Privacy Policy
1. What information do we collect about you and how do we use this information
1.1 Account and Profile Information
You don’t have to create an account to use this site for viewing publicly available information such as videos and blog posts. An account is required to access the course materials on the learning management system. To create an account, you must provide us with some personal data so that we can provide our services to you. This includes your full name, a public username, a password, and an email address. Your public username cannot be changed upon a successful account creation, and it is always public. You can use either your real name or a pseudonym for the public username. All other information can be edited under your account settings.
Once you registered and created an account, you also have the option of adding additional information:
- Year of birth
- Gender
- Country
- Education
- Spoken Language
- Social media links
- Site preferences
Additionally, whilst using the site the following information may be collected (not public):
- Internet Protocol (IP) address (not public)
- Geographical location (not public)
- Browser type and version (not public)
- Operating system (not public)
- Referral source (not public)
- Length of visit, page views, website navigation and any other related browsing activity.
1.2 User activities
QuTalent collects information from you when you participate in courses offered on the QuTalent Site. For example, we collect the information that you submit as part of your participation in the course. This includes course progression, tutorial answers, exams and grades, surveys, course feedback, and forum posts. We use the statistics of user activities to improve our course content and user engagement.
QuTalent may also use this information to help personalize learning path, so your learning experience is tailored to your interests and needs, assessing your performance, and awarding Certificates. We do this to meet our interests in offering the best user experience possible.
1.3 Discussion forum in the course learning management system
Your forum posts are public. You can choose to make a discussion post anonymously or under your username. The information posted about you by other people who use our forum may also be public. You are responsible for information you provide through our services, and you should think carefully about what you make public, especially if it is sensitive information.
1.4 Contact Information
We use your contact information, such as your email address, to authenticate your account and keep it – and our services – secure, and help prevent/mitigate spam, fraud, and abuse. We also use contact information to personalize our services, enable certain account features, for example, login verification, reset the password, send you information about our community and notify of new replies to your subscribed forums and topics. We also use contact information to answer your course and platform questions, as well as to notify you of course and QuTalent’s site maintenance and updates. We do this based on our legitimate interests in keeping learners up to date about our platform and responding to learner questions. You can also unsubscribe from any email notifications. If you email us, we will keep the content of your message, your email address, and your contact information to respond to your request.
1.5 Cookies
A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on your computer or mobile device. Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to operate our community. Cookies are not required for many parts of our community such as searching and looking at public profiles. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, many browsers’ settings can be set to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some of our community features may not function properly if you disable cookies. We do not support the Do Not Track browser option. You can learn more about how we use cookies and similar technologies here. We use cookies for the following purposes:
Authentication: We use cookies to identify you when you visit our community. When you create a topic or post a reply as a guest (not a registered user) we store your name and email address in cookies. We use this information to detect current visitor content (topics, posts) and display it to you even if the content is under moderation (not approved by moderators). The name is used to display as topic/post author name. Also, we store your name and email in cookies to auto-populate these fields when you post a new reply or create a new topic (you do not have to fill in this information every time you post content). We recommend that you do not use the guest posting option on non-personal devices, or at least delete browser cookies when you leave it.
Status: We use cookies to help us to determine if you are logged onto our website.
Security: We use cookies as an element of the security measures used to protect user accounts, including seeking to prevent fraudulent use of login credentials and to protect our website and services generally.
Google Analytics: We may use Google Analytics to analyze the use of our website. Google Analytics gathers information about website use by means of cookies. The information gathered relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website. Google’s privacy policy is available at:
https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
1.6 Log Data
We receive information when you view content on or otherwise interact with our websites, which we refer to as “Log Data,” even if you have not created an account. For example, when you visit our websites, sign into your account, interact with our email notifications, we may receive information about you. This Log Data includes information such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, location, your mobile carrier, device information (including device and application IDs), search terms, and cookie information. We use Log Data to operate our services and ensure their secure, reliable, and robust performance. We use information you provide to us and data we receive, including Log Data and data from third parties, to make inferences like what topics you may be interested in and what languages you speak. This helps us better design our services for you and personalize the content we show you.
2. Information We Share and Disclose
2.1 How we share information we collect
You should be aware that the public information you provide on our community may be read, collected, and used by members of the public who access these websites. Your posts activity history and certain profile information may remain even after you terminate your account. However, we do not share this information. We urge you to consider the sensitivity of any information you input into these services.
2.2 Sharing with third parties
Service Providers: We share information with third parties that help us operate, provide, improve, integrate, customize, support and market our services. We work with third-party service providers to provide website and application development, hosting, maintenance, backup, storage, virtual infrastructure, payment processing, analysis and other services for us, which may require them to access or use information about you. If a service provider needs to access information about you to perform services on our behalf, they do so under close instruction from us, including policies and procedures designed to protect your information.
Our administrators may choose to add new functionality or change the behaviour of the websites by installing third-party apps within the platform. Doing so may give third-party apps access to your account and information about you like your username and email address, and any content you choose to use in connection with those apps. Third-party app policies and procedures are not controlled by us, and this privacy policy does not cover how third-party apps use your information. Please review the privacy policies of third parties before connecting to or using their applications or services to learn more about their privacy and information handling practices.
If you object to information about you being shared with these third parties, please do not sign up for QUTALENT’s services.
Links to Third Party Sites: Our community may include links that direct you to other websites or services whose privacy practices may differ from ours. If you submit information to any of those third-party sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies, not this one. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policy of any website you visit.
Some of our services contain widgets and social media features, such as the Facebook “share” or Twitter “tweet” buttons. These widgets and features collect your IP address, and which page you are visiting on our website, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Widgets and social media features are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our website. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.
2.3 Law, Harm, and the Public Interest
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy or controls we may otherwise offer you, we may preserve, use, or disclose your personal data if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to protect the safety or integrity of our platform, including to help prevent spam, abuse, or malicious actors on our services, or to explain why we have removed content or accounts from our services; to address fraud, security, or technical issues; or to protect our rights or property or the rights or property of those who use our services. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your personal data.
2.4 Non-Personal Information
We share or disclose non-personal data, such as aggregated information like the community statistics (online users, visitors, current viewers of a topic, etc…), the number of people who clicked on a particular link (number of topic views) or voted on a poll in a topic (even if only one did).
3. How to access and control your information
3.1 Accessing or Rectifying Your Personal Data
We provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, delete, or modify the personal data you provided to us and associated with your account. You can request the correction, deletion, or modification of your personal data. Your request and choices may be limited in certain cases: for example, if fulfilling your request would reveal information about another person, or if you ask to delete information which we or your administrator are permitted by law or have compelling legitimate interests to keep. Where you have asked us to share data with third parties, for example, by installing third-party apps, you will need to contact those third-party service providers directly to have your information deleted or otherwise restricted. Please note that usernames cannot be changed. This is a QuTalent system restriction. Because usernames identify you in courses and elsewhere on the QuTalent Site, QuTalent encourages you to use discretion in choosing your username. If you want to protect your identity, do not use your real name or a name identifiable to you as your username. Also, QuTalent does not track or index every time or every place on the QuTalent Site when or where a learner may volunteer Personal Information, so neither QuTalent nor Members will be able to help you locate or manage all such instances. QuTalent encourages you to use discretion before volunteering Personal Information on the QuTalent Site.
3.2 Deletion of Your Personal Data
The deletion of your personal account will include personal data, profile data, created content, logs, etc… Cookies should be deleted from your side. Almost all browsers have an option to delete cookies. Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your profile information, even after we/you have deleted the information from our community.
3.3 Restrict Processing
You can opt out of our use of your information for marketing purposes by contacting us. When you make such requests, we may need time to investigate and facilitate your request. If there is a delay or dispute as to whether we have the right to continue using your information, we will restrict any further use of your information until the request is honoured or the dispute is resolved, provided your administrator does not object (where applicable). If you object to information about you being shared with a third-party app, please disable the app or contact your administrator to do so.
You may also opt-out of receiving email notifications related to your subscribed forums and posts or promotional communications from us by using the unsubscribe link within each email, updating your subscription settings on the My Profile, Subscription page, or by contacting us as provided below to have your contact information removed from our promotional email list or registration database.
4. How we store and secure the information we collect
We use data hosting service providers to host the information we collect, and we use technical measures to secure your data. While we implement safeguards designed to protect your information, no security system is impenetrable and due to the inherent nature of the Internet, we cannot guarantee that data, during transmission through the Internet or while stored on our systems or otherwise in our care, is absolutely safe from intrusion by others.
5. Online Privacy Policy Only
This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.
7. Your Consent to This Policy
By using our site, you consent to our Privacy Policy.
8. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page. We will let you know via a prominent notice on our Privacy Policy page, prior to the change becoming effective and update the “effective date” at the top of this Privacy Policy. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.
9. Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please send us an email at contact@qutalent.org.