Privacy
policy.

Who we are

Focus Media Services, LLC (“Focus Media,” “we,” “us”) provides communications training, consulting, and video production to school districts and public agencies. Our office is at 24 Veterans Square, Media, PA 19063.

This policy covers focusmediaservices.com, the member account area and course platform at /account, the Thoughts article library at /thoughts, and beforeitgoesviral.com — the book site, whose contact form reaches the same inbox and the same records described here.

It does not cover what happens on someone else’s site. If you buy the book on Amazon or watch a clip on YouTube, that company’s policy governs — see Other sites we link to.

The short version

• We collect what you give us — a message, a purchase, an account — plus a record of when you sign in.
• We use it to answer you, deliver what you bought, and keep one paid seat with one person.
• We do not sell it, rent it, or share it for advertising. There are no ad-tracking or social pixels on this site.
• Our page-view analytics set no cookies and do not identify you.
• We never see your full card number. Stripe handles payment.
• We do not want, ask for, or knowingly hold any student records.
• Email brad@focusmediaservices.com and we’ll show you what we hold, or delete it.

What we collect, and when

We collect nothing about you until you do one of the following.

When you send us a message

Our contact form asks for your name, email address, an optional district or organization, the topic of your inquiry, and your message. We also record which page you sent it from. The message is filed for us to work through and emailed to Brad, with your address as the reply-to so his answer reaches you directly.

The form carries a hidden field that people never see and automated spam scripts fill in. If it comes back filled, we discard the submission without storing anything.

When you buy something

Checkout runs on Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe’s page, not ours — we never receive or store your full card number. What Stripe passes back to us, and what we keep, is: your name and email address, the shipping address for anything physical, the amount paid, the currency, any discount code used, and Stripe’s own reference identifiers for the payment and the customer.

When you have a member account

Your account holds your first and last name, email address, an encrypted form of your password (never the password itself), the organization your seat belongs to when we know it, which product you hold, whether the account is active, and the date your access runs through. We may add internal notes — consultation hours used, mailing quirks, anything worth remembering about serving you well.

When you sign in

Each seat we sell is licensed to one person, so every sign-in is recorded. That record includes the email address used, a short device description, the IP address the request came from, the approximate city, region, and country derived from it, your browser’s user-agent string, and how many other active sessions that sign-in replaced.

We would rather be direct about why. A new sign-in signs the previous device out, and a pattern of sessions displacing one another is how we notice a single seat being passed around a department. It is also how we would spot someone else in your account.

When you use the course

We record which modules and phases you have marked complete, so the course remembers where you left off. Anything you type into a course reflection or notebook prompt is saved to your account so it is waiting when you come back.

When we email you

We log the transactional email we send you — the recipient address, what kind of message it was, its subject, and whether it was delivered or failed. This exists so that when someone tells us a welcome email never arrived, we can find out what actually happened.

When you simply read the site

We use Vercel Web Analytics for aggregate page-view counts. It sets no cookies and builds no profile of you; it does not follow you between sites or between sessions. Our hosting provider also keeps standard server logs for security and reliability.

Why we hold it

Everything above exists for one of five reasons, and no others:

• To answer you. Your message and contact details, so a person can write back.
• To deliver what you bought. Your account, access period, shipping address, and course progress.
• To keep the licence honest. Sign-in records, so one paid seat stays with one person.
• To keep accounts secure. Those same records let us investigate access you did not expect.
• To meet our obligations. Order and payment records we are required to keep for tax and accounting.

Where the law asks us to name a basis: we process your information to perform our contract with you, to meet legal obligations, and for the legitimate interest of protecting our licensed content and our members’ accounts.

Cookies & local storage

We set no advertising or tracking cookies. The full list is short enough to print here:

Your browser’s local storage also remembers the light or dark theme you pick on this site. That never leaves your device, and we cannot read it.

Clearing cookies signs you out and resets those preferences. Nothing else breaks.

Who else handles it

We run a small operation on a few well-established services. Each handles your information only to do the job we hired it for, and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. If our business is ever sold or merged, member and customer records would transfer with it, and we would say so here first.

These providers are based in the United States, and that is where your information is stored and processed.

What we don’t do

• We do not sell or rent your personal information. We never have.
• We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• We run no advertising pixels, no social trackers, and no cross-site profiling.
• We do not use your course reflections, your notebook entries, or the messages you send us to train artificial-intelligence models, and we do not hand them to anyone who does.
• We do not email you marketing you did not ask for. Our newsletter, The Warning Bell, is a separate opt-in on a separate platform.

How long we keep it

We will be straight with you about this: we do not run an automatic deletion schedule. Nothing here expires on a timer. What we keep, we keep for as long as it serves the working relationship — and we delete it when you ask.

• Contact messages — while the conversation is live, and afterward as a record of what we discussed.
• Member accounts, course progress, and notebook entries — for as long as your account exists, so a returning member finds their work where they left it. Deleting an account deletes its notebook entries with it.
• Sign-in records — kept as the licence record for the seat. These outlive the account itself, because they are the evidence that a seat was or was not shared.
• Orders and payment records — as long as tax and accounting rules require, currently seven years.
• Email delivery logs — kept as the record of what we sent you and whether it arrived.

Ask us to delete your account and we will, keeping only the order records we are legally required to hold and the sign-in log described above. If we introduce fixed retention windows later, we will change this section before we change the practice.

How we protect it

Every page and form on this site is served over an encrypted connection. Passwords are stored only in hashed form, so nobody — including us — can read them. Sign-in cookies are marked secure and same-site. Access to the administrative system is limited to named staff accounts, and the records carrying personal and billing details are visible only to administrators, not to everyone with a login.

No system is perfect. If a breach ever affects your information, we will tell you and the relevant authorities as promptly as the law requires.

Your choices and rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us to:

• show you what we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your account and its data;
• send you a copy of your data in a portable format;
• stop sending you email of a particular kind.

Email brad@focusmediaservices.com and we will respond within 30 days. We will not charge you for asking, and we will not treat you differently for having asked.

Because we do not sell personal information or use it for cross-context behavioral advertising, there is no such sale for you to opt out of. If your district holds a seat on your behalf, that district’s administrator can see that the seat is in use and when it was last used — but not your notebook entries or your reflections.

Students and children

Our services are sold to and used by adult professionals — superintendents, principals, communications staff, and their teams. They are not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

We do not want student records. Nothing we sell requires them, and no part of this site asks for them. Please do not include student names, images, or any information from a student’s educational record in a contact-form message, a course reflection, or an email to us. If you send us such information, we will delete it. Should a district ever need us to handle student data as part of a consulting or video engagement, that will be governed by a separate written agreement, not by this policy.

Other sites we link to

We link out to Amazon for the book, to YouTube for video, and to beehiiv for The Warning Bell newsletter. Once you leave our site, that company’s privacy policy applies and this one no longer does. If you subscribe to the newsletter, beehiiv holds that subscription — not us — and every issue carries its own unsubscribe link.

The book cites publicly available news coverage and video. Following one of those citations takes you to the original publisher, on their terms.

Changes to this policy

When we change how we handle information, we will update this page and move the effective date at the top. If a change is significant — a new category of data, a new use for what we already hold — we will email active members rather than rely on you noticing.

How to reach us

Questions about this policy, or about what we hold on you, go to a person, not a queue.