Privacy Policy

The privacy of our visitors is important to TheBestSchools.org. Of course, the privacy of your personal information is important to you, as well.

Accordingly, we have developed this Privacy Policy in order for you to understand how we collect, communicate, disclose, and make use of personal information.

This policy explains what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit TheBestSchools.org, and how we safeguard your information.

General

• Before or at the time of collecting personal information, we will identify the purposes for which information is being collected.
• We will collect and use personal information solely with the objective of fulfilling those purposes specified by us and for other compatible purposes, unless we obtain the consent of the individual concerned or as required by law.
• We will only retain personal information as long as necessary for the fulfillment of those purposes.
• We will collect personal information by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the individual concerned.
• Personal data should be relevant to the purposes for which it is to be used, and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.
• We will protect personal information by reasonable security safeguards against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
• We will make readily available to customers information about our policies and practices relating to the management of personal information.

Specific

• TheBestSchools.org will never sell or transfer to a third party any personal information, including your email address, that you may have to leave on our website in order to comment on an article or to subscribe for a TBS newsletter (such as for The Quad).
• In submitting your personal information at TheBestSchools.org in order to obtain free materials about a school or degree program, you are making a formal request of us, our affiliated entities, and third party marketing partners/vendors to provide you with such materials. Thus, by making such a request, you are granting permission to be contacted via email, mail, and phone; moreover, you are consenting to receive telephone calls for a limited period of time from our affiliates, marketing partners, and associated vendors, even if the telephone number you submitted appears on a state and/or federal Do Not Call list. This is because your request will serve as an exception to state and/or federal Do Not Call requirements.
• To comply with the law, your personal information may be shared, such as in the case of a subpoena or similar legal process when we believe that the disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, your safety or the safety of others, or investigate fraud. It may also be done to respond to a government request if TheBestSchools.org becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets to any other third party, with your prior consent to do so.

Log Files

As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as Comcast or AOL), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site, and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons

We use third-party advertisements to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information, including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and, in some cases, whether you have Flash installed.

DoubleClick DART cookies

We also may use DART cookies for ad-serving through Google's DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (for example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Chicago, you may see Chicago hotel advertisements when viewing a nonrelated site, such as one about baseball). DART uses “non-personally identifiable information.” It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers. You can opt out of this ad-serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting Google---Advertising and Privacy.

You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site, as well as other websites. This could include the inability to log in to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Deleting cookies does not mean you have permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.

* * *

We are committed to conducting our business in accordance with these principles and practices to ensure that the confidentiality of your personal information is protected and maintained. At the same time, to reflect changes and improvements to our handling of personal information, we may update this policy. For this reason, we encourage you to periodically review this page.

See our Terms and Conditions of Use.