This notice also applies to people whom we meet and engage with at conferences and tradeshows, and whom individual SimTutor team members may meet online, for instance on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Google Analytics uses cookies. (You can find more information on how cookies are used on our Sites in our Cookies Notice below.) By using a SimTutor Site and/or the Service, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.

If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through one of our Sites, we will be open about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information, by presenting you with a form to fill in, and will explain what we intend to do with the information.

If you fill out a form on one of our Sites to indicate you are interested in our Services, we may contact you to give you further information about the Services and how they could benefit you. You can unsubscribe from this type of communication by clicking on the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of one of our emails, by replying to one of our email messages and asking us to unsubscribe you, or you can submit your unsubscribe request by email to [email protected].

When you register for a free trial or request a SIMTICS guest educator account, we ask you for information such as email address and name so we can create a unique login for you. We also use your email address to stay in touch while you are evaluating our product: for instance when you sign up we may send you a welcome message, product information and tips (so you can learn how to use the product), and notifications and updates related to your use of the Service.

When you request information from a SimTutor team member at a tradeshow, conference or online we will collect your name and email address so that we can send you the information you requested. We may also continue to send you additional, relevant information about our Services, so you can make an informed decision about whether to purchase a subscription. You can request to be removed from that email list at any time by clicking the “Unsubscribe” button at the bottom of any email from SimTutor.

When you purchase a subscription for your personal use, the secure payment form will collect billing information from you including credit card details and billing address. This information is collected by our secure third-party payment partner (Authorize.net or Windcave) who will use this information to verify that the credit card is valid and isn’t being used fraudulently, to charge you for your subscription, and to ascertain if a charge was rejected by your bank. We will also remind you when your credit card is about to expire, so you can update it if you want to continue your subscription.

When you use the Services, we automatically keep a record of your in-app activity for you. This information includes which modules or simulations you access, the study time, and scores and completion times for individual simulations and quizzes.

• The SimTutor support team has access to this personal data but will only view it if they need to in order to answer a support query from you.
• If you are an individual learner who has made a private purchase through one of our Sites, no-one else outside the SimTutor support team has access to your personal data.
• If you are using the Services because you are required to by your school or your employer, then your instructors or supervisors will have access to your personal data. Please read the Notice to students and employees of SimTutor customers which follows.

If this situation applies to you, the access to and use of your personal data that is held by SimTutor, including your logbook data, may also be subject to that organization's own policies, e.g. your school or your employer. By using a Service in this manner, you agree that we may share your product usage information with that organization and any related person or software product that is involved in administering your access to such Service for that organization.

Notice to students and educators who access a Service through their education institution

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”) is a federal law that applies to educational institutions funded by the U.S. Department of Education (“covered educational institution(s)”).  FERPA provides parents and eligible students the right to (1) access education records and seek amendment of education records, and (2) provide consent to disclosure of personally identifiable information (“PII”) from student education records unless a FERPA exception applies.  Although SimTutor is not a covered educational institution, SimTutor provides services or functions to covered educational institutions for which the covered educational institution would otherwise use its own employees (“educational services”).

The covered educational institution may need to share PII with SimTutor to create user accounts or to set up individual student profiles.  This may be accomplished under FERPA’s exception related to directory information.  “Directory information” is information contained in the education records of a student that would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed. Typical examples of directory information include student name, e-mail, major field of study, dates of attendance, grade level, and Student ID number, user ID, or other unique personal identifier used to communicate in electronic systems but only if the identifier cannot be used to gain access to education records except when used in conjunction with one or more factors that authenticate the user’s identity, such as a PIN, password, or other factor known or possessed only by the authorized user.  Directory information is determined by the covered educational institution and parents and eligible students may opt out of disclosure under this exception.

In addition, SIMTICS is considered a “school official” and has a legitimate educational interest in the education records and PII it obtains in connection with the educational services.  The school official exception under FERPA allows covered educational institutions to disclose PII from education records to SIMTICS.  SIMTICS may also need to share education records or PII with the covered educational institution.  Parents and eligible students may not opt out of disclosure under the school official exception.

FERPA and the covered educational institution determine how SIMTICS uses and maintains the education records or PII. SimTutor uses the education records or PII only for authorized purposes and does not re-disclose the education records or PII to other parties without specific authorization from the parent or eligible student or from the covered educational institution consistent with FERPA. SimTutor will not use any FERPA-protected information for any other purpose than the purpose for which it was disclosed.  Furthermore, SimTutor will not share (or sell) FERPA-protected information, or re-use it for any other purposes, except as directed by the covered educational institution and as permitted by FERPA.  Student information that has been properly de-identified or that is shared under the “directory information” exception, is not protected by FERPA, and thus is not subject to FERPA’s use and re-disclosure limitations.

By using Services that are provided to an educational institution, you agree that we may share your education records and PII with your covered educational institution and any related person or software product that is involved in administering your access to such Services.

The third party payment partners store your information in encrypted form, transport it in encrypted form, using SSL, and they only use it for processing and managing your payments to us. 

To find out more about how these companies protect your personal data, you can read their security statements using these links:

• Authorize.Net
• Intuit/Quickbooks
• Windcave
• Chargify

We also use other third party service providers described at https://www.simtutor.com/resources/subprocessors/.

If you are a newsletter subscriber, please also read the section below titled Newsletter Sign-up.

Other ways we may use your data

• We may share your personal information to respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, to establish or exercise our legal rights or, defend against legal claims and if in our judgment in such circumstances disclosure is required or appropriate.
• We may share your personal information if we believe it is necessary in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our various terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.
• From time to time, SimTutor may sponsor a promotion, prize draw or contest. If you are eligible and you choose to enter, you may be asked to provide personal information including name and email address in order to participate. We will use the information you provide to contact you about the results of the promotion, draw or contest. From such personal information, SimTutor may also derive and store non-identifying and aggregate information to give us demographic information about the type of people who are interested in our products and services.
• We may share your personal information in connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform any potential buyer that it must use your personal information only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Notice.

We use external mailing system providers to deliver our newsletters, e.g. SharpSpring and MailChimp. These mailing system providers hold minimal contact information about you such as your email address which they need in order to deliver the e-newsletters to you by email.

When we send newsletters we use industry standard technologies to gather statistics about how many people opened the email and how many clicked on links. This information does not identify individuals; we use it to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter to make it more interesting and meaningful for our readers.

For more information on how these mailing system providers take care of personal data, you can read their privacy notices using the links below:

• MailChimp privacy notice
• SharpSpring privacy notice.

You can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of any of our newsletter emails. Alternatively you can contact us online or email us at [email protected] and request to be removed from the list.

We do not rent or trade email lists with other organizations and businesses.

For example, HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that is designed to protect the integrity and confidentiality of data between your computer or device and our Site. You will know we are employing such measures because:

• You will see “HTTPS” in our URLs, e.g. https://new.simtics.com.
• You will see the word “Secure” in the browser bar, or a "padlock" symbol, or similar, before the URL address in your browser.
• When our billing registration form asks you to enter sensitive information such as credit card details, that information is encrypted and is protected with the best encryption software in the industry - SSL.
• On secure pages and forms (like our billing registration form) the browser’s "padlock" icon at the bottom of the page in browsers like Google Chrome will show that it is locked - as opposed to un-locked, or open, when you are just "surfing" websites.
• We use a Web Application Firewall, which requires a secondary level of authentication of administration users beyond two-factor authentication. 

As well as protecting your data online, we also do everything in our power to protect your information off-line: 

• Our team members are required to adhere to our Information Security Program and Acceptable Use Policy and any updates to those.
• Only specific SimTutor team members are granted access to personally identifiable information, and only where they need it to perform a specific job that needs access to that data; for example, a customer service representative who responds to user queries or assists an instructor to access their students' logbook data; or an admin team member who investigates billing queries.  
• These team members are required to use passwords that are longer than the minimum length required for each application or system that holds personal information, and two-factor authentication is in place.

The servers that store personally identifiable information are in a secure environment on Microsoft Azure in their data center in the US.  You can read more about Microsoft’s security measures here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/TrustCenter/CloudServices/Azure/default.aspx

We do not pass any personal data to those other sites, but depending on how you use an external website, they may be able to collect some log data about you; for instance, your IP address if that site uses Google Analytics. 

If you have questions about how another site might use your information, you’ll need to check that site’s own privacy notice.

To request removal of your personal information from a SimTutor social media account, blog comment, or discussion forum, because you are unable to remove it yourself, you can contact us at [email protected]. In some cases, depending on where you posted your information, we may not be able to remove your personal information ourselves, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

An individual who seeks access to, or who seeks to correct, amend, or delete inaccuracies in personal information stored or processed by us on behalf of our customers (e.g., your educational institution or employer) should direct his/her query to that customer organization (the data controller). If an individual who is accessing the Services through one of our customers makes the query to us directly, we are required to contact such customer for instructions on how to respond to such query.  Upon receipt of a request from one of our customers for us to remove the data, we will respond to their request within thirty (30) days. We will retain personal information that we store and process on behalf of our customers for as long as needed to provide the Services to our customers. We will retain and use this personal information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

If you are a customer or otherwise provide us with personal information in connection with your use of our Sites or Services, we will delete this information upon your request, provided that, notwithstanding such request, this information may be retained for as long as you maintain an account for our Services, or as needed to provide you with our Services, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements.

If you reside in European Economic Area (EEA) or the United Kingdom and provided us with your personal information based on a contract with us, you may ask us to export such personal information in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and you have the right to transmit those data to another controller. To request such export please contact us at [email protected].

SimTutor marketing is directed at individuals 18 years and older, and in an education setting we only sell to institutions for use by students in Senior High School or older (i.e. Grade 11 upwards).

If you are younger than 16, do not use the Service and do not provide any personal information to us. If you are a parent of a child under 13 and become aware that your child has provided personal information to SimTutor, please contact us at [email protected].

This Privacy Notice was last updated on the date shown at the top of this notice.

Be assured that our goal with any future changes is always to ensure that your data is protected and to comply with relevant laws.

What is a cookie?

Cookies are text files, often encrypted, which contain small amounts of information that are used by web developers to improve the user’s experience on a website. Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate a website efficiently and remembering your preferences in between sessions.

Cookies are created and stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Each time you return to that website, your browser sends the relevant stored information back to the website.

You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, notify you when a cookie is set, or reject all cookies. The method for doing this will depend on the browser you use.

However cookies are almost unavoidable if you use the internet. Over 90% of all websites use at least one type of cookie, including the largest and most popular websites like YouTube, Google, Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo mail, Amazon. If you disable or reject all cookies, then in most cases you won’t be able to log in and use those sites. The same applies to SimTutor: if you reject all cookies, you will not be able to use the Services or Sites properly, you may not be able to "sign in" and you may not be able to take full advantage of other offerings.

How long are cookies stored for?

Session cookies are created temporarily during a browser session. A browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they close the browser window. Once you close the browser window, all session cookies are automatically deleted. These are the only type of cookies that SimTutor uses.

Persistent cookies remain on a user's device for the period of time specified in the cookie. They are activated each time that the user visits the website that created that particular cookie.  

You can find more information about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu.

Cookies we use on our Site

We only use cookies for storing session information (i.e. to track whether the user is logged in or not), and a session identifier so we can establish who it is that is interacting with the Site.  

Third party cookies 

We use web software from other software providers (often called “third parties”) that may use cookies. These other organisations may set cookies to allow them to track the success of their application or customise the application for you.

The third party software we use includes: 

• Intercom – for in-app communication with users of our Sites
• Google Analytics – to track usage of our Sites
• Raygun – for error and performance monitoring of our Sites
• Facebook and LinkedIn – e.g. if you choose to use the “Login with Facebook” or the “Login with LinkedIn” options when you sign up, or click on a Facebook icon while on our Site
• SharpSpring - for web forms where you can enter your contact information to request information from us.

You may also have cookies from another application that you choose to access while using our Site. For example, if you choose to share content through Facebook or Twitter, you might have cookies from these websites.

Also, if your school or employer uses a learning management system (LMS) like Blackboard, Moodle, or Canvas to provide you with access to a Service, then the LMS may use its own cookies.

Because of how cookies work, we cannot access any third party cookies, nor can those third parties access the data in cookies used by SimTutor. If you have queries about cookies from other websites, please check those websites for more information about the cookies they use and how to manage them.