Who we are
Our website address is: https://accredicity.com.
Introduction
This amended privacy policy (this “Privacy Policy”), including GDPR compliance, sets out how Accredicity, Inc. dba Accredicity (“Accredicity”, “us”, or “we”) collects, processes and holds your personal data if you visit our website(s) or otherwise provide personal data to us. Accredicity is the data controller of your personal data.
At Accredicity, nothing to us is more important than the success of our students and website users and the protection of their personal data. With users in nearly every country in the world, we adhere to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR expands the privacy rights granted to individuals in the European Union (EU) and requires certain companies that collect and process personal data of these individuals to comply with a new set of privacy regulations. In particular, the GDPR may apply to companies that collect and process the personal data of individuals in the EU and have a presence in the EU (e.g. offices or establishments) and to companies that do not have any presence in the EU but target individuals in the EU (e.g. by offering goods or services to such individuals) or monitor the behavior of individuals in the EU.
GDPR
In 2016, the EU approved a new privacy regulation called the General Data Protection Regulation commonly known as the GDPR. It applies to all companies that collect personal data and information on individuals in the EU and meet certain territorial requirements. The GDPR is designed to strengthen the security and protection of personal data of individuals in the EU, as well as provide businesses with a structured framework on how to collect, process, use, and share such personal data. Under the GDPR, the concept of “personal data” is very broad, and covers almost any information relating to an identifiable natural person.
This policy affects your legal rights and obligations, so please read it carefully. If you have any questions, please contact us at support@accredicity.com.
Personal data we collect
Accredicity collects and uses your personal data to operate its website(s) and deliver the services you have requested.
Accredicity may also use your personal data to inform you of other products or services available from Accredicity. Accredicity may also contact you via surveys to conduct research about your opinion of current services or of potential new services that may be offered.
We collect, process, store and use personal data, including your name, email address, physical address, phone number and educational and/or employment background, when you fill out our forms for more information.
When enrolling as a student with Accredicity, additional personal data will be collected and retained, including your photograph, dates of attendance, grade level, enrollment status (e.g., undergraduate or graduate, full-time or part time), credentials, honors and awards received, class rosters within the classroom, and the most recent educational agency or institution you attended. (Please see FERPA section for more details)
When you contact us by email or post, we may keep a record of the correspondence and may also record any telephone conversation we have with you.
All personal data that you provide to us must be true, complete and accurate. If you provide us with inaccurate or false data, and we suspect or identify fraud, we will record this.
You do not need to provide us with any personal data to interact with our website(s) or social media accounts. However, we may still collect the information described under the Data We Automatically Collect section (below) and the Marketing Communications section (below) of this Privacy Policy.
Data we automatically collect
When you visit our website(s), we, or third parties on our behalf, automatically collect and store information about your device and your activities. This information could include (a) your computer or other device’s unique ID number; (b) technical information about your device such as type of device, web browser or operating system; (c) your preferences and settings such as time zone and language; and (d) statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns. We collect this information using cookies in accordance with the Cookie section of this Privacy Policy and we use the information we collect on an anonymous basis to improve our website experience, our events and the services we provide, as well as for analytical and research purposes.
We also allow advertisers and advertising networks to collect information about your computer or mobile device, activities, and geographic location to enable them to display targeted ads to you and provide us with anonymous information about our users’ behavior. Again, this takes place through the use of cookies in accordance with the Cookie section of this Privacy Policy.
Marketing Communications
If you opt in to receive marketing communications from us, you consent to the processing of your data to send you such communications, which may include newsletters, blog posts, surveys and information about new events. We retain a record of your consent.
You can choose to no longer receive marketing communications by contacting us at datainquiries@accredicity.com or clicking unsubscribe from a marketing email. If you do unsubscribe to marketing communications, it may take up to five (5) business days for your new preferences to take effect.
Lawful processing of your personal data
We collect and use your personal data for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy on the basis of our legitimate interests (for example, providing educational offerings and evaluating your performance, conducting admissions research, or for website analytics); to process transactions requested by you and meet our contractual obligations (for example, registering you for an online education course, processing your application for admission, and to register you for events you wish to attend or contact you with requested information relating to the school); or on the basis of your consent, where applicable.
Who do we share your data with?
Accredicity does not sell, rent or lease to third-parties any personal data it collects.
Accredicity may share personal data with our third-party vendors to help perform statistical analysis, send you email or postal mail, or provide you with customer support. We may also share your personal data with third-party service providers, sub-contractors, and agents that we appoint to perform services on our behalf and in accordance with our instructions, including (but not limited to) payment providers, email communication providers, IT service providers, accountants, auditors and lawyers. All such third-parties are prohibited from using your personal data except to provide their contracted services to Accredicity, and they are required to maintain the confidentiality of your personal data.
Under certain circumstances we may have to disclose your personal data if required under applicable laws and/or regulations, or to protect a third-party’s rights, property, or safety.
Where we hold and process your personal data
Some or all of your personal data may be stored outside of the European Union (the EU), including for example, if our email server is located in a country outside the EU or if any of our service providers or their servers are based outside of the EU. We shall only transfer your personal data to organizations that have provided adequate safeguards with respect to your personal data.
Your rights
You have the right to obtain from us a copy of the personal data we collect in an easily accessible format, and to require us to correct or update the personal data if it is inaccurate or incomplete. You also have the right, at any time, to require that we delete your personal data. To exercise these rights, or any other rights you may have under applicable laws, please contact us at datainquiries@accredicity.com.
If you withdraw your consent to the use or sharing of your personal data for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, you may not have access to all (or any) of the related services, and we might not be able to provide you all (or any) of the services. Please note that, in certain cases, we may continue to process your personal data after you have withdrawn consent and requested that we delete your personal data, if we have a legal basis to do so. For example, we may retain certain data if we need to do so to comply with an independent legal obligation, if we still need the data for the lawful purposes for which we obtained the data, or if it is necessary to do so to pursue our legitimate interest in keeping our services and operations safe and secure.
Because we want to avoid taking action regarding your personal data at the direction of someone other than you, we will ask you for information verifying your identity.
We will respond to your request without undue delay and in any event within one month of receipt of the request, which can be extended by two further months where necessary, taking into account the complexity and number of the requests.
We reserve the right to charge a reasonable administrative fee, taking into account the administrative costs of providing the information or communication or taking the action requested, if your requests are manifestly unfounded or excessive, in particular because of their repetitive character.
If you have any complaints regarding our privacy practices, you have the right to make a complaint with your national data protection authority (i.e., supervisory authority).
Retention
We will retain your personal data for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy unless a longer period is required under applicable law, or is needed to resolve disputes or protect our legal rights or otherwise to comply with legal obligations.
Where we are processing personal data based on our legitimate interests, we generally will retain the data for a reasonable period of time based on the particular interest, taking into account the fundamental interests and the rights and freedoms of the data subjects.
Where we are processing personal data based on your consent, we generally will retain the information for the period of time necessary to carry out the processing activities to which you consented, subject to your right, under certain circumstances, to have certain of your personal data erased.
Where we are processing personal data based on contract, we generally will retain the information for the duration of the contract plus some additional limited period of time that is necessary to comply with law or that represents the statute of limitations for legal claims that could arise from the contractual relationship.
Representative
We have designated a representative in the European Union for purposes of the GDPR. Our representative may be contacted by following the contact information located at the bottom of this page.
CCPA
Accredicity (1) does not have annual gross revenues in excess of twenty-five million dollars, (2) does not buy, receive, sell, or share for commercial purposes, alone or in combination, the personal information of 50,000 or more California consumers, households, or devices, and (3) does not derive fifty percent or more of its annual revenues from selling California consumers’ personal information. As such, Accredicity and this website are not subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”).
FERPA
Accredicity adheres to the regulations and guidelines outlined in the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (“FERPA” or the “Act”) which protects the privacy of student education records. Under FERPA, school officials may not disclose student education records, nor permit inspection of student education records, without written permission from the student (unless disclosure is allowed under certain exceptions covered in the Act), and students are permitted to inspect their education records. Accredicity may disclose, without consent, “directory information,”.
Under FERPA, education records are defined as records, files, documents, and other materials that contain information directly related to a student and are maintained by an educational agency or institution or by a person acting for such agency or institution. The following are examples of student education records:
- Letters of recommendation (Note: students do not have the right to inspect these letters unless the author of the recommendation has granted such a waiver.)
- Student enrollment, registration, and course completion data, including course assignments and final grades
- Student applications forms
- Transcripts from student’s previously attended institutions, including high school and other colleges and universities
- Directory Information – such as a student’s name, address, telephone listing, date and place of birth, major field of study, participation in officially recognized activities and sports, registration status (active, inactive, probation, suspension, expelled, or graduate), enrollment status (full-, half-, part-time, or LOA), dates of attendance, credentials and awards received, and the most recent previous educational agency or institution attended by the student.
Access to Education Records:
Under FERPA, students have the right to inspect and review their educational records within 45 days of Accredicity receiving a request for such an inspection. Students also have the right to request an amendment to their educational records if they are believed to be inaccurate or misleading, and the right to consent or revoke the disclosure of all or part of their education records, including directory information.
- Students should submit a written request to the Registrar of Accredicity specifying the education record(s) they wish to inspect. The Registrar or Registrar’s designee will make arrangements for access and notify the student of the time and place where the records may be inspected. Accredicity is not required to provide copies of such records unless, for reasons such as great distance, it is impossible for students to review the records in person. Accredicity may charge a fee for copies.
- Students wishing to authorize another party (e.g., spouse or financial sponsor) to access their educational records, must submit a written notification to Accredicity with the full name of the authorized party and what information may be disclosed. Authorized parties must know personal information regarding the student before any Accredicity official will discuss student education records with the named party.
- Students seeking to amend or contest content within their student record must follow the Academic Grievance and Appeal Policies and Procedures.
- Students have the right to consent to the disclosure of their educational records, except to the extent FERPA authorizes disclosure without consent, including (without limitation) to the following parties or under the following conditions:
- School officials with legitimate educational interests;
- Other schools to which a student is transferring;
- Specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes;
- Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student;
- Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;
- Accrediting organizations;
- To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;
- Appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and
- State and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law.
Cookies
What Are Cookies
This website uses cookies as is common practice with almost all websites. Cookies are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer, to improve your experience. This page describes what information cookies gather, how we use them and why we sometimes need to store these cookies. We will also share how you can prevent these cookies from being stored; however this may downgrade or ‘break’ certain elements of this website’s functionality.
For more general information on cookies see the Wikipedia article on HTTP Cookies.
How We Use Cookies
We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. Unfortunately, in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to this website. It is recommended that you leave on all cookies if you are not sure whether you need them or not in case they are used to provide a service that you use.
Disable Cookies
You can disable cookies by adjusting the settings on your web browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies will affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit. Disabling cookies will usually result in disabling certain functionality and features of this website. Therefore it is recommended that you do not disable cookies.
Forms related cookies
When you submit personal data to us through a form, such as those found on contact pages or comment forms, cookies may be set to remember your user details for future correspondence.
Third Party Cookies
In some special cases, we also use cookies provided by our third-party vendors. The following section details which third-party cookies you might encounter through this website.
Google Analytics
This website uses Google Analytics, which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solution on the web, to help us understand how you use the website and ways in which can improve your user experience. These cookies may track things, such as how long you spend on the website and the pages that you visit, so we can continue to produce engaging content. For more information on Google Analytics cookies, see the official Google Analytics page.
From time to time we test new features and make subtle changes to the way that the website is delivered. When we are still testing new features, cookies may be used to ensure that you receive a consistent experience on the website while ensuring we understand which optimizations our users appreciate the most.
Because we provide courses and program it’s important for us to understand statistics about how many of the visitors to our website actually enroll as a students, and as such, this is the kind of data that these cookies will track. This is important to you as it means that we can accurately make business predictions that allow us to monitor our advertising and product costs to ensure the best possible user experience and tuition rates.
We also use social media buttons and/or plugins on this website that allow you to connect with your social network in various ways. For these to buttons and/or plugins work, the following social media websites including; Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Vimeo, YouTube, and will set cookies through our website which may be used to enhance your profile on their website or contribute to the data they hold for various purposes outlined in their respective privacy policies.
Contact Forms
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 visit our login page, 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.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
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.
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 (https://automattic.com/privacy/). 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.
Analytics
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), 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.
What rights you have over your data
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.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Plugins
We do track user data via our plugins and we securely store this information in your user profile on our encrypted server. We do store data fetched by our plugins on our servers, neither we share that data with any third party. Our plugins run absolutely on our site and store the data is in the database of our website.
We only collect your public profile data only from your consent that you grant before initiating Social Login, from the social network used to login at our website. This data may includes your first name, last name, email address, link to your social media profile, unique identifier, link to social profile avatar. This data is used to create your user profile at our website. You can revoke this consent at any time by sending us an email.
Some plugin also depends on any third party service, they might track user data. This can happen in following two ways:
1. Embedded Widgets
Some of our plugins have features to integrate embedded widgets as is, from third party services (like Facebook Like, Facebook Recommend, Twitter Tweet official buttons).
2. Third-party APIs/Connections
Our plugins send request to third party APIs via website-visitor’s web browser to fetch information (like social shares, social comment count). This request made by web browser may include IP address, which can then be seen by the third-party that it’s being requested from. This API request doesn’t include any personal data of the website user other than the IP address.
The Site uses Google (Google Workspace, Google Tag Manager, Google Fonts, Google Analytics) and YouTube Data API.
Learn more about YouTube’s Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms), Google Policies & Terms (https://policies.google.com/), and Google Privacy Policy (http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/).
If you are using social sharing feature of our plugins and you have enabled Linkedin Share official button, you can add following in the privacy policy of your website:
We use a Linkedin Share widget at our website to allow you to share our pages on Linkedin. These requests may track your IP address in accordance with their data privacy policy (https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy).
Paypal
If you are using PayPal Standard or PayPal Reference transactions please see the PayPal Privacy Policy (https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full) for more details.
Stripe
By making payments on this site, you may be storing personal data or sharing data with an external service such as Stripe. Learn more about Stripe’s Global Privacy Policy (https://stripe.com/gb/privacy).
Security
We shall process your personal data in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organizational measures. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Any payment transactions are encrypted using SSL technology.
Where we have given, or you have chosen a password, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential.
You acknowledge that no system can be completely secure. Therefore, although we take these steps to secure your personal data, we do not represent or warrant that your personal data will always remain completely secure.
Some of our services may enable users to submit their own content. Unless otherwise indicated, please remember that any personal data you submit or post as user-generated content could become public information. You should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal, financial or other information in such submissions or posts. We cannot prevent others from using that information in a manner that may violate this Privacy Policy, applicable law or your personal privacy and safety. We will not be responsible or liable for any content you submit or post or for how such content may be used by others.
More Information
If any provision of this Privacy Policy is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid or unenforceable, then such provision shall be construed, as closely as possible, to reflect the intentions of the parties and all other provisions shall remain in full force and effect.
We may update and change the terms of this Privacy Policy from time to time without notice. You are responsible for regularly reviewing this Privacy Policy, so that you are aware of any updates or changes. By using our website(s), you are deemed to have accepted the Privacy Policy in effect at the time of your use.
Contact Information
Accredicity welcomes your questions or comments regarding this Privacy Policy.
Please contact us at:
Accredicity
3113 Diamond Head Road, Suite D
Honolulu, Hawaii 96815, USA
Phone: (808) 212-9826
Email: support@accredicity.com
Effective as of January 16, 2019
Last Updated: March 18, 2021