Notice at Collection
Personal information includes information that directly identifies you, such as your name, telephone number and email address (“Personally Identifiable Information”), and information that can be associated with you or linked to you, including information about your browser or device (“Device Identified Information” or “Device Information”). All of this information together is considered “Personal Information” or “Personal Data.”
| Information We Collect | How We Use the Information |
| Your contact Information and other information derived from your communications with us | We use contact information you provide us to communicate with you, to fulfill requests, and to maintain business relationships. We may use it to deliver promotional and informational text and/or email messages to you. We also use this information to engage with you and respond to your queries, suggestions and complaints. |
| Your Internet Protocol address | We also use your IP address to determine your general geographic region in order to help us and our business partners perform our services in accordance with applicable law and user requirements. We use your Internet Protocol address (or IP address) to request advertisements from advertisers and help advertisers and business partners deliver ads to you. |
| Information about your browser or device and your use of the services | We use this information to provide the primary features of our services; perform essential functions that enable us to monitor, manage and enhance our services; tailor utility and output based on customer preferences; create internal analytics and reports; run data-based experiments to deliver better usability and functionality; prevent, detect or investigate spam, fraudulent, abusive or unlawful activities; and enforce our terms of service. We also use this information to help advertisers and their business partners deliver ads, to report on our services and ad performance, and to help advertisers analyze the performance of their ads. |
| Cookie IDs, Mobile Advertising IDs, or other user IDs | We use these to help with ad delivery; to ensure ads are not shown too many times to the same device; for reporting on and analysis of the performance of our services and the advertisements, and to improve our services. We also use the information we collect through these technologies to help us detect fraud and for other security purposes. In some cases, we may use these technologies to help us remember and honor your choices. |
| Information about your choices | We use information you enter into our platform to provide you with our services. We use information about whether you wish to opt out of targeted advertising or opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, to honor your choices and to ask our partners to do so. We do not use this information for any other purpose. We use information about your exercise of rights and choices we receive from companies we work with to help them honor those rights and choices. |
At FindMortgageOnline (“we,” “us,” “our,” FindMortgageOnline) we work to protect your privacy and maintain your trust. We provide current and prospective students (“they,” “their,” “you,” “your,” “users”) with an interactive platform to find programs and universities that match their criteria, requirements and goals. We also host articles and other content designed to help you make the most of your journey toward higher education.
We are committed to fair information practices to protect the privacy of users who use our services and/or visit websites where our technology is employed and/or our content is displayed. This notice, our Privacy Policy, explains how we collect, use, share and disclose information about users of such websites, platforms, content, and technology. We refer to all of these together as the “services.”
FindMortgageOnline owns and operates other independent websites and services that may collect, store, and use information about users differently. These websites have their own privacy policies and are not described here. We may perform services for some of these, or to other affiliated websites and services as though they were independent websites or services, and some affiliated companies may provide services to us.
You can click on the topics listed below to learn more about them.
In this policy, we describe:
Personal Information We Collect
How We Use the Personal Information We Collect
Sources of the Personal Information
How We Sell or Share Personal Information We Collect [Purposes]
Personal Information We Collect
We currently collect the following personal information:
Information about your Browser and Device. When you visit our websites or a website where we license and operate our technology, or use our services, we collect Device Information. This personal information is automatically communicated by your browser about your interaction with the services. This information does not directly identify you, but it tells us about your device and browser. This includes:
- Your Internet Protocol or IP Address. We collect your Internet Protocol (IP) address, the address of your device on the Internet.
- Which browser you are using.
- The type of device and operating system (windows, iOS, android) you are using.
We also collect identifiers that we or our partners associate with your browser or device to help us provide our services, such as:
- Cookie IDs or other user ids that are specific to your web browser, but do not directly identify you. (You can learn more about cookies here.)
- Click IDs, ids that are added to your browser when you click on an advertisement.
Mobile and other Platform identifiers. We may collect identifiers or information about your use of the services through mobile identifiers, platform or operating system identifiers, or other unique identifiers that are not associated with browsers.
No Sensitive Information. We do not collect any sensitive personal information about users.
No Inferences or Profiles. We do not use the information we collect to draw inferences about users or to create profiles based on their activities across unaffiliated websites over time.
No Information about Children. Our services are not directed to children or used for advertising to children. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under 16.
Information you Provide. When you contact us through our website or by email or phone to express interest in our products or services, to use our services, to subscribe to our promotional or informational text and/or email messages, to communicate with us about an ongoing business relationship, or to tell us you would like to make choices about how we use your information, you provide us with your name, your contact information (including your email address and/or telephone number), your previous and/or proposed courses of study or educational programs, and/or your desired start dates for and modes of study. You may also provide us with information about how you use, or would like to use, our services. When you interact with us, you may have the choice of whether to provide additional information about yourself, and tell us about your use of our products and services.
Information about Use of our Services. We receive information about how you engage with the services, including selections you make on our platform and other usage information (e.g. your clicks, impressions, etc.).
How We Use Personal Information We Collect
We use the information you provide regarding your educational background, criteria, requirements and goals to offer the services to you.
We use your IP address to ensure the right ads are delivered to you and to determine your general geographic region. For example, this may allow us to determine your country, city, or the metropolitan area from which you are accessing the services. It does not tell us your precise location, and we do not try to derive this information in any other way.
We use the information we receive about your browser and the type of device and operating system you are using to determine how best to deliver ads to you. We also use this information to help us analyze the way our services are accessed and used so that we may improve them.
We use cookie IDs or similar assigned identifiers that are placed on your browser or device by us, by websites that use our services, or by other partners to make sure the same device does not see the same advertisement too many times. We may also use cookie IDs to recognize your device or browser if you have visited our website, or the website of one of our content partners, before. We also use the information about your visits to web pages which we receive from cookies to help us understand how our services are used and improve our services.
We use click IDs to measure and report on the number of people who engage with our services so that we can determine how effectively we and our advertisers communicate with our users.
We use all of this information that does not directly identify you to analyze and report on the performance and effectiveness of our services and to improve our services.
We use the information you provide us through contact forms or by phone or email to respond to your requests, communicate with you about our services, and maintain business relationships.
We use information collected by Google Analytics on our behalf, and their analysis of that information, to better understand our customers’ use of our services and improve them.
We use information from surveys to develop and improve our services.
Sources of Personal Information
We collect information from:
- Your interaction with our services.
- Cookies, pixels, web beacons and other such technologies that are used to identify a web browser or device and provide information about its interaction with our services.
- Choices users make when they exercise their rights, such as whether to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, or opt out of targeted advertising, are passed to us from your use of the services.
- You when you fill out a webform on our website, call us, or email us, or we may receive it in the course of ordinary business communications.
- We receive contact information, other information you provide to us, and information about how you interact with a social media service such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram when you interact with our social media web pages.
- We use clear gifs (web beacons) in email messages we send to determine whether you open them.
Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of code stored on your browser that can allow information about the web pages you have visited to be communicated by your browser. Some cookies are necessary to allow web pages to function. You can reject other cookies by changing the settings in your browser, however, this may limit the functionality of certain web pages and services, and it could mean that some of your choices, which may also be stored in cookies, will be lost.
Promotions or advertisements displayed via the services may also contain cookies, and we do not have access to or control over information collected by advertisers when you click on any such promotions or advertisements.
Non-Cookie Identifiers (Mobile IDs)
Some technologies, platforms, or operating systems use their own IDs to collect and communicate information about users’ visits to their properties and engagement with their content and advertising. You cannot limit collection of information through these IDs, such as Apple IDFAs (IDs for Advertising) and Google Advertising IDS, in a browser setting. You must go to the settings on your device to make choices about whether these IDs are used to communicate information about you.
How We Sell or Share Personal Information We Collect
We do not disclose personal information in exchange for money, but we may share it for other valuable consideration as part of the way we provide our services. Under some U.S. state law, this may be considered a “sale” of personal information.
When you use our services we disclose the information you provide us or that we collect from your browser or device to service providers who assist us in providing services. They are not permitted to use this personal information for other purposes. We also share this information with our analytics partners, including Google Analytics.
We share information about the interaction of your browser or device with websites, search services, and advertisements with advertisers and with their partners and representatives so that they can determine whether certain advertisements are likely to interest you and decide whether they want to present those ads to you.
We may also share information we receive about your device and how it interacts with the services, or search results you are viewing, with the website or search services where advertisements using our services are shown for reporting and analysis of advertising performance. This reporting is done in aggregate form, describing how users behaved as a group, not as a report on your individual activity.
We share some device information, such as cookies or similar IDs we obtain through tracking technologies, with advertisers and their business partners to help manage ad selection and delivery so that you see ads that make sense in the context where you are viewing them and do not see the same advertisement too many times, and to help us ensure we communicate accurate information about ad delivery to advertisers for their analysis of the effectiveness of their ads.
The third parties with which we share information are required to disclose their own privacy and information practices through privacy notices on their own websites. Their information practices may be different from ours, but they must also honor privacy laws in the areas where they operate. We contractually require all of the parties with which we share information to have their own privacy policies. As we discuss below, if we receive notice of choices you make when you visit a website or otherwise, we will pass that information along to the third parties with which we share information, and will require them to honor certain choices also, such as your choice to opt out of sale or sharing.
We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of children under the age of 16.
We may disclose Personal Information if we determine that we are required to do so:
- To comply with applicable laws, or with legal process served on us;
- To protect or defend our rights or the rights of any of our users or business partners;
- To enforce our terms of use or other agreements; or
- To protect anyone’s rights, property or safety (including our own).
Social Media
We may maintain a presence on some social media services where you can learn about us and communicate with us about our services. We collect the same kinds of information from these social media pages. In addition, you may share information about your use of our services with social media services if you are logged into them.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics for site analysis. For more information about Google Analytics go to http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners (“How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps”). Users who don’t want their data collected and disclosed to Google Analytics can install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. To opt out of Google Analytics, go to https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Your Rights and Choices
Depending on where you live and where you access our services, you may have the right to request that we:
- provide you information about how we use your personal information;
- give you access to, and a copy of, your personal information that we store on our system;
- update, correct or delete your information held in our files;
- stop using, and require that third parties stop using, some or all of your personal information for certain purposes, even if you continue to use our services; and
- discontinue contacting you by phone or by email.
You may exercise these rights by submitting a privacy rights request here or by emailing us at privacy@findMortgageOnline.com or through the webform on the page that describes rights for a U.S. state. Consumers from certain U.S. states have specific rights and choices available to them. You can get more information about these state specific rights, and exercise your choices, here.
Universal Opt-Out Signals
We honor “Global Privacy Controls” or other universal opt out signals you can set in some browsers where we are required to do so by applicable law. These are signals you can send from your browser to a website to convey your choice to exercise certain opt-out rights granted by individual states.
Do Not Track
We do not honor Do Not Track signals sent by browsers that do not meet the requirements of universal opt out signals or global privacy controls under applicable law.
Data Retention Practices
We keep your personal information only for as long as we need to. This time period may depend on what we are using your information for, in accordance with this privacy policy. For example, if you have provided us with personal information such as an email address when contacting us about a specific enquiry, we may retain this information for the duration of your enquiry remaining open as well as for our own records so we may effectively address similar enquiries in the future. If your personal information is no longer required for this purpose, we will delete it or make it anonymous by removing all details that identify you.
However, if necessary, we may retain your personal information for our compliance with a legal, accounting, or reporting obligation or for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific, or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.
Data Security
No information security is perfect, but we use commercially reasonable efforts and rely on technical and operational measures common in our industry to protect personal information and keep it secure. These methods may include encryption, limiting access to personal information to those who need to know it, and limiting how long we retain information.
We expect the services to include features that will help us track down bugs and crashes; some of these features will include reports that are generated by our users’ devices, and these reports include information about device type, capabilities, and other software running at the time of the crash. You will have the option whether or not to provide this information to us, and it will always be provided to us anonymously. This information will never include Personal Information and never be identifiable by user, and we will use this information for our development, debugging and other quality improvement efforts.
U.S. State Privacy Rights and Choices.
If you are a California consumer, you have the right to:
- know what information we have collected about you, ask us to delete your personal information;
- ask us to delete your personal information;
- ask us to correct personal information if you believe we are keeping inaccurate information about you; and
- opt-out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, including by sending a GPC signal from your browser.
We will not discriminate against you in any way for exercising these rights.
You may exercise these rights by submitting a privacy rights request here or by emailing us at privacy@findMortgageOnline.com
For certain requests (requests to know or correct the information we maintain about you) we may email you to confirm your identity. If we cannot confirm your identity for a request to delete information, we will treat it as a request to opt out of sale and sharing. An authorized agent may make requests on your behalf, but we will request proof that you gave permission for that agent to act for you. Agents who are making a request should do so by email.
If you are a Virginia, Connecticut, Colorado, or Utah consumer, you have the right to :
- Confirm whether or not we are processing your personal information and access your personal information;
- Correct inaccuracies in your personal data and the purposes for which we are processing it;
- Delete your personal information;
- Obtain a copy of personal data you have previously provided to us;
- Opt out of targeted advertising
- Opt out of the sale of your personal information;
- Opt out of profiling that would be used for significant decisions about you.
- If and when global privacy controls or other universal opt-out mechanisms are approved and honoring them is required in your state, you will also have the right to opt-out of sale, targeting, or profiling, or all of these, using these browser-based controls.
For certain requests, we may email you to confirm your identity. You may submit a privacy rights request here or by email us at privacy@findMortgageOnline.com
Changes to this Policy
We may revise this policy from time to time – e.g., to keep up with changes in the law, or to reflect changes in how we are doing business. All services that are governed by this policy will always include our most up-to-date privacy policy, and we include an effective date at the top of the policy, so you can quickly see when we last updated the policy. We will always include links to previous policies so that you can compare them. Any updates or modifications to this privacy policy will be effective as soon as we post the updated privacy policy to the services unless we say otherwise, and it is your responsibility to review this privacy policy periodically to make sure you continue to be in agreement with all of its terms.
Material changes to this policy will not apply to information we have already collected unless we receive your consent for them to do so.
Contact Us
We welcome comments and questions on this policy, our information practices generally, or any related issues. You may use a message form that you can complete in order to contact us directly. You can also contact us through any social media pages we maintain, as well as other business networking platforms. If you communicate with us by email, even if you have not previously provided us with your email address, we will use your email address if necessary, in order to respond to you, and we may retain your email address in our files during and for a period after the time that we are in communication.
You can reach us by postal or electronic mail at:
You can communicate about this privacy policy by emailing: privacy@findMortgageOnline.com