The privacy of your data—and it is your data, not ours!—is a big deal to us. In this policy, we lay out: what data we collect and why; how your data is handled; and your rights with respect to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.
This policy is split into sections. For your convenience, links to each of those sections is as follows:
- Privacy policy
- What we collect and why
- When we access or disclose your information
- Your rights with respect to your information
- How we secure your data
- What happens when you delete content in your product accounts
- Data retention
- Location of site and data
- When transferring personal data from the EU
- Changes and questions
This policy applies to PengajianAm.com, the product built and maintained by our company. If you are applying for a job with us, please contact us directly for information about our recruitment privacy practices.
This policy applies to our handling of information about site visitors, prospective customers, and customers and authorized users (in relation to their procurement of the services and management of their relationship with PengajianAm.com). We refer collectively to these categories of individuals as "you" throughout this policy.
What we collect and why
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
Identity and access
When you sign up for PengajianAm.com, we ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a school name. That’s so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you product updates and other essential information. We may also send you optional surveys from time to time to help us understand how you use our products and to make improvements. With your consent, we will send you our newsletter and other updates. We may also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products.
We’ll never sell your personal information to third parties, and we won’t use your name in marketing statements without your permission either.
Billing information
If you sign up for a paid PengajianAm.com product, you will be asked to provide your payment information and billing address. Credit card information is submitted directly to our payment processor and doesn’t hit PengajianAm.com servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for purposes of account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address so we can charge you for service, calculate any sales tax due, send you invoices, and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.
Product interactions
We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your PengajianAm.com account. This is so you can use our products as intended. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days.
General Geolocation data
For PengajianAm.com, we log the full IP address used to sign up for an account and retain that for use in mitigating future spammy signups. We also log all account access by full IP address for security and fraud prevention purposes, and we keep this login data for as long as your account is active.
Website interactions
We collect information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes such as conversion rate testing and experimenting with new product designs. This includes, for example, your browser and operating system versions, your IP address, which web pages you visited and how long they took to load, and which website referred you to us. If you have an account and are signed in, these web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account until your account is no longer active. The web analytics we use are described further in the Advertising and Cookies section.
Anti-bot assessments
We use CAPTCHA across our applications to mitigate brute force logins and as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our apps and the broader Internet community from credential stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your PengajianAm.com account and when you fill in certain forms in PengajianAm.com, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g., IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to try to detect if the activity is from an automated program instead of a human. The CAPTCHA service then provides PengajianAm.com with the spam score results; we do not have access to the evaluated information.
Advertising and Cookies
PengajianAm.com runs contextual ads on various third-party platforms such as Google, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Users who click on one of our ads will be sent to the PengajianAm.com marketing site. Where permissible under law, we may load an ad-company script on their browsers that sets a third-party cookie and sends information to the ad network to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of our ads, e.g., which ad they clicked and which keyword triggered the ad, and whether they performed certain actions such as clicking a button or submitting a form.
We also use persistent first-party cookies and some third-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and perform A/B testing as well as support some analytics.
A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings and accept or block individual cookies in your browser settings, although our apps won’t work and other aspects of our service may not function properly if you turn cookies off.
Voluntary correspondence
When you email PengajianAm.com with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including your email address, so that we have a history of past correspondence to reference if you reach out in the future.
We also store information you may volunteer, for example, written responses to surveys. If you agree to a customer interview, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We will only do so with your express consent.
How we approach mobile app permissions
We offer optional desktop and mobile apps for some of our products. Because of how the platforms are designed, our apps typically must request your consent before accessing contacts, calendar, camera, and other privacy-sensitive features of your device. Consent is always optional and our apps will function without it, though some features may be unavailable. There are a few exceptions, for example:
- Our iOS apps will ask for permission to use push notifications upon first sign-in.
- Android apps do not require permission to send push notifications.
When we access or disclose your information
To provide products or services you’ve requested. We use some third-party subprocessors to help run our applications and provide the Services to you. We also use third-party processors for other business functions such as managing newsletter subscriptions, sending customer surveys, and providing our company storefront.
We may disclose your information at your direction if you integrate a third-party service into your use of our products. For example, we may allow you, at your option, to connect your Gmail account to your PengajianAm.com account so that you can use PengajianAm.com to receive and respond to your Gmail email. Email that you receive and respond to through PengajianAm.com from your Gmail address will be stored by both PengajianAm.com and Google and will be available to you from your Gmail account as well as your PengajianAm.com account.
No PengajianAm.com human looks at your content except for limited purposes with your express permission, for example, if an error occurs that stops an automated process from working and requires manual intervention to fix. These are rare cases, and when they happen, we look for root cause solutions as much as possible to avoid them recurring. We may also access your data if required in order to respond to legal process (see "When required under applicable law" below).
To exclude you from seeing our ads. Where permissible by law and if you have a PengajianAm.com account, we may disclose a one-way hash of your email address with ad companies to exclude you from seeing our ads.
To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding restricted uses. Accessing a customer’s account when investigating potential abuse is a measure of last resort. We want to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us, and we do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will take action as necessary, including notifying appropriate authorities where warranted.
Aggregated and de-identified data. We may aggregate and/or de-identify information collected through the services. We may use de-identified or aggregated data for any purpose, including marketing or analytics.
- If we are audited by a tax authority, we may be required to disclose billing-related information. If that happens, we will disclose only the minimum needed, such as billing addresses and tax exemption information.
Finally, if PengajianAm.com is acquired by or merges with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any of your personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
How we secure your data
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. In addition, we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest.
Data retention
We keep your information for the time necessary for the purposes for which it is processed. The length of time for which we retain information depends on the purposes for which we collected and use it and your choices, after which time we may delete and/or aggregate it. We may also retain and use this information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Through this policy, we have provided specific retention periods for certain types of information.
Changes and questions
We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify users.
Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us at walter@pengajianam.com and we'll be happy to try to answer them!