What Are Tracking Technologies?

When you visit our site, small text files get stored on your device. These are called cookies, but there are other tracking methods too—pixel tags, local storage, and session identifiers. They help us remember your preferences, track which courses you've viewed, and understand how people move through our educational content.

Some of these technologies are essential. Without them, you couldn't log into your account or enroll in courses. Others help us improve the site based on real usage patterns. And yes, some are used for marketing—showing you relevant ads about our lighting and texture design programs when you're browsing elsewhere online.

Types of Tracking We Use

What Each Category Actually Does

Essential Tracking (Always Active)

When you log into your student dashboard, a session cookie keeps you authenticated. Without it, you'd get kicked back to the login page with every click. We also use these to remember your course enrollment choices while you're completing the registration process.

Security tokens prevent cross-site request forgery attacks. Load balancers use cookies to route your requests to the same server, which keeps your session stable. These aren't negotiable—they're the foundation of how modern web applications function.

Functional Enhancements

Say you adjusted the playback speed on a tutorial video to 1.5x because the instructor talks slowly. We'll remember that preference for future videos. Same goes for whether you prefer the condensed or expanded navigation menu, or if you've dismissed certain onboarding tooltips.

These cookies make the site feel less generic. But if you reject them, you'll just need to reset your preferences each visit. Not ideal, but totally workable.

Analytics & Usage Patterns

We use tools like Google Analytics to see which course pages get the most traffic, where students exit the enrollment flow, and which blog posts about texture mapping techniques actually get read. The data is anonymized—we see trends, not "Reece from Halifax spent 14 minutes on the normal mapping tutorial."

This information directly influences what we create next. If everyone's searching for "Unity HDRP lighting setup" but we only have Unreal Engine content, that's a clear signal to develop new material.

Marketing & Retargeting

Here's where things get more intrusive. If you visit our autumn 2025 course catalog, third-party advertising networks might place cookies that let us show you ads on Facebook or industry sites you visit later. These cookies track you across different domains, which is why they make people uncomfortable.

We also use conversion tracking to see if someone who clicked our ad about physically-based rendering actually enrolled in that course. It helps us stop wasting money on ineffective campaigns and invest more in what works.

Data Retention & Storage

Different tracking technologies have different lifespans. Session cookies disappear when you close your browser. Persistent cookies might stick around for months or even years, depending on their purpose.

We periodically clean out expired cookies and review which ones we actually need. But be aware—third-party advertising networks control their own retention schedules. We can tell them not to place cookies on our site, but we don't control how long they keep data once they've collected it.

Taking Control Through Your Browser

Every modern browser lets you block or delete cookies manually. The exact steps vary, but here's the general approach for popular browsers used in Canada and elsewhere:

Blocking all cookies will break most interactive websites, including ours. You won't be able to log in, enroll in courses, or maintain any personalized settings. But blocking third-party cookies is usually safe and kills most advertising trackers without disrupting functionality.

Third-Party Services We Use

We don't just use our own tracking technologies. Several third-party services place cookies when you visit grassberg.net:

• Google Analytics tracks site usage and generates reports about student behavior patterns
• Google Ads and Facebook Pixel enable retargeting campaigns for our courses
• Vimeo or similar video platforms embed cookies when you watch course preview videos
• Payment processors like Stripe place cookies during checkout for fraud prevention
• Live chat widgets (when active) track conversation history and user context

Each of these services has its own privacy policy explaining what data they collect and how they use it. We've chosen providers who meet Canadian privacy standards, but ultimately they're responsible for their own data practices.

How Tracking Improves Your Experience

Without getting too promotional about it, here's what cookies actually enable on our platform:

When you return to the site, we remember which courses you were exploring. Your dashboard shows relevant recommendations based on your browsing history—if you spent time reading about volumetric lighting, we'll surface related texture mapping content.

Performance cookies help us identify slow-loading pages so we can optimize them. If students in rural Ontario are experiencing delays loading video previews, we need to know that. Analytics tracking reveals these patterns.

And yeah, marketing cookies let us remind you about courses you showed interest in. If you attended our free webinar on PBR workflows in January 2025 but haven't enrolled in the full program yet, a targeted ad might prompt you to take that next step.

Updates to This Policy

We'll update this policy when we add new tracking technologies or change how we use existing ones. Major changes will be announced through email to enrolled students and posted prominently on the site.

The current version was last revised in February 2025. We recommend checking back periodically if you're particularly concerned about tracking practices. The date at the top of this page will always reflect the most recent update.