PRIVACY POLICY

Who we are

UStudy is the premier educational consultancy for North America in Europe and is based in the Netherlands. UStudy BV is a subsidiary company of Study Global BV. We have been in business since 2005 and over the past decade have focused on providing expert, quality advice and personalized guidance to students from a range of different backgrounds who are looking to pursue further education in North America. Our head office is located in the Netherlands, at Wilgendreef 83 in Voorburg. Our website address is: https://ustudy.world.

At UStudy, we are strongly committed to protecting personal data and are committed to protecting your privacy in accordance with our obligations under data protection legislation.  From 28 May 2018 this is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as supplemented by the Data Protection Act 2018 and related laws.

This Privacy Statement explains what information UStudy collects about you and how it will be used.

Personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable living person.  This Privacy Statement applies to personal data provided to us, both by individuals themselves or by others.  UStudy will respect any personal data you share with us, or that we get from other organisations and keep it safe.  We may use personal data provided to us for any of the purposes described in this Privacy Statement or as otherwise stated at the point of collection.

If you have any queries regarding this privacy policy, please contact us at info@ustudy.world.

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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 is available here: 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.

Contact forms

At UStudy, we collect different types of information about our users for two main reasons. When registering for our services, we require the collection of personal information to provide personalised services unique to individuals. The personal data we collect comes directly from the contact form, and includes your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address. This data will be collected from you directly in the application form. We use this data:

  • – to contact you if we have any questions/queries regarding your registration;
  • – to contact you if your application is successful;
  • – to contact you if necessary.

    We may also use your contact information to send you marketing messages. If you don’t want to receive these messages, you can opt out, at any time, by following the instructions in the message. If you correspond with us by email, we may retain the content of your email messages, your email address and our responses.

When you get accepted to a high school, college, university or other institute, with your consent we would like to use promotional material such as photographs on our website and on our Social Media pages. You will have the opportunity to withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us at info@UStudy.nl.

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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to help us understand how visitors are using and engaging with our website and apps (we do not collect data on the specific usage of the dashboard). This allows us to make improvements to our web services and your online experience.

The Google Analytics tracking tool uses a number of cookies to collect information and report website usage statistics and does so without personally identifying individual visitors to Google or UStudy. The information generated by the cookie about your use of UStudy’s website will be transmitted and stored by Google on servers in the United States.

For more information about Google’s privacy policy in regards to Google Analytics, please see www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html

UStudy will not merge personally-identifiable information with anonymous information gathered from these analytics systems unless there is prior notice and affirmative consent via opt-in from the user.  When using any of these tracking tools UStudy does not identify users or facilitate the merging of personally identifiable information with non-personally identifiable information collected.

If you wish to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking please visit and install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/.

Who we share your data with

We will never share your data with any organisation to use for their own purposes. Your data will never be sold.

We will share your data if:

  • We need to transfer information to further your enrolment process
  • we are legally required to do so, for example, by a law enforcement agency or court;
  • we transfer the management out or take over any other organisation or part of it (including us), in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer so that they may continue using it in the same way.

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.

Under the GDPR  you have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. If you wish to request this information, please contact info@ustudy.world.

We will then send you a form you will need to complete and send back to us by email.  We will also require you to provide two forms of identification. Once we have received your information request and your identification we will respond within one month.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. If you submit any form, or schedule a meeting through our website or SuperSaas, your submitted data will be sent to our contact database, and we may send occasional email communications to your provided email address. Your data will never be sold.

Additional information

How we protect your data

Your data will just be kept by UStudy. We save your data on protected servers, so no other parties can reach it. We always ensure that we have the necessary controls in place to protect the personal data you provide us with.  We carry out regular audits of who has access to data and to confirm it is being managed appropriately.

Updates to this Privacy Statement

We may make changes to this Privacy Statement.  If we do make significant changes to the way we collect and process your personal information we will make this clear on our website, or by contacting you directly.

This Privacy Statement was last updated on 24 May 2018.