Privacy Policy

Scholarmate.com (the "Site") is committed to safeguarding your privacy online. We reserve the right to change it at any time, and all changes are effective upon posting.

This Policy applies to all of the ScholarMate products, services and websites offered by IRIS Systems Limited or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies (collectively, ScholarMate's "services"). Separate privacy notices will also be posted to explain our privacy practice on how particular services process personal information. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please don't hestitate to contact us by phone, fax or e-mail.

It is our top concern to protect your privacy, so we adhere to the following principles:

• We do not rent, sell, or otherwise provide your personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing purposes.

• We do not share any information you have not chosen to display on your LinkedIn profile to other parties, unless compelled by law, or as necessary to enforce our User Agreement or protect the rights, property, or personal safety of LinkedIn, its Users, and the public.

• All information that you provide will be protected with industry standard protocols and technology.

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy 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. By continuing to use the LinkedIn service after notice of changes has been sent to you or published on the ScholarMate website, you are consenting to the changes.

Information we collect and how we use it: We offer a set of value-added services that require you to register for an account and provide any personal information to us, such as ScholarMate registration and subscription. Therefore, we may collect the following types of information:

1) Information you provide - When you sign up for a ScholarMate Account or other ScholarMate service or promotion that requires registration or subscription, we ask you for personal information (such as your name, email address and account password) in order to enable you to use the ScholarMate services. For certain services, such as our services subscription or advertising programs, we also request for credit card or other payment account information which we keep in encrypted form onto secure servers. We may combine those information you submit under your account with information made available from other ScholarMate services or third parties in order to better serve your needs and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out such act of combining the information.

2) ScholarMate cookies - Like most websites, ScholarMate uses cookies and web log files to track site usage and trends, to improve the quality of our service, to customize your experience on ScholarMate. When you visit ScholarMate, we send one or more cookies - a small file containing a string of characters - onto your computer that uniquely identifies your browser. We use cookies to help for improving the quality of our service to our valuable customers by storing user preferences and tracking user trends, for example, how users search their own or other scholarly work. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some ScholarMate features and services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled. One type of cookie, known as a “persistent” cookie, is set once you’ve logged in to your ScholarMate account. The next time you visit the ScholarMate website, the persistent cookie will allow us to recognize you as an existing User so you will not need to log in before using the Services. In order to access or change any of your private information (like a credit card number) or to send a message to another User, however, you must log in securely again with your password even if your computer contains your persistent cookie. Another type of cookie, called a “session” cookie, is used to identify a particular visit to the ScholarMate website. Session cookies expire after a short time or when you close your web browser.

3) Login information - When you use ScholarMate services, our servers automatically record information about what your browser sends whenever you visit a website. Our server may take logs on those information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.

4) User communications - In order to respond to your requests, process your inquiries and enhance our services for you, we may keep record of the communications when you send email or other types of communications to ScholarMate.

5) Affiliated sites - As we may offer some of our services in conjunction with other web sites, the personal information provided by you to those sites may also be sent to ScholarMate in order to deliver the service. We process such information in according to this Policy. The affiliated sites may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies for information.

6) Other sites - This Privacy Policy applies to ScholarMate web sites and services that are owned and operated by IRIS Systems Limited. We do not exercise control over those sites displayed as search results or links from within our various services. These other sites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you. We encourage you to read their privacy policies for information as well.

7) Log files, IP addresses and information of your computer - Due to the communications standards on the internet, when you visit the ScholarMate website we automatically receive the URL of the site from which you came and the site to which you are going when you leave ScholarMate. ScholarMate also receives the internet protocol (“IP”) address of your computer (or the proxy server you use to access the World Wide Web), your computer operating system and type of web browser you are using, email patterns, mobile device operating system (if you are accessing LinkedIn using a mobile device), as well as the name of your ISP or your mobile carrier. We use this information to analyze overall trends to help improve the service. The ScholarMate between your IP address and your personally identifiable information is not shared with third parties without your permission, except as the Compliance with Legal Process.

In addition to the above purposes described in this Privacy Policy that ScholarMate processes personal information, other purposes may include:

1) Provide our products and services to users, including the display of customized content and advertising;
2) Auditing, research and analysis for our services maintenance, protection and improvement;
3) Ensure the technical functioning of our system network;
4) Develop new services.

Choices for personal information

When you sign up for our service that requires registration or subscription, we ask you to provide your personal information. If we use this information other than the purpose for which the information was collected, we will request for your prior consent before such use.

If we propose to use your personal information for any those purposes not described in our Privacy Policy, we will offer the option to opt out such use.

You can decline to submit personal information to any of our services; but ScholarMate may not be able to provide you those services if you decline the submission.

Information sharing

ScholarMate only shares personal information with other companies or individuals under the scope of the following limited circumstances described:
1) We require opt-in consent from you for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
2) We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons that you have to process your personal information on our behalf. We require all these parties to agree on the instructions described and in compliance with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
3) We have good faith belief that the reasonably access, use, preserve or disclose such information is necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms & Conditions of Service, including investigation of potential violations, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of ScholarMate, its users or the public under the permission of law.

Information security

Security measures are taken to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of personal data, including internal reviews for data collection and storage, data processing practices and security measures, and physical security measures in guarding against any unauthorized access to systems where personal data is stored.

ScholarMate employees, contractors and agents have restricted access to any personal information from which they have to know in order to operate, develop or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and if they violate these obligations, they may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution.

Accessing and updating personal information

When you use our services, we make efforts in good faith to let you access to your personal information; either to correct your personal data if it is not accurate or to delete such data at your request if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. We ask individual users to identify themselves and the information requested to be accessed, corrected or removed before processing such requests. We may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive or systematic, require disproportionate technical effort, jeopardize the privacy of others, or the access is not otherwise required. In any case, we perform this service free of charge, except if doing so would require a disproportionate effort. As some of our services have different types of procedures to access, correct or delete users' personal information, the details for these procedures are described in the specific privacy notices for these services.

Changes to this policy

Please note that this Privacy Policy may be revised from time to time to comply with legal requirements. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We will post any Policy changes on this page, and even to have a more prominent notice, such as email notification of Policy changes, if the changes are significant.

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please feel free to contact us any time and we will respond to you accordingly.