Table of Contents
Introduction
CyberShield Academy ("we," "our," or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website or use our services, including our online and in-person cyber security training courses.
We understand the importance of protecting your personal information, especially given our focus on security education. This policy outlines our practices regarding data collection and processing in compliance with applicable data protection laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. By accessing or using our services, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by the terms described in this policy. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our services.
Information We Collect
We collect information from and about users of our services in several ways:
Information You Provide to Us
- Contact and Registration Information: When you register for our courses, we collect your name, email address, phone number, and other contact details necessary to provide you with our services.
- Profile Information: Information you provide when creating a user profile on our learning platform, including educational background, professional experience, and learning preferences.
- Course Participation Data: Your assignments, quiz results, course progress, forum posts, and other interactions within our learning environment.
- Payment Information: When you make a purchase, we collect payment details and billing information. We do not store complete credit card information on our servers.
- Communications: Information contained in your communications with us, including customer support inquiries and feedback.
Information We Collect Automatically
- Usage Information: We collect information about how you access and use our services, including the pages you visit, the time and duration of your visits, and the links you click.
- Device Information: Technical data about the devices you use to access our services, including IP address, device type, operating system, and browser type.
- Cookies and Tracking Technologies: We use cookies and similar technologies to track activity on our website and hold certain information. For more details, see our Cookies section below.
- Learning Analytics: We may collect data about your interaction with our learning materials to improve course effectiveness and personalize your learning experience.
Information from Third Parties
We may receive information about you from third parties, including:
- Business Partners: Information from our business partners when they refer you to our services.
- Service Providers: Information from our service providers that help us operate, provide, improve, or market our services.
- Public Sources: Publicly available information that helps us understand our audience and improve our services.
How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect for various purposes, including:
- Providing Services: To deliver our courses and related services, manage your account, process payments, and provide customer support.
- Personalization: To personalize your learning experience, recommend relevant content, and provide customized support based on your progress and needs.
- Communication: To communicate with you about your courses, account, updates to our policies, and promotional offers (when you've opted to receive such communications).
- Improvement: To analyze and improve our services, develop new features, and enhance the user experience.
- Security: To detect, prevent, and address technical issues, security breaches, potentially prohibited or illegal activities, and enforce our Terms of Service.
- Legal Compliance: To comply with applicable laws, regulations, and legal processes.
- Research and Analytics: To conduct research and analyze trends to better understand how users interact with our services.
- Marketing: To market our services to you and others, including sending promotional communications (with your consent where required by law).
We process your information based on one or more of the following legal grounds:
- Performance of Contract: Processing necessary to deliver our services and fulfill our contractual obligations to you.
- Legitimate Interests: Processing justified by our legitimate interests, such as improving our services and growing our business, provided these interests are not overridden by your rights and freedoms.
- Consent: Processing based on your specific consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
- Legal Obligation: Processing required to comply with our legal obligations.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
We may share your information in the following circumstances:
- Service Providers: We share information with third-party vendors, consultants, and other service providers who perform services on our behalf, such as payment processing, data analysis, email delivery, hosting services, and customer service.
- Business Transfers: If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of business assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information.
- Legal Requirements: We may disclose your information if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g., a court or government agency).
- Protection of Rights: We may disclose information to protect the rights, property, or safety of CyberShield Academy, our users, or others.
- With Your Consent: We may share your information with third parties when you have given us your consent to do so.
We do not sell, rent, or lease your personal information to third parties without your explicit consent. When we share information with service providers, we ensure they use the data only for the purposes specified and in compliance with our privacy requirements.
Data Security and Protection
As a cyber security education provider, we take the security of your information seriously. We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction.
Our Security Measures Include
- Encryption: We use industry-standard encryption to protect your data during transmission and at rest.
- Access Controls: We restrict access to your personal information to employees, contractors, and third-party service providers who need to know that information to process it for us.
- Regular Audits: We conduct regular security assessments and audits to ensure our systems maintain a high level of security.
- Staff Training: Our team members receive regular training on privacy and security best practices.
- Incident Response: We have procedures in place to address any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and applicable regulators as required by law.
While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. Therefore, we cannot guarantee absolute security.
We encourage you to take steps to protect your own personal information, such as maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and using secure networks when accessing our services.
Your Rights and Choices
Depending on your location, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information. These may include:
- Access: You have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you.
- Correction: You can request that we correct inaccurate or incomplete information about you.
- Deletion: In certain circumstances, you can request that we delete your personal information.
- Restriction: You can ask us to temporarily or permanently stop processing some or all of your personal information.
- Data Portability: You may have the right to request a copy of your personal information in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.
- Objection: You can object to our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
- Withdraw Consent: Where we process your data based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time.
How to Exercise Your Rights
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information provided in the Contact Information section below. We will respond to your request within the timeframe required by applicable law.
Please note that we may need to verify your identity before processing your request, and in some cases, we may be required by law to retain certain information.
Communications Preferences
You can opt out of receiving promotional emails from us by following the unsubscribe instructions included in each email. Even if you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you service-related communications, such as those about your account or our ongoing business relations.
Data Retention
We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider:
- The amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information
- The potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal information
- The purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means
- The applicable legal, regulatory, or contractual requirements
In some circumstances, we may anonymize your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.
Upon your request to delete your information, we will delete or anonymize your personal information unless we need to retain certain information for legitimate business or legal purposes.
Children's Privacy
Our services are not directed to individuals under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you are a parent or guardian and believe we have collected information from your child, please contact us immediately. If we become aware that we have collected personal information from a child under 16 without verification of parental consent, we will take steps to remove that information from our servers.
Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page.
For significant changes, we will provide more prominent notice, which may include an email notification to the address associated with your account. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to stay informed about how we are protecting your information.
Your continued use of our services after any changes to this Privacy Policy constitutes your acceptance of the revised policy.
Contact Information
If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please submit your inquiry through our website contact form.
You can also contact our Privacy Team via our online learning platform or by contacting customer support.
We will respond to all legitimate requests within a reasonable timeframe.