Information Collection & Use
Thinkwell is the sole owner of the information collected on our website. Thinkwell collects personally identifiable information from our users at several different points on our website, such as:
Registration
In order to use our online education products, you must first complete a registration form on our website and create a password. Thinkwell will use your email address as your login name. During registration you are required to give contact information (such as your name, telephone number and email address).
We ask customers who register with us to provide us with their email address in order to (1) complete the registration of your copy of our product, (2) enable us to send you information as described below, (3) so we can verify your role in a course as either a registered student or as the instructor, (4) respond to your technical support questions. We may also send you a ?Welcome? email message after you register.
We do not distribute passwords to anyone except (1) an educational institution that purchases Thinkwell products on the student?s behalf, or (2) to an outside service provider if the password is strictly necessary to provide the products and services you have purchased. If you forget your password, you can reset it from your computer. If you forget your user name, you can contact Thinkwell Technical Support. You may not share your password. You are responsible for protecting the security and confidentiality of your password except solely when it is in our possession and control.
We require your telephone number so that we may contact you if there is a problem with delivering email to you regarding your technical support requests. We do not disclose your telephone number to third parties other than our service providers. We do not use your telephone number for any marketing purposes.
Orders
If you purchase a product or service from us, we request certain personally identifiable information from you on our order form. You must provide contact information (such as name, email, telephone, and credit card billing address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date).
When you enter your contact information and financial information on our website, we encrypt it using secure socket layer technology (SSL).
We use this information only for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.
When you order a product or service from us at our website, we will normally send you an order confirmation email, and will normally send you a shipment confirmation email if you order any optional physical products like printed workbooks or CD-ROMs.
Surveys or Contests
From time-to-time we may provide you the opportunity to participate in contests or surveys on our site. If you participate, we will request certain personally identifiable information from you. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The requested information typically includes contact information (such as name and shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code).
We use survey information to improve our products and services, and to plan for future product features. We use your personal information to notify contest winners and award prizes, and to personalize offers that you elect to receive from us.
We may use a third party service provider to conduct these surveys or contests; that third-party provider will be prohibited from using our users? personally identifiable information for any other purpose. We will not share the personally identifiable information you provide through a contest or survey with other third parties unless we give you prior notice and opportunity to opt-out.
Tell-A-Friend
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend?s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. Thinkwell stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program.
Your friend may contact us by email at unsubscribe@thinkwell.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
Course Management
In the event that you use our products or services in connection with a course at a school where the use of our products is required, by using such product or services you agree and consent to the following:
We may store and share with your school or its authorized representatives any and all information related to you, including, but not limited to, information about your progress through our materials, all personally identifiable information related to you, which video lectures you watch and the results of any exercises you complete.
We have no control over a school?s use of any personal information provided to such school by us, and Thinkwell shall have no liability related to a school?s use or misuse of any information provided to such school by us.
In the event that we are provided with information relating to a student by an educational agency or institution and such student or parent of such student desires to obtain such information pursuant to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), all requests for disclosure of such information by the student or such student?s parents should be directed to the applicable educational agency or institution.
We may use your information to send you course progress reminder emails if you choose to receive these.
Collection and Use of Children?s Personal Information
Our website and our products are intended for general audiences. Our website and our products are not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under the age of 13. When a parental consent is required, failure to provide the parental consent shall result in the refusal of services requested by such child. We will not knowingly ask children under the age of 13 to provide more information than is reasonably necessary to provide our services. Parents can change or revoke the consent choices previously made by contacting us as described in Choice/Opt-Out below, and review, edit or request the deletion of their children's personal information by using the ?My Account? link at the top of the child?s course home page, which is the first page displayed following the child?s login at our site. In the event of the revocation of consent or the deletion of the child?s personal information, we may terminate any service provided to the child if the information at issue is reasonably necessary for the child?s use of our products or services.
Please note that if you grant consent for your child to provide us with personal information, this will include the child?s name, address, telephone number and email address. This information will be used to deliver our products and services to your child and may potentially be made publicly available through the child?s use of discussion forums or blogs. We will also collect cookies from your child. A more detailed discussion of our use of cookies may be found below.
For issues regarding the collection or maintenance of children?s personal information, please contact us using the contact information above. Communications from Thinkwell
Special Offers and Updates
We will occasionally send you information on products, services, special deals, and promotions. You can sign up to receive for these emails from us on our registration page. Out of respect for your privacy, we present the option not to receive these types of communications. Please see the Choice/Opt-Out section.
Newsletters
If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter(s), we will use your name and email address to send the newsletter to you. Out of respect for your privacy, we provide you a way to unsubscribe. Please see the Choice/Opt-Out section.
Service-related Announcements
We may send you service-related announcements. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email. Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to deactivate your account.
Customer Service
Based upon the personally identifiable information you provide us, we will send you a welcoming email to verify your username and password. We will also communicate with you in response to your inquiries, to provide the services you request, and to manage your account. We will normally communicate with you by email, but may contact you by telephone to obtain a new email address if believe that the email address we have in our records is no longer active, or to discuss a problem with shipping any optional materials in your order, such as workbooks or CD-ROMs.
Profile
We store information that we collect through cookies and log files to create a ?profile? of your preferences. We tie your personally identifiable information, and your purchasing history, to information in the profile, in order to provide tailored promotions and marketing offers, to improve the content of the site for you, and to report on your progress to your course instructor (if any).
Information Sharing and Disclosure
Except as provided herein and to implement the information uses described in this Privacy Policy, Thinkwell never sells, rents, or lends email addresses or other personally-identifiable information or profiles of users to another organization.
Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)
We share aggregated demographic information about our user base with other companies who market our products or who incorporate our educational content into their products or services. This information does not identify individual users.
We do not link aggregate user data with personally identifiable information.
Personally identifiable information
We share Personally Identifiable Information with Third Parties who act as our agents or service providers, solely for delivering the products and services you purchase, to deliver email messages containing service-related announcement (such as scheduled website maintenance) that you generally may not opt-out from receiving, or to deliver remarketing-related email messages that you may choose to opt-out from receiving. Our agreements with these third-parties include prohibitions against the third party using any personally identifiable information for any purpose other than those described here.
We do not store your complete credit card number in our databases or other records after your credit card company has processed the payment transaction through our website.
Order Fulfillment Agents
We normally use an outside fulfillment company to pack and ship orders for optional physical goods such as printed workbooks and CD-ROMs. Thinkwell or our outside fulfillment company may transmit your shipping information such as your name, shipping address and in some cases your phone number to a common carrier such as UPS, FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service. We use PayPal and your credit card company to bill you for goods and services, and we transmit your credit card information and your billing address information to PayPal to process your credit card transaction. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any other purposes.
Email Service Providers
We use other third parties to provide email list management and email delivery services for our marketing offers and our newsletters. When you sign up for marketing offers or to receive our newsletters, we will share your name and email address as necessary for the third party to provide those services.
These third parties are prohibited from using your personally identifiable information for any other purpose.
Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights; investigate or prevent fraud, illegal activities or breach of our terms and conditions of use; and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, government investigation, court order, or legal process served on our Website
When you register your use of our products, we provide you with the opportunity to ?opt-out? from receiving marketing-related email messages and email newsletters from Thinkwell.
We provide you the opportunity to ?opt-out? of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this information. For example, if you purchase a product/service but do not wish to receive any additional marketing material from us, you can indicate your preference in the on-line purchase procedure or in the on-line registration procedure.
If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by emailing us at unsubscribe@thinkwell.com. You may also opt out by sending a FAX to 1+512-416-8047, Attention: Order Processing, or by writing to us at:
Thinkwell Corporation
Attention: Order Processing
1801 East 51 St.
Suite 365-103
Austin, TX 78723
Log Files
As is true of most Websites, we gather certain information automatically 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 site, to track users? movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.
We may link IP addresses to personally identifiable information in order to detect and track possible fraudulent use of our products or violation of our copyrights.
Cookies
We use a third-party tracking service called Google Analytics that uses cookies to track non-personally identifiable information about visitors to our site in the aggregate so that we may understand and improve our website and our product offerings.
A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user?s computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on this site. We do link the information we store in cookies to any personally identifiable information you submit while on our site so that we may identify a particular user as they use the features of our products such as video lessons and review exercises, for example so we may report student progress to course instructors or to homeschool parents.
We use only session ID cookies and do not use persistent cookies. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. We use session cookies to allow users to purchase products, and to navigate within our website when using our services and products.
If you reject cookies in your web browser, you cannot purchase products at our website, register for the use of our products purchased at a bookstore, or use the website-based products and services you purchase. You will need to enable cookies for our website in order to register and use our online products and services.
Clear Gifs (Web Beacons)
Thinkwell may employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons), that help us better manage the content of our email newsletters and marketing offers 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 which messages are read by the subscribers to our email messages. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user?s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly in email messages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers? personally identifiable information.
We use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain email communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. If you would like to opt-out of these emails, please see Choice/Opt-Out above.
Third Party Advertisers
As of now, the Thinkwell website and email from Thinkwell does not contain third-party, paid advertising of any kind.
Links to Other Sites
This Website contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by Thinkwell. Please be aware that we, Thinkwell Corporation, are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.
We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Website that collects personally identifiable information.
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this Website.
Discussion Forums/User Reviews
If you use a bulletin board or write a review on this site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. Thinkwell is not responsible for the content of user reviews or the opinions stated by users on our website. We reserve the right to edit or delete inappropriate or offensive materials, or to terminate the account of users who post inappropriate or offensive materials, or who use these services in a manner inconsistent with our Terms and Conditions of Sale. By your act of supplying content to thinkwell.com, you thereby transfer and assign your right title and interest in the copyright thereto. You may not supply content that includes copyrighted material of third parties or contains inappropriate or offensive materials.
Blogs
Thinkwell maintains a corporate blog, blog.thinkwell.com to make announcements of public interest about our company, our products, and the world of education. Access to our blog is open to the public, and registration to use our products does not affect use of our blog. Use of our blog is not required with the use of our products. If you post a comment on our blog, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other readers of the blog, and could be used by others to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to post in your comments. Thinkwell is not responsible for the content of blog reader comments or the opinions stated by our readers. We reserve the right to edit or delete inappropriate or offensive materials, or to deny comment rights to readers who post inappropriate or offensive materials. By your act of supplying content to thinkwell.com, you thereby transfer and assign your right title and interest in the copyright thereto. You may not supply content that includes copyrighted material of third parties or contains inappropriate or offensive materials.
Access to Personally Identifiable Information
If your Personally Identifiable Information changes, you may update this information on our website using the ?My Account? link at the top of your course home page, which is the first page displayed following your login at our site. If you no longer desire to use the services of our website, or you no longer wish to receive communications from Thinkwell, or if you wish us to delete your information from our records, you may also email your request to our Customer Support staff at techsupport@thinkwell.com or by making your request using any of the methods described above under Choice/Opt Out.
Security
When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). To learn more about SSL, follow this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer.
We follow generally accepted industry standards designed to protect the personal information of the nature submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially reasonable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its security. THINKWELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES AS TO THE SECURITY OF YOUR DATA COMMUNICATIONS, OR THAT THIRD PARTIES WILL NOT GAIN UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER(S) OR YOUR ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS. YOU AGREE THAT THINKWELL WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY SUCH ACCESS.
If you have any questions about security on our Website, you can send email us at techsupport@thinkwell.com.
Business Transitions
In the event Thinkwell goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, your personally identifiable information will likely be among the assets transferred. You will be notified via email of any such change in ownership or control of your personal information.
Changes in this Privacy Statement
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post a notice of those changes to this privacy statement on our home page, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.
Contact Us
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact us by any of these methods:
Email: privacy@thinkwell.com
Phone: 1+512-416-8000, select option 1.
Fax: 1+512-416-8047, Attn: Order Processing
Post:
Thinkwell Corporation
Attention: Order Processing
1801 East 51 St.
Suite 365-103
Austin, TX 78723
Privacy Policy dated as of April 29, 2009.
