Privacy Policy
Last amended 01 December 2014
Here at GEMS Education (“gemseducation.com”, “we” or “us”), we take your privacy seriously. As educators we know the importance of trust. We have created this privacy policy so you know how we collect, use and store any personal information you give us.
By using the gemseducation.com site or any GEMS school or GEMS Education website, including signing up for any newsletters or feeds, you are agreeing to be bound by our terms and conditions which include this privacy policy. Please take the time to read them and note that they may change from time to time. If they do you can always find an up-to-date version here on this page.
We will comply with the privacy laws of the country we are contacting you in. But, regardless of legislation we will always aim to be relevant and respectful if you have given us consent to contact you. If at any time you don’t feel we’ve lived up to this, please let us know straight away by contacting us.
1. Data privacy
1.1 What information do we gather?
We may collect and process the following information in electronic and/or physical form (the “Information”) from you:
- Information that you provide by filling in forms on our website, including information provided at the time of registering to use our site, subscribing to a service, posting material or requesting further information or services; we may also ask you for information if you report a problem with the website
- If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence
- We may also ask you to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them
- Details of any transactions you carry out through the website or otherwise and of the fulfilment of your orders
- If you want to sign up to receive our newsletter we will collect the following personal information from you: your email address, name, date of birth and what you are interested in hearing more about
- We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration purposes and to help us improve the website; this is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual
This policy explains how we use personal information you provide to us. ‘Personal information’ is information which identifies you or another person, or is capable of doing so.
1.2 Password and confidentiality
If you are provided with a user identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures for a registration-only section of the website, you are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and user name for the site and you are responsible for all activities that are carried out under them. We do not have the means to check the identities of people using the site and we will not be liable where your password or user name is used by someone else. You agree to contact us immediately regarding any unauthorised use of your password or user name of which you become aware. We have the right to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our opinion, you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms or the terms and conditions of use of the website.
1.3 How we use information
We use information held about you in the following ways:
- To register your application
- To ensure that the website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
- To provide you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, based on information we collect from cookies or where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes
- To send you relevant news if you have signed up to receive it
- To occasionally carry out surveys to ensure that we are providing you with what you are interested in
- To comply with the law
- To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us
- To allow you to participate in any interactive features of the website, when you choose to do so
- To check whether you are eligible for a competition and to contact you if you win
- To notify you about changes to our service
- To comply with the law as we feel is necessary to prevent illegal activity or to protect our interest
We won’t keep hold of your personal information for longer than is reasonably necessary or required by law.
1.4 Will we share your information with anyone else?
Yes if…
- You specifically request this, such as when you submit information to enquire about jobs or submit a job application through www.gemseducation.com/careers for current or future roles
- We are required to do so to comply with the law or with direction from the courts or other authorities
- We feel it is reasonably necessary to prevent illegal activity or to protect our interests – such as when someone has breached Paragraph 2 (Use of this Site and User Code of Conduct) of our terms and conditions
- It helps our trusted third party service providers to provide and improve our service to you or to carry out surveys and user analysis to understand your needs and preferences; we will also share your information with MailChimp, who securely host emails and act as a supplier to distribute our newsletters; we require these service providers to keep your personal information safe and secure; these trusted third parties would only be permitted to use your personal information for the purposes we specify
We won’t rent or sell your details to any other organisation or individual. We may share some broader statistics and customer profiling information with third parties and other parts of GEMS Education – but we’ll keep it anonymous, so you won’t be identifiable from that data.
1.5 Where we store and process information
The information we collect from you is partly stored on our servers in the UK and partly stored on our servers in the United States and India. Your data may be transferred, stored outside the UK and the European Union, including in the United Arab Emirates and countries which do not have data privacy laws as strong as those in the European Union, and may also be processed by people operating outside the European Union who work for us or one of our suppliers. By submitting information, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing across national borders and entities as needed to provide you with the service you have asked from us. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that information is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.
1.6 Information security
If you provide us with personal data over the Internet, you should be aware that data transmission via this medium cannot be guaranteed to be 100% secure. While we will take all reasonable efforts to protect such personal data, you acknowledge that we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any personal data provided by these means and you provide it to us at your own risk. Once received, we have appropriate technical and organisational security measures in place to protect the data that resides on our servers. However, we do not warrant the security of our servers, nor do we warrant that the information will be completely secure or not be intercepted while being transmitted over the Internet.
1.7 How you can access your information
You are entitled to be told by us whether we or someone else on our behalf is processing your personal information; what personal information we hold; details of the purposes for the processing of your personal information; and details of any third party with whom your personal information has been shared.
To do this we may charge a small admin fee for providing this information. And we may request proof of your identity before we disclose such information to you so we can prevent unauthorised access. Just write to us at:
The Webmaster
GEMS Education
2nd Floor, St Albans House
57 – 59 Haymarket
London, United Kingdom
SW1Y 4QX
1.8 Consent
By submitting the Information to us, you consent to our collection, storing and processing of this information in accordance with this privacy policy. Any changes to our privacy policy will be posted on the website so that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it.
What about personal information relating to minors? As educators, protecting the online privacy of children is especially important to us. If you are under 18 years old, please do not provide us with your name, contact details or any other information about yourself. To find out more, please read our terms and conditions.
You also have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. You can do this by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data.
1.9 Are you protected by this policy on other websites not gemseducation.com?
Our website contains links to other websites. Obviously, we don’t have any control over them and take no responsibility for any information you give them. Other sites have different privacy and security policies, which we advise you to read.
2. Cookies
2.1 What are cookies?
We use “cookies” to store and collect information regarding your use of our site. Cookies are small pieces of information stored by the browser on your computer’s hard drive. They send the information stored on them back to our web server when you access our site.
These cookies enable us to load the site in such a way as to reflect your personal preferences (based on your previous browsing on gemseducation.com as well as keywords we may be able to gather from the URLs of webpages from which you accessed our Site, your IP address and any search engine used to reach us).
We use these cookies to improve your experience and recommend content that may be of interest to you. You can find out more about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org and more about the cookies we use below.
2.2 What cookies do we use?
We only set a few cookies ourselves, but when we include content from other sites (like Facebook or Twitter), they also get the opportunity to set cookies, to help them serve their content better. We can’t guarantee that we’ll have listed every cookie you might get from a third party – they can change them at any time as their needs change. Here are the main cookies used by gemseducation.com
2.3 The GEMS Education cookie:
- Contains a random ID
- This ID is then used to store information about your browsing history on gemseducation.com
- Uses an encrypted section of the cookie to ensure that no other user can “simulate” your cookie and impersonate you
- Has an expiry of 30 days
- For more information please get in touch with the webmaster at the address below:
The Webmaster
GEMS Education
2nd Floor, St Albans House
57 – 59 Haymarket
London, United Kingdom
SW1Y 4QX
2.4 Cookies for measuring web traffic
The Site uses cookies of a kind commonly referred to as “analytics cookies”. We generally use the tool from Google called Google analytics which helps us to understand how many people visit our Site, how often people return to the site, how long they stay, and where on gemseducation.com they tend to go. We use this to try to work out what kind of experience you’re having on the site, so we can make it better. These cookies do not allow us to identify you personally. If you would like to read Google’s privacy policy please click here.
2.5 Cookies from social networks
Because GEMS Education and GEMS Schools and education initiatives are active on various social networks, we try and make it as easy as possible to share content and to see what content is popular on those networks. For that reason we may include recommendations from Facebook, tweets from Twitter, content from Google+ and add buttons to allow people to easily share to those networks.
When we include these social ‘plugins’, it gives those sites the flexibility to use cookies. If you haven’t visited these sites, no cookies will be added.
For more information about how Facebook uses cookies, please see their support site http://www.facebook.com/help/445588775451827.
You can read more about how Twitter users cookies in their privacy policy https://twitter.com/privacy
For more information about ’Add This’, see their privacy policy http://www.addthis.com/privacy/privacy-policy#.UjdI8cakr6M
For more information about the Google +1 button, see their privacy policy http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/+/policy/+1button.html
2.6 Cookies for content
We often include content from other sites in our updates, most notably YouTube videos. When we do this, YouTube may store cookies in order to track how people are watching videos from their site.
For more information about YouTube privacy policy https://www.youtube.com/user/googleprivacy
2.7 You don’t want cookies?
Whether the Site is able to set cookies depends on a setting in your web browser. By visiting the website with cookies enabled, you consent to our use of cookies. If you wish to disable cookies, you can find instructions on how to do so for various popular web browsers by following the links below:
- Firefox
(http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences) - Internet Explorer 7 and 8
(http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/block-or-allow-cookies) - Internet Explorer 9
(http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows7/How-to-manage-cookies-in-Internet-Explorer-9) - Chrome
(http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95647) - Safari
(http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11913)
If you use a different web browser, please contact the browser maker for instructions on disabling cookies. Please note that, if you disable cookies in your browser, some aspects of the website, and of other websites, may stop working.
Finally – please talk to us
If you have any queries, comments or complaints regarding the site or these Terms and Conditions, just get in touch. You can click here to contact us or write to us at:
The Webmaster
GEMS Education
2nd Floor, St Albans House
57 – 59 Haymarket
London, United Kingdom
SW1Y 4QX