Information Collection and Use

This document discloses MBAs.com's information gathering and dissemination practices as they apply to individual site users. MBAs.com collects information from its users at several different points on its Web site.

Registration

In order to request information from many of our educational partners, a user must first complete a form with contact information. These forms vary across partners but can include name, email address, mailing address, day and night phone number, education level, and income range. MBAs.com and our partners use this information to contact users about services, courses, or training for which they have requested information or expressed interest. We do not sell or make available this information for any other reason. In rare cases, the receiving partner may already have the users information on file. When this occurs, the users information may be sent to a similar education provider that has the degree program, the course or the training that suits the users needs. Users may also choose to make the information provided to our educational partners available to other third parties. Please refer to the partner's privacy statement in these instances.

Cookies

A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. Cookie data may be linked to personally identifiable information for data analysis and quality assurance purposes, but individual cookie data is never shared with or sold to any third parties. We use session ID cookies and persistent cookies with a life up to 60 days. For the session ID cookie, once users close the browser, the cookie simply terminates. A persistent cookie is a small text file stored on the user's hard drive for an extended period of time.

MBAs.com uses cookies to track which areas of our site are most visited for the purpose of better optimization and user experience. If users reject the cookie, they may still use our site. Persistent cookies enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. See the "Profile" section.

Some of our business partners use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies, once we have given permission for them to set cookies for advertising. This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by MBAs.com only and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Profile

We store information that we collect through cookies, log files, clear gifs, and/or third parties to create a profile of our users. A profile is stored information that we keep on individual users that details their viewing preferences. This information is not tied to the user's personally identifiable information. We do not share your profile with other third parties.

Log Files

Like most standard Web site servers we use log files. This includes Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user's movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)

We and our third party advertising companies employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better manage content on our site by informing us 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. The main difference between the two is that clear gifs are invisible on the page and are much smaller, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Clear gifs are not tied to users' personally identifiable information.

Clear Gifs can "work with" existing cookies on a computer if they are both from the same Web site or advertising company. That means, for example, that if a person visited "www.companyX.com", which uses an advertising company's clear gif, the Web site or advertising company would match the clear gif's identifier and the advertising company's cookie ID number, to show the past online behavior for that computer. This collected information would then be given to the advertising company or Web site.

Third Party Advertising

The ads appearing on this Web site are delivered to users by third party web servers selected by our advertisers. Information about users' visit to this site, such as number of times they have viewed an ad (but not user name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to users on this site.

MBAs.com Advertising

We do a wide variety of online advertising, in various places over the Internet, and always intend for our efforts to protect users privacy and to obey relevant marketing laws. We abhor SPAM and make reasonable efforts to ensure that our marketing communications are not considered SPAM. MBAs.com will purchase marketing lists, but only from those vendors and partners that acquire the users opt-in consent and uphold strict privacy standards. Those users individuals that receive our marketing communications, but no longer wish to these receive marketing communications from MBAs.com may opt-out by sending an e-mail to our Marketing Department. If you have any complaints about any MBAs.com advertisement, please contact us using the contact information in the last section of this document.

Legal Disclaimer

Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our Web site.

Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)

We share aggregated demographic information with our partners and advertisers. This is not linked to any personally identifiable information.

Service Providers

We partner with other third parties to provide specific services (e.g., student loans, text books, and other education-related products and services). When the user signs up for these particular services, we share names, or other contact information that is necessary for the third party to provide these services. Service provider forms may ask for contact information (such as name, email, address) and sensitive information (such as date of birth and social security number) for in order to perform their service (such as to verify previous student loans). These third parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.

Links

This Web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we, MBAs.com, are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Web site. Certain links on MBAs.com may be i-framed, in an RSS feed or in a redirect form for tracking purposes only. If a URL appears to be masked, it is done to ensure our internal tracking systems log activity. MBAs.com does not condone nor tolerate deceptive link building.

Notification of Changes

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We will use information in accordance with the privacy policy under which the information was collected.

If, however, we are going to use users' personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify users via email. Users will have a choice as to whether or not we use their information in this different manner.