle Training, LLC], [mailing address — required for privacy and copyright notices].

2. You, your department, and Rekindle

Rekindle Training is a training company, not a department. Your instructor invites you; you accept the invitation and set a password, and the account belongs to you alone. The department or employer you name is recorded on your profile so your training documentation says who you worked for at the time; Rekindle does not administer that department, and typing its name does not join you to anyone else's roster.

Two parties still hold responsibilities for your data:

• Rekindle is responsible for your account and for operating the platform — security, availability, the instruction and grading itself, and the choices described in this policy.
• Your department, if it sent you here or receives your records, is responsible for how it uses them: how it evaluates readiness, how long it must retain records, and how it responds to public-records requests or litigation. Its own policies and applicable records laws apply to that use, and we can't change them on its behalf.

If you change departments, the training you completed stays on your transcript, stamped with the department as written at the time. See retention and deletion for how that interacts with your rights.

3. What we collect

3.1 Account and identity

Collected when you accept your instructor's invitation or edit your profile:

• Name, email address, and password. We never store your password — only a salted scrypt hash of it, which cannot be reversed into your password.
• Rank or title, and contact phone number (both optional).
• Department or employer, as you (or your instructor) wrote it.
• State identifiers, where they apply: your Texas Commission on Fire Protection (TCFP) PIN and your State Firemen's and Fire Marshals' Association (SFFMA) account number. Those agencies issue them; your instructor enters them so your training can be matched to your state record. You can read them on your profile but not change them there — ask your instructor to correct one.
• Your role — trainee, instructor, or auditor — and your avatar color.
• Whether your account is active, and the date it was created.

3.2 Training activity

This is the substance of a training record, and it is generated as you train:

• Enrollments and assignments — the courses you're enrolled in, who enrolled you or whether you self-enrolled from the catalog, due dates, and refresher cycles.
• Time on task — while a lesson is open, the viewer reports activity about every 10 seconds, and we record time per slide or per page. Reported time is capped server-side, so it reflects attention rather than a window left open overnight. It stops when you switch tabs or close the lesson.
• Progress and completion — which units you've viewed, when you started and finished.
• Assessments — quiz attempts including your individual answers, the score, pass/fail, and timestamps.
• Course pages — when an instructor-written page asks you to acknowledge it or answer questions before you continue, we record that you did, when, and what you answered.
• Submissions — files you upload for skill sheets and assignments (the file itself, its original name and size), plus the instructor's grade and written feedback.
• Supporting documents — paperwork your instructor attaches to your record, such as a signed skills worksheet from a hands-on session, an evaluation, or a certificate card. Each update is kept as a new version; earlier versions are not overwritten.
• State class registration — for courses registered with the state's FIDO system, the training-provider agreement (TPA) number that covered you, the dates it was issued for, the dates you trained under it, and the reason if you were moved to a different TPA.
• Calendar — the sessions, classes, and exams scheduled for your courses, and whether reminders for them were sent to you.
• Training records — on course completion we write a permanent record: course title, training category, credit hours, seat time, and completion date. These are append-only by design — the record is what makes it audit-ready — and they build your transcript.
• Certifications — certifications issued or renewed through Rekindle, with issue and expiration dates, and whether one has been revoked.
• Audit log — an append-only trail of who did what: sign-ups, enrollments, grading, certification grants, record-affecting administrative changes. It stores the actor, action, affected item, and one line of description.

3.3 Messages

You can message Rekindle's instructor from inside the app. We store each message, who wrote it, when it was sent and read, and any files attached to it. Attached files are stored in Microsoft Azure Blob Storage along with a SHA-256 fingerprint, so a copy of a document can later be checked against the one that was sent. Messages are part of your training record and are not deleted from the app once sent.

3.4 Email we send you

We email you about your account and your training: your invitation, password resets, assignments and due dates, calendar sessions (when they are scheduled, a week before, and the day before), new messages, and course surveys. We keep a copy of each email we send — recipient, subject, content, and whether it was delivered — so the instructor can confirm a notice actually went out.

3.5 Course surveys

After a course, the instructor may send you a short survey through a personal link. Surveys are anonymous by default: we record that you answered, but your answers are stored with no name, no link back to you, and only the day they arrived, so nobody can tell which answers are yours. If a survey is named, it says so before you answer, and your answers are stored with your name. The link only lets its holder answer that one survey once; it never signs anyone in.

3.6 Content uploaded by instructors

Instructors upload PowerPoint decks, PDFs, and assignment materials. Those files are stored, converted for display (see 3.8), and served to enrolled members. If a deck names members, includes photographs, or contains incident details, that content is in Rekindle because an instructor put it there — the Terms of Service puts responsibility for what gets uploaded on the uploader.

Each slide can also carry alt text (for screen readers), a narration script (shown as the slide's text version) and narration audio — spoken by an AI voice, or recorded by the instructor in their own voice. An instructor's recording is stored with their name and played, labeled with that name, to members enrolled in the lesson. How the AI drafts are made is in section 3.8.

3.7 Technical and log data

• A session cookie that keeps you signed in — see section 5. The session it points to is stored in our database, so a restart doesn't sign you out.
• Ordinary server logs: request paths, timestamps, IP address, browser user-agent, and errors. We use these to keep the service running and to investigate abuse or defects.

3.8 How lesson conversion and narration work

PowerPoint files are converted to slide images on our own servers using open-source software (LibreOffice and poppler). PDFs are rendered in your browser by a copy of pdf.js that we serve ourselves.

To give slides alt text and narration, each slide image — and the slide's text, where it can be read from the file — is sent to Anthropic's Claude API, which drafts the alt text and narration script. The script is sent to Microsoft Azure AI Speech, which turns it into audio. An instructor reviews the drafts, and trainees see none of it until the instructor publishes the lesson. What goes to these services is the lesson slide: if a slide shows a person or incident details, that goes with it, but nothing from your own account — your profile, progress, answers, submissions or messages — is sent to either service. Anthropic does not use data sent through its commercial API to train its models.

All dates and times are stored in UTC and shown in U.S. Central time (Dallas–Fort Worth).

4. What we don't collect

• No location tracking. Rekindle does not request or store GPS or device location.
• No device or contact scraping, no microphone or camera access, no keystroke or screen recording, no webcam proctoring.
• No Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, payment card numbers, or biometrics. There is no field for them. Don't put them in a free-text field, a message, or an attachment either. (Your TCFP PIN and SFFMA account number, described in section 3.1, are state training-record identifiers, not government ID numbers.)
• No health or patient information. Rekindle has no PHI fields and is not designed, and not offered, as a HIPAA-covered system. Never upload patient care reports, run sheets containing patient identifiers, medical records, or fitness-for-duty medical documentation.
• No personnel investigation, disciplinary, or CJIS-regulated material. Rekindle is a training system; those records belong in the systems your department maintains for them.
• No advertising or cross-site tracking data, and no data broker enrichment.

If sensitive information of that kind reaches Rekindle anyway, tell us at privacy@rekindletraining.com and we will remove it.

5. Cookies and tracking

Rekindle sets one cookie: a session cookie that records that you are signed in. It is httpOnly (unreadable by page scripts), scoped to same-site requests, and expires after 12 hours or when you sign out. Without it, you cannot stay signed in.

We run no analytics, advertising, session-replay, or social media trackers. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to beyond the cookie that makes sign-in work.

One third-party request is worth naming: our pages load the Montserrat, Bebas Neue, and Cinzel typefaces from Google Fonts, so Google receives your IP address and user-agent when fonts load. Google states that Google Fonts does not use this to profile users or serve ads — see the Google Fonts privacy FAQ. If you would rather make zero third-party requests, ask us about self-hosting the fonts.

The contact form and the sign-in page run Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from bots. While that check runs, Cloudflare receives your IP address and browser details and may set a cookie scoped to its own domain; it is not used to track you across sites — see the Cloudflare Privacy Policy. Once you are signed in, pages make no Cloudflare request.

6. How we use information

• To run your training — authenticate you, show your courses, unlock modules in order, grade quizzes, route submissions to an instructor.
• To produce the records your department and the state need — transcripts, ISO training-hours reporting by category, certification expiry tracking, overdue and readiness dashboards, course reports (which the instructor can download as a spreadsheet), state class registration (TPA) history, and the audit log.
• To keep the service working and honest — debugging, backups, capacity, abuse investigation, and the server-side time caps that keep reported hours credible.
• To communicate with you about your account and training: messages with your instructor, assignment, due-date, and calendar reminders, course surveys, security notices, and material changes to this policy or the Terms.
• To improve our courses — survey answers tell the instructor what worked and what didn't.
• To improve Rekindle using aggregate, de-identified usage patterns — how long a lesson takes across many departments, which quiz items nearly everyone misses. Nothing published or shared in this form identifies you or your department.

We do not: sell or rent personal information; share it with advertisers or data brokers; use your uploaded content, submissions, or transcripts to train machine-learning models; or use training data for any purpose other than delivering and documenting training.

7. Who can see your data

A note on roles: the instructor role is held by Rekindle Training's own staff, and the auditor role is given only to someone a state agency designates. If you believe someone has access they shouldn't, tell us at privacy@rekindletraining.com.

8. Sharing outside Rekindle

We share personal information only in these situations:

• Infrastructure providers who process data for us. Today that is Microsoft Azure, which hosts the application, the Azure SQL database, and Blob Storage (message attachments and narration audio) in the United States, and delivers our email through Azure Communication Services, and speaks slide narration through Azure AI Speech. Microsoft processes the data under its contractual commitments to us and does not use it for its own purposes — see the Microsoft Privacy Statement and Microsoft Trust Center. Anthropic drafts alt text and narration scripts from lesson slides, as described in section 3.8 — see the Anthropic Privacy Policy. Google Fonts serves the typeface and Cloudflare checks the contact and sign-in forms for bots, as described in section 5. If we add a provider that handles personal information — payment processing, for example — we will update this section before it goes live.
• State training and certification agencies. For courses that earn state credit, the instructor registers the class with the state and records the TPA that covers you, and the state may review those records — including through the read-only auditor seat in section 7. We share with the state what it needs to register, credit, and audit the training, not your whole account.
• Your department. As described in section 7. If your department exports its records, those exports are then in its hands.
• Legal requirements. Where we are legally required to — a valid subpoena, court order, or lawful government request. Where we are permitted to, we will notify the affected member and department before responding.
• Public records and litigation. Most fire departments are public agencies. Training records held by a public department may be subject to public-records or open-records laws and to litigation holds, independent of anything Rekindle does. Those requests go to your department, which decides how to respond.
• Safety. To investigate fraud, security incidents, or a credible threat to someone's safety.
• Business transfer. If Rekindle is acquired or merged, data may transfer as part of that transaction. The acquirer would remain bound by this policy for data collected under it, or we will give you notice and a chance to export your record before any material change.

We do not sell personal information, and we have not sold or shared it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

9. Where data lives and how long we keep it

Data is stored in Microsoft Azure data centers in the United States. Uploaded lesson files, converted slide images, submitted files, and supporting documents are stored on Rekindle-controlled storage in the same region; message attachments are stored in Azure Blob Storage in the same region.

10. How we protect it

• Passwords are stored as salted scrypt hashes, never in plain text and never recoverable — not even by us.
• In transit, traffic to Rekindle is encrypted with TLS.
• At rest, the database is encrypted by Azure SQL, and database credentials are held in the deployment environment, not in our source code.
• Access control is enforced per request: lesson content, submitted files, supporting documents, message attachments, and reports are checked against your sign-in, role, and enrollment before they are served. The auditor seat is read-only by rule: any request that would change something is refused.
• Sign-in is protected by per-address attempt limits and a bot check.
• Session cookies are httpOnly and same-site, which blunts script-based theft and cross-site request forgery.
• The audit log is append-only. Nothing in the application updates or deletes an audit row, so administrative history can't be quietly rewritten.
• Staff access is limited to people who need it to operate the service.

What we don't claim: Rekindle has not completed a SOC 2 audit or a third-party penetration test, and no system is perfectly secure. We'd rather tell you that than imply otherwise.

If we learn of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify affected members and departments without undue delay, and as required by applicable law.

Found a vulnerability? Report it to support@rekindletraining.com. Please give us a reasonable window to fix it before disclosing publicly; we won't pursue good-faith research that respects member privacy and avoids service disruption.

11. Your choices and rights

11.1 What you can do yourself, right now

• See and correct your information — your profile holds your name, email, rank, phone, department, and avatar color, and shows your TCFP PIN and SFFMA account number if they are on file.
• Review your training data — My training for progress and time on task, and My transcript for the complete record, which is printable and shareable with any agency or prospective employer.
• Download your documents — every supporting document on your record, and the files in your messages, can be opened and saved from your documents and messages.
• Sign out to end your session and clear the cookie.

11.2 What to ask us for

Email privacy@rekindletraining.com from your account email address, and we will respond within 30 days:

• Access or a copy — a machine-readable export of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction of anything you can't fix yourself — a mis-entered training record, a wrong state identifier.
• Deletion of your account and personal data.
• Restriction or objection — tell us what you object to and we'll explain what we can do.
• A human — no automated decision-making produces legal or comparably significant effects about you in Rekindle. Readiness judgments are made by people at your department.

11.3 The honest limits on deletion

Two things we can't simply erase, and you should know why before you accept an invitation:

• Completed training records and the audit log are append-only. They exist so a department can prove what training happened. Deleting them on request would defeat the purpose of a compliance record and could expose your department in an ISO review or a lawsuit.
• Your department's copy of its records. Where the records are your department's documentation, we will delete your Rekindle account and de-identify what we can, and we will refer the rest to your department, which is the party with the retention obligation. We'll tell you exactly what was deleted, what was retained, and who at your department to talk to.

We will not retaliate for a privacy request, and exercising these rights never affects your training standing.

12. State and regional privacy rights

California. Under the CCPA/CPRA, California residents have rights to know, access, delete, correct, and limit use of sensitive personal information, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is no “Do Not Sell or Share” action to take. Use the contacts in section 11; we verify requests against your account email. An authorized agent may submit a request with written proof of authority. See the California Attorney General's CCPA page for background.

Other U.S. states. Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws — Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Oregon, and others — have similar rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of their data, and to appeal a denial. To appeal, reply to our response and write “Privacy Appeal” in the subject line; if we deny the appeal we'll tell you how to contact your state attorney general.

Outside the United States. Rekindle is built for U.S. fire departments and hosted in the United States. If you use it from the EU, UK, or Canada, you are consenting to processing in the U.S.; contact us and we will honor access, correction, deletion, and portability requests on the same terms.

13. Juniors, explorers, and cadets under 18

Rekindle is built for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and accounts must not be created for them.

Junior firefighter, explorer, and cadet programs are real, and members aged 13–17 may use Rekindle only where the department has obtained verifiable parent or guardian consent under its own program rules, and the department has an adult responsible for the account. Departments enrolling minors should keep that consent on file — Rekindle does not collect or verify it.

If you believe a member under 13 has an account, or that a minor's account was created without consent, write to privacy@rekindletraining.com and we will remove it promptly.

14. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the product or our providers change. The “Last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version. For material changes — a new category of data, a new recipient, a new purpose — we will notify account holders by email or an in-app notice at least 30 days before the change takes effect, so you have time to export your record and close your account if you disagree. Continued use after the effective date means the updated policy applies.

15. Contact us

• Privacy questions and data requests: privacy@rekindletraining.com
• Security reports: support@rekindletraining.com
• Everything else: support@rekindletraining.com
• Mail: [registered entity name — e.g. Rekindle Training, LLC], [mailing address — required for privacy and copyright notices]

See also the Terms of Service, which covers accounts, uploaded content, acceptable use, and the limits of what a training record proves.