How The Counter Case collects, uses, and protects information.

The Counter Case is an independent educational project created and operated by Matanat Talibzada, based in Azerbaijan. It is not a company, an LLC, a university, or an accredited research institution — it's a single-person project, built in the open. This page will be updated if that ever changes.

The Counter Case is an interactive business-learning platform: you predict the outcome of a real business scenario, see the evidence behind what happened (or what a well-researched simulation shows), then reflect on how your thinking changed. Over time, that builds into a personal record of how calibrated your judgment is.

This policy explains, plainly, what information the platform collects, why, and what happens to it.

Account information

When you create an account, we collect the email address and password you provide. Your password itself is never visible to us — Supabase Auth, the authentication service this platform runs on, stores it in a form we cannot read, and handles verifying it when you sign in. We also store the display name you choose (or a default based on your email if you don't set one), and the session information needed to keep you signed in between visits.

Learning information

As you use the platform, we store the predictions you make on each case, the confidence level you assign to each one, any written reflections you save, and which cases you've bookmarked. Together, this is your learning history.

Your Judgment Score is calculated fresh from this underlying prediction and confidence data each time you view it — it is not currently stored separately as its own permanent record.

Educator information

If you apply for educator access, we collect your name, your institutional email address, your institution's name, and — optionally — your department and a link to an institutional profile page. We also generate some internal verification signals (for example, whether your email domain matches a recognized educational pattern) used to decide whether your application can be approved automatically.

Classroom information

If you join a live class as a guest — using a class code and a display name, with no account — we store that display name, which session you joined, your prediction, your confidence level, and a temporary identifier used only to reconnect you to your own submission if you refresh the page. Joining this way does not, by itself, create a permanent account.

Bug reports and contact messages

If you submit a bug report, we store what you wrote, the page you were on, your browser's user-agent string, and — only if you choose to include one — an email address for follow-up. The general contact form works the same way, except we only collect the page and browser information when you're specifically reporting a site problem — a recommendation, a research suggestion, or a teaching or partnership message collects nothing beyond what you actually wrote and your optional reply email.

We use the information above to:

• create and authenticate your account
• preserve your learning progress and prediction history
• calculate your Judgment Score and calibration feedback
• save your reflections and bookmarked cases
• run classroom sessions and give professors the results they're authorized to see
• verify educator applications
• investigate and fix bugs
• keep the platform secure and working correctly
• respond to legitimate requests you make about your own account or data

We don't use your information for anything beyond these purposes.

Judgment Score is an educational feature. It looks at the confidence you stated on past predictions alongside how often those predictions matched the documented or modeled outcome, and gives you feedback on whether your judgment tends to run overconfident, underconfident, or well-calibrated — and in which topics.

It is not an intelligence assessment, a psychological or clinical assessment, an academic grade, an admissions metric, an employability assessment, a financial or credit assessment, or a professional qualification or certification of any kind. It measures one narrow thing — how your stated confidence lines up with your actual accuracy on this platform's cases — and nothing more.

Guest classroom participation is designed to require as little information as possible: a class code and a display name, nothing more. It doesn't create a permanent account on its own.

A professor running a session sees only the results for their own class — never another professor's, and never a list scoped to anything beyond the sessions they created and own.

Classroom display names aren't meant to be seen outside that class. Please don't enter anything sensitive as a display name — a first name or nickname is enough.

The platform uses two kinds of cookies, both strictly functional:

• An authentication session cookie, which keeps you signed in between visits.
• A guest classroom identity cookie, used only if you join a class without an account — it's what lets you refresh the page mid-session without losing your place, and it isn't readable by any script running on the page.

Neither is used for advertising or behavioral tracking. The Counter Case does not currently use any third-party analytics or behavioral advertising technology of any kind.

The Counter Case runs on two outside services:

• Supabase handles authentication and hosts the database.
• Netlify hosts and delivers the website.

Both are infrastructure providers, not partners — they have no relationship with The Counter Case beyond providing these technical services, and using them doesn't imply any endorsement of this platform. The specific geographic region where data is stored hasn't been confirmed yet; this section will be updated with that detail once it has.

While your account is active, we keep your account and learning information — predictions, confidence ratings, reflections, saved cases — because the platform's core value depends on that history: a Judgment Score is only meaningful when it's built from a real track record over time.

We intend for every registered user to be able to request access to, correction of, or deletion of their account information. There is currently no self-service “delete my account” button in the product — if you'd like your data removed, you can reach out using the contact information below and we'll handle it manually.

Before acting on a deletion or access request, we may need to confirm you're the person the account actually belongs to, so someone else can't access or delete your data by pretending to be you.

One deliberate exception: if you participated in a live classroom session and your response is already part of that session's recorded results, deleting your account later removes your connection to that response, so a professor's already-taught session doesn't lose data retroactively. To be precise about what that means: the response isn't erased, it is disconnected from your identity.

We collect educator verification information specifically to decide whether to grant professor-level access — the ability to create classes, run live sessions, and see classroom results.

Being verified as an educator by The Counter Case is exactly that: a determination made by this platform, using automated checks against your institutional email and manual review for unclear cases. It is not, and should not be read as, any endorsement, partnership, or sponsorship by your university or institution.

The Counter Case is not an adults-only service. Learners aged 13 to 17 are welcome to use the platform, both by creating their own account and by joining a live class as a guest through /join.

For now, the minimum age is 13 for both — creating a learner account and joining a class as a guest. Users under 13 may not do either. This is checked with a simple confirmation at signup and at the point of joining a class; it is a self-reported confirmation, not an identity check, and we do not currently verify age beyond it.

Depending on where you live and how you're using the platform, you may need a parent, guardian, or school's authorization — for example, if a school is directing students to use this as part of a class. That's a real possibility we want to name plainly rather than skip past, but we have not built, and do not claim to have, any parental-consent verification, school-consent verification, COPPA compliance machinery, or universal GDPR compliance. If your school or district has its own requirements here, please follow them.

Educator (professor) access follows the same underlying 13+ floor, since applying for it requires an account first — there's no separate age rule for educators beyond that.

We use technical measures intended to restrict access to your information to only what's authorized — including authentication checks and database-level access controls that limit each type of user to their own data.

No online service can guarantee absolute security, and we won't claim otherwise. What we can say is that access controls exist and are actively maintained, and that reports of potential issues are taken seriously (see “Bug reports” above).

The Counter Case is intended for an international audience. Because it runs on infrastructure providers like Supabase and Netlify, your information may be processed in a country other than the one you're in.

We don't claim compliance with every country's privacy law — this is a young, independently-run project, and being precise about that is more useful to you than a broad claim we can't back up.

Cases on this platform cite and link to academic papers, universities, companies, journals, government sources, and other independent websites as evidence for what they describe. The Counter Case doesn't control those websites' privacy practices, and linking to or citing a source doesn't imply that source endorses, sponsors, or partners with The Counter Case.

Your predictions, confidence ratings, and reflections are yours — used to build your own Judgment Score and learning history. They are not presented as evidence supporting the business claims made in any Counter Case case, and we don't publish individual learner data.

The evidence behind each case comes from independent, credible sources, cited directly on that case's page — never from aggregated learner activity.

This policy will be updated when what the platform actually does changes in a meaningful way — not on a fixed schedule. The date at the top will always reflect the most recent real change. If a change meaningfully affects how your existing information is handled, we'll make a reasonable effort to let you know, rather than updating this page silently.

The Counter Case
Created and operated by Matanat Talibzada
Azerbaijan