Privacy Policy

Effective Date: August 2019

This Privacy Policy describes how Achievement Study Abroad (“Achievement Study Abroad”, “we”, “our”, or “us”) collects, uses, and shares personal information of our students, advisors, faculty, alumni, and users of this website, https://www.achievementstudyabroad.org/.

We periodically update this Privacy Policy and reserve the right to change the provisions of this Policy or our privacy practices at any time. If you are an Achievement Study Abroad student, advisor, faculty, alumni, or receive emails from Achievement Study Abroad, you may receive notice when this Privacy Policy is modified.  If not, we encourage you to review this site periodically and we will alert you to changes that have been made by updating the Effective Date of the Policy.  Your use of the site constitutes consent to any changes in this Policy as in effect on the date of such use.

Personal Information

Personal information means information that specifically identifies an individual person, such as name, mailing address, email address, phone number, or account number.  It may also include other information about you, such as gender, date of birth, or other demographic information, or about your use of the site, such as IP address or cookies, if that other information is linked to your personal information.

Your Rights to Access Your Personal Information

You have the right to access personal information about you that we have collected through our site by sending a request for access to [email protected].  You can also request that we correct any such information by sending an email to the same address.  To verify that the request is authentic, we may require that such request be sent from the email address associated with your personal information.  While we will comply reasonably and promptly with your request, we may need to retain some of your information for our own recordkeeping or to fulfill a legal obligation.

How Achievement Study Abroad Collects Your Personal Information

We collect personal information that you provide to us.  For example:

  • If you complete our website form to contact us, we may ask you to provide your full name, email, school/university name, location of interest, program term, term year, and your major.
  • If you apply for one of our study abroad programs, we may ask you to provide information such as your graduation year, expected degree, cumulative GPA, whether you receive financial aid, whether you are a first-generation college student, race, parent and guardian information, passport information, and health information.
  • If you apply to work for Achievement Study Abroad, we may ask you to provide more detailed and sensitive personal information required for compliance with our hiring and equal opportunity policies and practices.
  • Our site may include social media features, such as links to our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of each social media platform.


We also collect some of your information automatically when you visit our site and any software applications made available by us for use on or through computers and mobile devices. For example, our site collect your IP address and other online identifiers and record the pages that you visit and other information about your activity on the  

site.


Like many other websites, we ask you to allow us to use “cookies” to remember information about you and improve your browsing experience on our site.  If you reject cookies, you may still use our site, but your ability to use some features or areas of our site may be limited.  We may also work with third-party providers who may use cookies on our site.  You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the use of all or some cookies. For more information about cookies, including how to set your internet browser to reject cookies, please go to www.allaboutcookies.org.

Our site may contain links to other websites.  Other websites’ collection of your information is governed by their own privacy policies.

How Achievement Study Abroad Uses Personal Information

We may use your personal information to:

  • Evaluate students’ applications;
  • Support course registration;
  • Enroll individuals in educational, research, wellness, and other programs;
  • Perform administrative tasks;
  • Evaluate applications for employment and maintain personnel files;
  • Support our educational objectives;
  • Provide information about Achievement Study Abroad offerings through phone and e-mail campaigns; and
  • Other similar uses.

We do not sell personal information to third parties.  However, we may share your information with third parties and vendors under contract with us to perform the functions listed above.  We may also share your personal information with other third parties:

  • When the processing is in our legitimate business interests, subject to your interests and fundamental rights;
  • To fulfill a legal obligation, including:
  1.  in response to lawful requests or legal process, including in response to law enforcement requirements; or
  2. as part of a business transaction, sale or transfer, or bankruptcy proceeding;
  • For protection of personal or public safety or to prevent illegal activities; or
  • To protect our own rights including enforcing our own policies, contracts, and terms of use.

We may also use anonymous or pseudonymous personal information for internal purposes, such as to track the effectiveness of and improve our courses, programs, and other offerings.  We may also share anonymous or pseudonymous data with selected third parties.

How Achievement Study Abroad Protects Personal Information

We employ reasonable security measures to protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of personal information under our control. We take precautions to protect your information. Any information you provide to us will either be emailed directly to us or may be stored on a secure server by a trusted third party.

We use a trusted third party website and hosting provider to facilitate the running and management of our official website. Wherever we collect sensitive information (such as credit card data), that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for “https” at the beginning of the address of the Web page. Our business meets high data protection and security standards and we are bound by contract to keep any information we process confidential. We do not rent, sell or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies.

The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment that is key and password locked. Employee user accounts are secured with 2 factor authentication methods that are compartmentalized to the user only. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorized access.

Data Retention

We keep your personal information for as long as needed to fulfill the particular purpose for which it is collected.  We may also retain your records if legally required or to fulfill a legitimate interest.

Data Transfers from EU to US

If you provide personal information to us while located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”), you consent to the transfer of personal information to the United States, and potentially to other countries outside of the EEA.  You understand that the current laws of countries outside of the EEA may not provide the same level of protection as the data protection laws of the EEA.  Nonetheless, we will take all reasonable steps to protect your privacy in accordance with the applicable data protection laws.

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide any personal information to us.


Data Protection

Information about data processing in connection with Google Analytics

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Ireland limited. If the person responsible for data processing on this website is located outside the European Economic Area or Switzerland, then Google Analytics will be processed by Google LLC. Google LLC and Google Ireland Limited are hereinafter referred to as "Google." When using Google Analytics, data processing is technically provided by Jimdo. In that regard, reference is hereby made to the privacy statements of Jimdo. Jimdo GmbH (Jimdo GmbH, Stresemannstrasse 375, 22761 Hamburg [email protected]) and the operator of this website have a joint responsibility for the data processing in connection with Google Analytics on this website.

 

Google Analytics uses so-called "cookies", text files that are stored on the device used and allow an analysis of the use of the website by the site visitor. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is usually transmitted to a Google server and stored there.

 

Google Analytics is used exclusively with the extension "_anonymizeIp ()" on this website. This extension ensures anonymization of the IP address by shortening and excludes a direct personal reference. The extension truncates Google's IP address within member states of the European Union or other parties to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. The IP address transmitted by Google Analytics within the context of Google Analytics will not be merged with other data provided by Google.

 

On behalf of Jimdo and the site operator, Google will use the information collected to evaluate the use of the website, to compile reports on website activity and to provide other website and internet related services to Jimdo and the site operator (Art. 6 para 1 letter f DSGVO). The legitimate interest in data processing lies in the optimization of this website, the analysis of the use of the website and the adaptation of the content, which is made possible by the provision of statistics functions of Jimdo. The interests of the users are adequately protected by the pseudonymization.

 

Google is certified according to the so-called Privacy Shield (list entry here) and guarantees an appropriate level of data protection on this basis. The data sent and linked to cookies, user IDs (eg user ID) or advertising IDs will be automatically deleted after 50 months. The deletion of data whose retention period has been reached is done automatically once a month.

 

Capturing by Google Analytics can be prevented by the site visitor adjusting the cookie settings for this site. In addition, the collection and storage of the IP address and the data generated by cookies may be objected to at any time with future effect. The corresponding browser plugin can be downloaded and installed at the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

 

The site visitor can prevent the collection by Google Analytics on this website by clicking on the following link. An opt-out cookie is set which prevents the future collection of data when visiting this website.

 

When Link clicked: The site visitor objected to the collection of data via Google Analytics on this website.

 

For more information about the Google Terms of Use and Privacy, please see the Google Analytics Terms and Conditions or the Google Analytics Overview.

 

According to the relevant legislation and the GDPR, site visitors have certain rights in relation to their personal data processed via this Google Analytics data processing. In particular, he has a right of access, rectification, data portability or deletion of his data and a right to data portability. The site visitor also has the right to object to certain processing of his data. In order to exercise these data subject rights regarding the Google Analytics data processing on this page, an affected person (site visitor) can contact Jimdo (Jimdo GmbH [email protected]) or the site operator at any time.

 

Conctact Information

To report any issues or concerns, or to contact Achievement Study Abroad with any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, e-mail us at [email protected]