Notice of Information We Collect And How We Use It
Our primary purpose in collecting Personal Information (as defined below) is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience using our Services and to enable Employers and Educators to interact with you in connection with potential Opportunities and Training. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our Services to make your experience easier and more productive. “Personal Information” means information that specifically identifies an individual (such as a name, e-mail address, etc.) or other information about that individual that is directly linked to Personal Information. Personal Information does not include “de-identified” or “aggregate” information, which is data we collect about the use of our Services that SkillSmart does not use to identify such individual. We collect and store information, including Personal Information, which you provide to us when registering or when using the Services. Some such information is required in order for you to register as a user of our Services. You can choose not to provide us with certain information, but by doing so, you may not be able to take advantage of many of our features and functionality. We use Personal Information to deliver the Services to you, to improve the delivery of our Services, which may include advertising, and to develop analytics and to enable us and our partners to improve our Services and correspond with you.
We also collect and store non-personally identifiable information that is automatically generated when you use the Services. We use this information to do internal research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand, protect and serve you and our community.
In general, our collection and use of information is as follows:
SkillSmart collects Personal Information you knowingly choose to submit to us during registration, such as your name, email address, information about yourself (such as age, race, gender, and veteran status), and any information you provide to us to validate your skills (such as work history, education history, extracurricular activities, references, etc.) which we use for the following general purposes: identification and authentication of a User; provision of User Information to other Users of the Service (as discussed below); contacting you; making improvements to the Services; research; and generation and reporting of aggregated, anonymous data.
SkillSmart may automatically receive and record information on our server logs or from your browser, including your IP address, cookies, and the pages you request. IP addresses are automatically reported by your browser each time you view a web page. Your IP address may be stored by SkillSmart when you register with SkillSmart. IP addresses may be used for various research purposes, and/or delivering unique functionality to our Services. A variety of non-personal information may be collected through online tracking mechanisms and used for targeted online advertising, as explained below.
Cookies
By using our Website or other Services, you indicate your consent for SkillSmart and our affiliates to send cookies to your computer in order to uniquely identify your browser and improve the quality of our services; you may turn off cookies in your browser though, in doing so, some of our Services may not work. A “cookie” is a piece of alphanumeric data stored on a visitor’s hard drive that enables us to improve your access to our Website and identify repeat visitors to our Services. We use the non-personally identifiable information obtained from cookies, such as your browser version, IP address, referring domains, pages visited, your mobile carrier, device and application IDs, the nature of your use of the Website and cookie information, to improve our Website delivery, including advertising, and to develop analytics and aggregated data that allow us and our partners to utilize our Service and reach out to you via our Services or otherwise. If you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by SkillSmart, or by any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The Help function within your browser should tell you how to do so. For information on how to delete cookies on the browser of your mobile phone as applicable you will need to refer to your handset manual.
Log Files
Like many websites, we may automatically gather certain information about our Website traffic and store it in log files. This information includes Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the Website, to track users’ movements around the Website and to gather demographic information about our user base.
We may link this automatically collected data to Personal Information. IP addresses may be tied to Personal Information to troubleshoot access issues and ban users by IP address from certain communities upon appropriate request.
We may use a third-party tracking service that uses log files and cookies, see “Notice of Information We Collect and How We Collect It” above, to track non- Personal Information about visitors to the Website in the aggregate. This service captures usage and volume statistics as well as geographical location data to compile usage reports and maps for optimization and troubleshooting purposes.
Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)
We may employ, and our third party advertising partners may employ, a software technology called clear gifs, also referred to as web beacons or web bugs, that help manage content on the Website by tracking what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We may use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails recipients have opened. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. If you would like to opt-out of these emails, please see “Choice and Opt-out.”
Online behavioral and interest-based advertising
In the future, the Website may enable third parties to use the tracking mechanisms described above to collect your non-personal information for use in online behavioral advertising. For example, third parties may use the fact that you visited the Website to target online ads for SkillSmart services to you on non-SkillSmart websites. In addition, our third-party advertising networks might use information about your use of the Website to help target non-SkillSmart advertisements based on your online behavior in general. For information about behavioral advertising practices, including privacy and confidentiality, visit the Network Advertising Initiative website or the Digital Advertising Alliance website.
Any use of online tracking mechanisms by third parties would be subject to those third parties’ own privacy policies, and not this Policy. If you prefer to prevent third parties from setting and accessing cookies on your computer, you may set your browser to block cookies. Additionally, you may remove yourself from the targeted advertising of companies within the Network Advertising Initiative by opting out here, or of companies participating in the Digital Advertising Alliance program by opting out here.
