Who we are
Abridge Academy Ltd is a registered company in the UK and Wales, company number: 12384197, registered address: 7 Bournemouth Road, Chandler’s Ford, Eastleigh, Hampshire, SO53 3DA. Our website address is: http://abridgeacademy.com.
Website use
This privacy policy applies only to your use of the website, online courses, content and applications to our programs. Partner organisations and websites linked to in this website may also gather information in accordance with their own privacy policies. You should consult other parties’ privacy policies when applicable and appropriate.
What personal data we collect, why we collect it and who we share it with
General website use
When you access the website via any means, use the online courses and content, register or post notes, assignments or other material, respond to or participate in any survey or questionnaire sent to you by us, provide comments via the support button, or make a purchase through the Website, we may collect, store and use certain of your personal information in line with this policy.
We may also collect data relating to your visits to the Website that cannot identify you but records your use of our website and online courses including, for example, details of how long you have used the website and the online courses for. We may also collect your computer’s IP address in order to help us tailor the service to your location.
Registration and purchases
To register or make a purchase on the website, we ask for your name and email address. We may also ask you to confirm your qualifications in accordance with the course eligibility criteria. We may also ask you additional questions, for example relating to your motivations for applying or joining a course, however answering these questions is optional.
When you make a purchase, PayPal or Stripe, our payment service providers, will also collect and process your credit card or other payment details. This data is collected, processed and stored in accordance with the PayPal privacy policy or Stripe privacy policy.
Email list
If you register on the website, apply for a program, make a purchase or complete the subscription form, you will automatically be added to our email list.
We will collect information such as your name and email address in order to provide you with this service. Additionally, you may choose to provide additional information such as your nationality in order that we can better tailor the emails we send to you, however this is optional.
We may also gather additional information, for example purchase history, application history, particular webpages visited or time spend on the website, in order to better understand how you interact with our website, products or services. This enables us to better tailor the emails we send to you.
Program applications and participation
If you apply to one of our programs, we will collect information such as your name, email address, age, qualifications, experience and motivations in order to assess your application and confirm your eligibility. If you are accepted onto the program, we may ask for additional personal information, such as your passport details, photos, medical details or criminal record check. This is required to provide you with the service requested as well as to ensure you are fit to take part.
If you are accepted onto the program, your information may be processed or passed on to third-party organisations such as the hosting partner, government organisations or visa authorities as required to provide you with the service requested or by law. This includes third parties located in countries outside of the EEA, which may have lower standards of data protection. Specifically, our website servers are located in Germany but we work with third parties located in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and the United States of America.
While we use our best efforts to protect the security of your data, please be aware that we cannot guarantee the security of information transferred over the internet, processed or stored by third party organisations. In particular, you should be aware that any data sent to China may be accessed and stored indefinitely by service providers and government authorities, in accordance with local law.
Online courses
As you enrol and progress through a course, we will collect information such as the lessons completed in order to track your progress. We will store the results of your assessments, including quiz responses and assignment submissions, in order to grade you on the course. We will also collect your full name in order to provide you with a completion certificate for your course.
If your enrolment in the online course was facilitated or required through an external partner organisation, we may share your course progress and assessment data with them.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
If you complete and submit a contact form, we will collect any information contained within that form, for example your name, email address and message. This information is collected for customer service purposes in order to respond to your message.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics and marketing
Like many site operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our website (“log data”).
This log data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.
In addition, we use third party services such as Google Analytics and Facebook that collect, monitor and analyse this. This data allows us to analyse how you interact with the website and therefore display targeted adverts to you on other websites you visit.
You may opt out of the automated collection of information by third-party ad networks for the purpose of delivering advertisements tailored to your interests, by visiting the consumer opt-out page for the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioural Advertising at http://www.aboutads.info/choices/ and edit or opt-out your Google Display Network ads’ preferences at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/.
Disclosure of your data
We may disclose your personal information to third parties when permitted by law including:
- with your consent;
- to our partners in order for them to help us provide our services to you, this includes partner schools and organisations;
- our provider of customer relationship management services (which allows us, for example, to send personalised email communications to you);
- our provider of file storage and management services if you email us directly;
- our payment services provider when you make a purchase to process your payment; and
Additionally, we may disclose your information if:
- we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your information to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets, provided that they continue to use your information substantially in accordance with the terms of this privacy policy;
- all, or substantially all of our assets, are acquired by a third party provided that they continue to use your information substantially in accordance with the terms of this privacy policy, in which case information held by us will be one of the transferred assets; and
- we are under a duty to disclose or share your information in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms and conditions or other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or safety, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
How long we retain your data
We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements). When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. If you wish to delete the comment, you may do so within your user area.
For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
If you apply for one of our programs, we will retain your application data indefinitely as a record should you choose to apply again. If you wish to have your application data removed you may do so by contacting Abridge Academy directly.
If you participate in one of our programs, all sensitive personal data such as passport and medical details will be deleted by the 31st December on the year you completed the program. Any materials such as photos, videos, feedback survey responses or testimonials will be retained indefinitely for monitoring and publicity purposes. If you wish to have your data deleted, you may do so by contacting us directly. However, please note that anonymous survey responses are not associated with your identity and so cannot be removed.
If your information has been passed on to a third party, it will be retained in accordance with their data retention policy. Where appropriate, we will ask third parties to delete personal data when they no longer have a legitimate reason to retain it. However, we cannot guarantee that this request will be upheld.
What rights you have over your data
You have the following data protection rights:
- You can edit and update your personal profile on our website whenever you wish. This allows you to keep your details up-to-date and adjust your public profile;
- You can unsubscribe from email communications by following the “unsubscribe” link in any email we have sent to you. Alternatively, you may contact us directly to access, correct, delete or update your mailing list details and email preferences;
- If we have collected and process your personal information on the basis of your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent;
- If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
- You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. (Contact details for data protection authorities in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and certain non-European countries (including the US and Canada) are available here).