How We Collect Information

In almost all cases, we do not obtain any personally identifiable information about you unless you choose to reveal it. You voluntarily submit such information when, for example, you fill out our online “Contact Us” form, send us email or respond to emails from us. We advise you not to include personally identifiable information in your correspondence with other students unless you want them to see it or in your correspondence with our team unless you want us to see it. Thus, you are not required to disclose any personally identifiable information to us. We may also receive personally identifiable information about you from schools, other users or third parties who may communicate with us about you (such as in the case of complaints).

When feasible, we do automatically collect your IP address. We also automatically collect and store statistics and other information about you and your online activities both on an aggregated, non-personally identifiable basis and in a manner that may allow us to associate such information with other personally identifiable information about you and your activities on our site.

How We Use and Disclose Your Information

We use your information on an aggregated basis to do such things as operate our site and enhance our site. We also use this data, both aggregated and personally identifiable, to enhance your onsite experience. We may disclose aggregated information about our site to third parties.

As a general practice, we do not sell your personally identifiable information to third parties. So, for example, we do not sell your email addresses to spammers or sell your name and personal demographic information to mass marketers. However, on particular pages where we ask for your personally identifiable information, we may explicitly tell you that the data we are collecting on that page will be provided to third parties, in which case those disclosures shall override anything to the contrary in this policy. We would also have the right to sell this information as part of a sale of all or substantially all of our assets.

Note that some online activities you choose to do necessarily lead to disclosure of your personally identifiable information to third parties, such as when you include your name and email address in messages posted on our site or sent via our service (using current or future functionality). In these cases, again, your choice to disclose personally identifiable information is voluntary.

In some situations, we provide your personally identifiable information to third party service providers to enhance or expand the functionality available to you as a user of the Site, but this will only be done when you specifically ask us to by responding to our Survey.

In some cases, we use your personally identifiable information to provide information to you, such as to send newsletters and email that you request or to personalize the site in accordance with your requests. We will provide you with directions in all emails and newsletters on how to be taken off our newsletter list.

Cookies and Other Tracking Methods

Cookies are small pieces of information stored on your hard drive, not on our site. We may use cookies on our site for a number of reasons. First, cookies can help us provide information that is targeted to your interests. Second, cookies allow us to better understand how Users use our site, which in turn helps us focus our resources on features that are most popular with our Users. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, but some parts of our site may not work properly if you do so.

In addition to using cookies, in some circumstances we may track or collect information about your activities on our site by your IP address or by the URLs that you come from or leave to. However, these methods do not permit us to associate this information with any other personally identifiable information that you may have provided us.

Other Sites

Please note that different rules may apply to the collection, use or disclosure of your information by third party service providers or vendors or any other sites you encounter on the Internet (even if these sites are branded with our branding or framed by our site). We encourage you to investigate and ask questions before disclosing information to third parties.

Limits on Our Abilities

Although your privacy is very important to us, due to the existing legal and technical environment, we cannot fully ensure that your private communications and other personally identifiable information will not be disclosed to third parties. For example, we may be forced to disclose information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Additionally, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to private entities, law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate to investigate or resolve possible problems or inquiries.

Security

We use industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, such as firewalls and Secure Socket Layers where appropriate. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.