Prepskills Inc. (the “Company”) or PREPSKILLS® is the premier SSAT and SAT preparation provider in Canada for students seeking admission to private/independent schools as well as U.S. colleges. The Company is committed to ensuring the privacy of those who enrol in its program and those who visit its website. This Privacy Policy describes how the Company is committed to safeguarding your personal information.
The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to tell you what personal information we collect about students and their parents or guardians, how we use it, whether we disclose it to anybody else, how long we keep it, and how you can request access to your personal information or obtain more information about the Company’s privacy policies and procedures.
What Personal Information Does the Company Collect and Why?
The Company collects personal information of its students in the normal course of doing business. “Personal information” is any information that could be used to identify a student and, depending on the nature of your interaction with us, may include the following (‘Personal Information’):
- Name, address, and telephone and facsimile numbers of student and their parent or guardian;
- E-mail address;
- Occupation, academic information, test scores and school acceptance information;
- Payment information, including credit card numbers where used as a form of payment;
- Educational background, records and related information;
- Medical information that you may provide.
Providing your Personal Information, either in person, by telephone, or on-line, constitutes your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of such Personal Information by the Company for the purpose of providing the relevant services. Personal Information is collected only with the consent of a parent or guardian and completion of the Registration Form indicates your consent to collection of a student’s Personal Information for the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy.
The Company may use your Personal Information to provide you with program services, enrichment tools and information. For example, the Company may:
- Contact you to discuss a student’s progress;
- Provide you with information and updates regarding programs or materials that PREPSKILLS have to offer and which the Company thinks will interest you;
- Respond to your requests for information, services and products;
- Improve the Company’s services to better understand and meet educational enrichments needs; and
The Registration form requests permission to use students photographs for promotional and for training Purposes. In limited circumstances, the Company may contact you and ask for your permission to use a name of a student in advertising brochures. This will only be done with your express consent, and normally would be used only when listing awards and achievements, and for the use of a name and photo in testimonials.
How this Information is Used
The information we collect is used for a variety of purposes, such as:
- to enable your use of our services and fulfill your requests for certain features, such as enabling you to participate in and renew paid services, polls, and message boards;
- by performing statistical, demographic and marketing analyses of users of our services to improve our relationship with our customers
- for product development purposes and to generally inform advertisers about the nature of our subscriber base to improve our relationship with our customers;
- to customize your experience by allowing advertising to be targeted to the users for whom such advertising is most pertinent
Direct Communication
An important aspect of our services includes direct communication with our customers. As a result, we will periodically send you communications to your email, text, or voice mailbox, via telephone, fax, cell phone, email, paper mail, or any other delivery method regarding the products or services you may have purchased through this Website. We may also send you information about product or service updates, new features, or information we believe you may find interesting. We may send you information regarding other products and services we offer.
How to access, correct, delete or exercise other rights regarding your Personal Information
If you would like to request to access, correct, object to the use, restrict or delete personal information that you have previously provided to us, or if you would like to request to receive an electronic copy of your personal information for purposes of transmitting it to another company, you may contact us at info@prepskills.com with the subject line “Data Subject Request.” We will attempt to comply with your request. However, the nature of our business, along with the applicable law governing our business, requires us to retain your information for several years. Please also note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping purposes and/or to complete any transactions that you began prior to requesting a change or deletion (e.g., when you make a purchase or enter a promotion, you may not be able to change or delete the personal information provided until after the completion of such purchase or promotion). There may also be residual information that will remain within our databases and other records, which will not be removed.
As a result, we cannot guarantee the deletion of all your information. But, when we receive a deletion request, we will remove your applicable information from our marketing and billing systems accordingly. This will ensure that there are no further mailings or billings directed towards you.
As we continue to refine our systems, we will establish a method for the complete removal of all user information from the system without compromising our legal and ethical duties. This document will evolve as these new methods are defined and tested for permanent account deletion.
For your protection, we may only implement requests with respect to the personal information associated with the particular email address that you use to send us your request, and we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request. We will try to comply with your request as soon as reasonably practicable.
Your choices regarding our use and disclosure of information
We may use the information you provide for marketing purposes such as promotional emailing, direct mail, and sales contacts. We give you many choices regarding our use and disclosure of your personal information for marketing purposes. You may opt-out from receiving electronic communications from us if you are a user of products or services and no longer want to receive marketing-related emails from us on a going-forward basis, you may opt-out of receiving these marketing-related emails by sending a request for list removal to info@prepskills.com. If you have provided your information to us, and opt-out, we will put in place processes to honor your request. This may entail keeping some information for the purpose of remembering that you have opted-out.
We will try to comply with your request(s) as soon as reasonably practicable. Please also note that if you do opt-out of receiving marketing-related emails from us, we may still send you messages for administrative or other purposes directly relating to your use of the products or services, and you cannot opt-out from receiving those messages.
Data Retention
We will retain your personal information for as long as needed or permitted in light of the purpose(s) for which it was obtained and consistent with applicable law. The criteria used to determine our retention periods include:
The length of time we have an ongoing relationship with you and provide the Services to you (for example, for as long as you have an account with us or keep using the Services);
Whether there is a legal obligation to which we are subject (for example, certain laws require us to keep records of your transactions for a certain period of time before we can delete them); or
Whether retention is advisable in light of our legal position (such as in regard to applicable statutes of limitations, litigation or regulatory investigations).
Social Media Features
Our products and services may use social media features provided by third parties, such as the Facebook Like button. These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our websites, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our websites. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.
Links To Other Websites
This Privacy Policy does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information or other practices of any third parties, including any third-party site or service used in connection with our products and services. The inclusion of a link does not imply endorsement of the linked site or service by us.
Please note that we are not responsible for the collection, usage and disclosure policies and practices (including the data security practices) of other organizations, such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Zoho or any other app developer, app provider, social media platform provider, operating system provider, wireless service provider or device manufacturer, including any personal information you disclose to other organizations through or in connection with our products and services, including our social media pages.
Third-Party Vendors
In providing our products and services, we use various third-party vendors who may either directly or indirectly collect information from you, including, but not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft. You should review the relevant privacy policies (for further information on how each third party handles your personal information. If you would like a list of all third-party vendors who we currently use, please request the “current third-party vendor list” by emailing us at info@prepskills.com.
Non-Personal Information Collected Through Technology and Third-Parties
During your visit as you browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we automatically collect and store the following anonymous information about your visit:
- the date and time you access our site;
- the pages You visit on our site;
- if You navigate to our site by clicking a link, the location of that link;
- the technical capabilities of the computer you use to access our site;
- the internet service provider You use to connect to our site (for example “companyX.com” if You have a commercial internet account, or “universityX.edu” if You connect from a university); and
- the IP address (a number automatically assigned to Your computer whenever You are surfing the internet) from which You access our site.
We use this information, in the aggregate, to make our website more useful to visitors — to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology used, to detect operational problems, and to improve the website’s overall security.
Cookies, Beacons, Local Storage, and Other Similar Technologies
We use “cookies,” Web beacons, HTML5 local storage, and other similar technologies. These technologies allow us to manage access to and use of the Services, recognize you and provide personalization, and help us understand how people use our Services. You may not be able to access certain areas of our websites, including Prepskills.com, if your computer does not accept cookies from us.
We do not respond to browser-based “do not track” signals.
We may transmit non-personally identifiable website usage information to third parties in order to show you advertising for Prepskills when you visit other sites.
Analytics, Log Files and Reading History
We gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information may include IP addresses, browser type, operating system and other useful information about the use of our Services, including a history of the pages you view.
We may combine this automatically collected log information with other information we collect about you. We do this to improve services we offer you, including customized recommendations, advertising, to improve marketing, and to track access and use of our Services across the devices that you may use to access our Services.
We have hired third parties to provide us information, reports, and analysis about the usage, browsing patterns of our users. They may independently record the type of device and operating system you are using, general location information, as well as events that occur on our Website, such as how often you use our Website.
Third-party Persons or Entities with Whom We Share Personally Identifiable Information
Unless stated otherwise in this Privacy Policy, we will not sell, rent, swap or authorize any third party to use your email address.
Third Parties
We may share information about our audience in aggregate or de-identified form. Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to indicate a restriction of our use or sharing of aggregated or de-identified information in any way.
Disclosure by Necessity
We may occasionally access, preserve, and/or disclose personal information as required by law, for example, to comply with a court order or subpoena or we have a good faith belief that such action is necessary to
- comply with the law or with legal process;
- protect and defend our rights and property;
- protect against misuse or unauthorized use of Our Services; or
- protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public (among other things, this means that if you provide false information or attempt to pose as someone else, information about you may be disclosed as part of any investigation into your actions).
As we continue to develop our business, we or our affiliates may sell or buy other businesses or entities, or we may merge with another company, or be bought by another company. In such transactions, personal information may be among the transferred assets.
Your information may be stored and processed in any country in which we maintain facilities or conduct operations. By using our Website, your personal information may be transferred outside of your country of use and/or residence.
When your account becomes inactive, your information may remain in our computers, electronic databases, and archives, and may not be reasonably capable of expungement.
Children’s Guidelines
COPPA Compliance. We do not knowingly collect or store any personal information about children under the age of 13. If you are under 18 years of age you are not authorized to provide us any personal information and should not use or access this Website.
Your California Privacy Rights: Notice to California Customers and Opt-Out Information
California’s “Shine the Light” law, Civil Code section 1798.83, requires certain businesses to respond to requests from California customers asking about businesses’ practices related to disclosing personal information to third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. Alternatively, such businesses may have in place a policy not to disclose personal information of customers to third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes if the customer has exercised an option to opt-out of such information-sharing. We do not share your personal information with third parties for the purpose of direct marketing if you have exercised an option to opt-out.
Does the Company Disclose Personal Information?
The Company may, on occasion, share some or all of your Personal Information with third parties for the purposes set out above. For example, Personal information may be shared:
- With other PREPSKILLS entities affiliated with the Company for the purposes of providing you with services and information; and
- With third parties within the Company network that offer services aligned with education.
How Does the Company Protect the Personal Information It Collects?
The Company has implemented appropriate safeguards and security measures to protect your Personal Information from loss, theft, unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. Security measures adopted by the Company include limiting the number of individuals with access to your Personal Information. All affiliates, suppliers, agents, employees and other parties performing services on our behalf who handle Personal Information are bound to maintain the confidentiality of all Personal Information and may not use the information for any unauthorized purpose.
Accuracy and Access
We are committed to ensuring that the Personal Information we hold for each student is accurate, up-to-date and complete. You have the right to access your Personal Information in our files and to update or remove that information as necessary, subject to any legal restrictions that would prohibit such action. To access your Personal Information, please contact our Privacy Officer by telephone, e-mail or post at the numbers and address provided below. Please be sure to specify what information requires updating or removal.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
The Company may add, modify or remove portions of this Privacy Policy, as and when it deems necessary or appropriate. You will be able to determine when this Privacy Policy was most recently modified by referring to the ‘last update’ date appearing at the end of this document.
Concerns about your Privacy
If you have any questions or concerns about privacy, confidentiality or how a request for Personal Information has been handled by the Company, please contact the Company’s Privacy Officer at:
Prepskills Inc.
Attn: Privacy Officer
876 Eglinton Ave East
Toronto, ON, M4G 2L1
1-866-973-PREP (7737)
