Last Updated: June 10, 2021
This Privacy Policy applies to web sites operated by Canopy Education, Inc., dba CollegeVine (“CollegeVine”), including www.collegevine.com and blog.collegevine.com (together the “CollegeVine Sites”). By visiting or using the CollegeVine Sites, and any other linked pages, features, content, or any other services we offer from time to time in connection therewith, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined in this Privacy Policy, and you hereby consent that we will collect, use, and share your information in the following ways.
CollegeVine is a free, online guidance platform used by students to navigate the college admissions process, including tools and information to help students build their school lists, write their essays, and apply to colleges. To provide our services, we often collect detailed personal information from you. This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of the personally identifiable information (“Personal Information”) that we gather when you access or use the CollegeVine Sites and services and explains our information collection and sharing practices, as well as the choices you can make to limit our sharing your information.
We also allow you to share your profile with colleges that are interested in connecting with you. We give you control over whether you want to make your profile public to colleges and what information you wish to include in your public profile. Your Personal Information is only viewable to colleges when you choose to make your profile public and your profile is never visible to other users.
This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that we do not own or control, or to individuals that we do not employ or manage. Information you choose to disclose publicly on the CollegeVine Sites (i.e., information you choose to post or share in our public forums, communities and with other users) will not be considered Personal Information.
In general, we use this Personal Information to deliver personalized services to our users. We also share your Personal Information with vendors (for example, marketing automation vendors or hosting providers) as needed to assist CollegeVine with business operations, but in such instances, these vendors are contractually required to keep your information confidential. If you participate in the Advocate service, you consent to CollegeVine sharing your Personal Information with educational institutions you select.
We may also use information about how you interact with the CollegeVine Sites to generate aggregated data and insights that may also be shared with our partners. We take steps to ensure that this data is always anonymous and not identifiable in any way.
CollegeVine collects and stores information you provide to us. For example, during the registration process, we collect Personal Information such as your name, username, email address, and third-party account credentials (for example, permission to authenticate you via your Google Account or other third-party sites). If you provide your third-party account credentials to us, you are consenting to have the information in those accounts (“Third-Party Account Information”) transmitted into your account with us, and that Third-Party Account Information is covered by this Privacy Policy. We may also collect other Personal Information you provide to us through your use of our services, such as your address, phone number, date of birth, photo, financial information, other academic and demographic variables relevant to the college selection/admission process, including college applications, admissions results, financial aid offers, and reviews and feedback related to use of our products and services.
CollegeVine does not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register. If you are under 13, please do not attempt to register for the CollegeVine Sites or send any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, or email address. No one under age 13 may provide any personal information to CollegeVine or on the CollegeVine Sites. In the event that we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at info@collegevine.com.
Whenever you interact with the CollegeVine Sites, we automatically receive and record information on our server logs from your browser including your IP address, “cookie” information, and the page you requested. Information gathered through cookies and our web server logs may include the date and time of visits, your IP address, the pages viewed, time spent at our CollegeVine Site, and the web sites visited just before and just after a CollegeVine Site. This information may be appended to your profile information to provide you with better service and information and may be shared with partners as detailed in this Privacy Policy.
We may use and share the information you supply to CollegeVine in the following ways:
CollegeVine uses your information to customize your experience on the CollegeVine Sites based on your profile and interests and to deliver a more personalized guidance experience. CollegeVine uses various methods to recognize you, including cookies and requesting your e-mail address and password before accessing our site.
We also allow you to share your profile with colleges that are interested in connecting with you. We give you control over whether you want to make your profile public to colleges and what information you share in your public profile. Your Personal Information is only viewable to colleges when you choose to make your profile public and your profile is never visible to other users.
CollegeVine may use your contact information to send you e-mail messages regarding updates to the CollegeVine Site, such as the publication of new CollegeVine information and content, promotional offers, or to communicate with you about your use of the CollegeVine Sites. The frequency of these messages will vary depending upon your profile. You may opt-out of receiving these emails at any time via the unsubscribe link contained in the email message.
CollegeVine Sites may invite you to participate in surveys, contests and other promotions relevant to the college search process. If you participate, your personally identifiable information may be shared with third party marketing partners to process entries and send you promotional material. Please consult the official rules of any contest or sweepstakes you enter on a CollegeVine Site as specific data collection, usage, and information sharing practices may vary by contest and sweepstakes. Survey information will be used to monitor or improve the CollegeVine Sites, but we will not share individual responses to a survey without your consent.
We may use anonymous information about how you use CollegeVine Sites (e.g., the schools in which you are interested in, schools to which you apply, the participants you connect to on the CollegeVine Network) to improve the functionality of CollegeVine Sites and improve CollegeVine's service offerings, including using this data at an aggregate level to create data analytics offerings to analyze trends.
CollegeVine may use the reviews and feedback you provide to us related to your use of the products and services for marketing purposes.
CollegeVine uses third party vendors to perform operational functions related to the CollegeVine Sites. Some of these vendors (e.g., marketing automation vendors, email vendors or hosting providers) may have access to your personally identifiable information, but only as necessary to provide services to CollegeVine. CollegeVine has agreements in place with these vendors requiring them to keep your information confidential and use reasonable data security measures to protect it.
CollegeVine Sites may use third party analytics services, such as Heap, to help improve usability and the customer experience. These services may record mouse clicks, page views, mouse movements and scrolling activity and are used by CollegeVine to analyze trends and administer the CollegeVine Sites.
For advertising purposes, we occasionally use information about our customers to generate a "lookalike audience" or similar audience of prospective customers through Facebook, Google, and other online advertising platforms. This allows us to target advertisements on their networks to potential customers who appear to have shared interests or similar demographics to our existing customers, based on the platforms' own data. We typically do this by uploading a list of email addresses which are used to generate the lookalike audience. Email addresses that are sent to these platforms are used for no other purpose, other than to build the lookalike audience. We do not have access to the identity of anybody in the lookalike audience, unless they choose to click on the ads. Based on this, we believe that generating lookalike audiences poses little or no threat to the privacy of our customers.
This Privacy Policy applies only to the CollegeVine Sites. While CollegeVine Sites may link to other third-party web sites, information you may provide on a linked site once you leave the CollegeVine Site is not controlled by CollegeVine and is not controlled by this Privacy Policy. You should consult the privacy policy of any linked sites before providing your information to those sites.
CollegeVine will release your personal information if required by law, for example, if we receive a subpoena or otherwise believe in good faith that the law requires us to release your information.
If CollegeVine sells any part of its business, CollegeVine may transfer your information to its successor, regardless of your opt-out status.
You have the option to set your profile preference to either public or private. If your profile is public, the information you include in your profile will be viewable to colleges. If your profile is private, your profile will only be visible to you. Your profile will never be shared with other users.
You may deactivate your account or opt-out of receiving certain types of communications contacting our customer support team at support@CollegeVine.com. If you deactivate your account, we will retain your information in our active database, but will not use it to contact you or share with partners. CollegeVine will communicate with you only according to your listed preferences. In order to opt-out of third-party communications, you will need to contact the applicable third party. If you have any questions relating to opting-out, please contact us at support@CollegeVine.com,
You can update your personal information by contacting us at support@CollegeVine.com.
You may close your account on a CollegeVine Site by sending an email to support@CollegeVine.com and we will remove your personal information from our active database. Once your account is closed, we will discard your personally identifiable data, but we may retain certain data for internal business purposes, such as analysis of non-personally identifiable data or as may be required by applicable law.
CollegeVine Sites are operated in the United States. If you are located outside of the United States, any information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By using the CollegeVine Sites or by providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.
CollegeVine has reasonable security measures in place to keep the information you provide to us safe from unauthorized access. However, no method of information transfer over the Internet is 100% secure and we cannot guarantee the security of your information during its transmission or storage in our systems. We will assume that anyone who has the required login/password information for your account is you, so please keep this information confidential. Vendors and contractors who perform operational services for CollegeVine Sites and have access to your personally identifiable information are required to keep the information confidential.
If you have any questions about security issues, please e-mail us at info@CollegeVine.com,
Information provided in this Section 7 pursuant to CalOPPA is in addition to the disclosures contained in other sections of this Privacy Policy, which also address some CalOPPA requirements.
Do Not Track ("DNT") Signals - Web browsers offer you an option to send "Do Not Track" signals to web sites you visit. CollegeVine Sites may use third-party ad servers, retargeting services and web analytics systems, such as Google, to provide advertising on our sites, analyze aggregate web usage statistics and provide us the ability to display advertisements to you when you have left our site. CollegeVine does not respond to DNT Signals as it does not track you when you leave a CollegeVine Site. CollegeVine's third party service providers, who provide ad serving, retargeting services and web analytics services to CollegeVine, may not respond to DNT signals. If a user comes to a CollegeVine Site directly with a DNT signal enabled on such user's browser, CollegeVine does not look for the DNT signal or respond to it.
Third Party Collection of Personally Identifiable Information - Other than as specified in this Privacy Policy, we generally do not allow third parties to collect your personally identifiable information provided on the CollegeVine Sites. In some cases, however, our third-party service providers may collect information through the CollegeVine Site in order to assist CollegeVine in operating its web sites and services. Section 3 of this Privacy Policy contains additional information on how we share your information with third party service providers.
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time and will change the Last Updated date on this policy when we do so. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used. If we make changes in the way we use Personal Information, we will notify you by posting an announcement on the CollegeVine Sites or sending you an email. You are bound by any changes to the Privacy Policy when you use the CollegeVine Sites after such changes have been first posted.
If you have any questions regarding our privacy policies, please send message to info@collegevine.com.
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