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Account & Identity Policy

Account ownership, accurate identity information, sharing rules and account transfers.

Last updated on October 25, 2026.

One person, one account. It is yours alone: do not share it, sell it or hand it to someone else. Keep the details on it true, including your name and date of birth, and keep it secure. You can close it whenever you want; if you have students or earnings, we pay you what you are owed and give your students 30 days' notice before your courses go.

This summary is for orientation only. The sections below are the operative terms.

1. Who this applies to

This policy applies to everyone with an ACADA account, in every role: students, instructors, collaborators, affiliates and journalists. ACADA L.L.C., a Tennessee limited liability company (ACADA, we), provides the account and sets the rules below for holding one.

2. What we expect

Sign up as yourself, once. Keep the details true and the password private. Tell us if something about the account is wrong or if someone else has got into it.

3. One account per person

  • Hold one account. Do not create a second account to reuse a free trial, a discount code or a referral reward, to get around a restriction, or for any other reason. The one exception is the beta: a tester we have invited may hold extra accounts for testing, if they declare them in the ACADA Beta room. If you have lost access to your account, recover it through the sign-in page or write to support@acada.ac rather than starting again.
  • Do not share it. Do not give your password to anyone, and do not let anyone else sign in as you. A shared account is treated as yours for everything done with it.
  • Do not transfer it. Accounts cannot be bought, sold, rented, given away or inherited, and that includes an instructor account with courses and students. An instructor who wants someone else to help run a course appoints them as a collaborator; there is no way to hand a course or an account to another person.

Accounts are for people. A company, school or team does not get an account of its own; the person who uses it does.

4. Accurate details

The details on your account must be true and kept up to date. We ask for them for a reason: your name is how students and instructors know who they are dealing with, your email is how we reach you about your account and your money, and your date of birth decides which protections apply to you.

  • Name. Use your real name or a name you are genuinely known by. Students may use a pen name. Instructors, collaborators and affiliates give their legal identity to Stripe when they set up payouts, whatever name they show on ACADA. An "Identity verified" mark, which the Verification Policy defines, verifies the person behind the account, not the name shown. Do not use a name that makes people think you are someone else; that is impersonation under the Community Guidelines.
  • Username. 3 to 30 characters: lowercase letters, numbers, dots and underscores. A username that contains "acada", or that is a word we use for ourselves such as admin, support or staff, is refused; the Trademark policy says why. We may change a username that impersonates a person or a brand, and we tell you when we do.
  • Email address. It must be yours and it must work. Changing it is confirmed from both the old address and the new one.
  • Date of birth. Given once, at signup, and corrected only through support@acada.ac. It is never shown on your profile. How it is used is set out in the Age & Child Safety policy.
  • Payout and tax details. If you earn on ACADA, the details you give Stripe or PayPal must be your own.

If we find a detail is wrong, we ask you to correct it, and we may restrict what the account can do until you have. An account created with someone else's identity is closed.

5. Keeping your account secure

Your password must be at least 8 characters and include an upper-case letter, a lower-case letter, a number and a special character, and it should be one you use nowhere else. In Settings, under Security, you can turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app, save backup codes, see which devices are signed in and sign them out, and see your last 10 sign-ins. We email you when your account is signed in to from a device we have not seen before, when your password changes, when two-factor authentication is turned on or off, and when new backup codes are made. A change of email address takes effect only once it is confirmed from the link we send.

If you think someone else has access to your account, change your password from the sign-in page and write to support@acada.ac. If we believe an account has been taken over, from a report or from what we see, we sign it out of every device and require a new password before it can be used again.

6. Signing in

You can sign in with an email address and password, or with a Google or GitHub account that uses the same email. An email signup is confirmed by a link we send. Signing in with Google or GitHub the first time asks for your date of birth, since those services do not tell us it.

7. Closing your account

You can close your account at any time from Settings, under Account. Two things happen when you ask:

  • A 14-day wait. The account is deleted 14 days after you ask, or 30 days if students hold access to your courses (section 8). Signing in before that date and choosing Reactivate cancels the deletion. If nobody else is affected and we owe you nothing, you can choose to delete it at once instead.
  • What goes. Your profile, portfolio, progress, certificates, messages, reviews, submissions, press articles, notes, flashcards, whiteboards, rooms you created, and anything you uploaded. A course nobody has bought comes off sale the day you ask and is deleted with the account. Paid access you hold ends with the account, and the days left on it are not refunded. What we keep afterwards, and for how long, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

8. If you have students or earnings

An instructor, collaborator or affiliate who closes their account is treated the same way, with three additions. These apply whenever someone else has live access to one of your courses, or we owe you money. In those cases the wait cannot be skipped, and it is 30 days rather than 14 when students are affected, so they have time to finish and to save what they can.

  • Your courses come off sale the day you ask. Nobody new can enroll. Students who are already enrolled keep full access until the deletion date.
  • Your students are told the same day. Each one gets an email with the date. What they earned in your courses stays on their accounts. A monthly subscriber is not charged again and is refunded any paid days that run past the date. A lifetime buyer is refunded for the part of the course they had not completed, as described in the Purchases, Refunds & Subscriptions policy.
  • You are paid first. Everything you have earned and not yet withdrawn, as an instructor, collaborator or affiliate, is paid out with no minimum. What has cleared is queued when you ask and paid on the next daily payout run; what is still in its refund hold is paid once it clears, and the deletion waits for it. If you have no payout method ready to receive the money, we ask you to add one before the deletion can go ahead. The account is not deleted while a payout is on its way; if one fails, the deletion waits until we have paid you.

9. If an account holder dies

A family member or the executor of the estate can ask us to close the account by writing to support@acada.ac. We close it once we have reasonable proof of the death and of who is asking, and we handle any money owed as in section 8. We do not give anyone access to the account itself.

10. How we enforce this

Most breaches of this policy are handled under the steps in the Account Enforcement & Appeals policy: a written warning, then restrictions, then closure. A second account is closed and its activity is attributed to the first. An account created with someone else's identity, or bought, sold or transferred, is closed at once.

11. Reporting a problem

To report an account that impersonates you or someone else, use the Report button on the profile and choose "Impersonation". For anything else about an account, including recovering yours, write to support@acada.ac. A person replies within 24 hours.

12. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we change the date shown at the top. If a change adds a rule or a consequence, we post a notice in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect.

13. Related policies