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Privacy policy

(Last updated: July 2012)

Introduction

Questia is committed to safeguarding the personal information of our customers and online visitors. Please read the following policy to understand the treatment of your personal information and what options you have to direct our activities.

By registering or using the Questia^SM service, or accessing any Questia website, you agree to the terms of our privacy policy.

Specific questions or comments regarding this policy should be directed to Questia by sending us an email. A complete description of your rights and duties concerning use of this site is given in our User Agreements.

1. Information collected

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to enable us to provide you with an efficient, customized experience while you use the Questia service. To fully use our service, you will need to register using our online registration form where you will be required to provide certain personal information.

Once you register, you can use your account page to review and change the information that you submitted during registration at any time.

Upon request we will remove your personal information from our operational databases (unless your account is in dispute, in which case it will be kept until the dispute is resolved). In order to remove information, please contact us. Technical constraints and the fact that we back up our system may prevent the total elimination of all of your personally identifying information.

Occasionally we solicit additional information from you through the use of optional questionnaires. None of this additional information is required for your continued use of our service.

In addition to the information we require for registration, we automatically track certain information about you based upon your use of our site. This information may include websites you come from and go to from ours, what browser you are using, your IP address and what searches you perform in our service. This information is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis.

On certain pages of our site, and with certain features of our service, we use cookies. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session, and may not experience a fully-customized experience.

If you send us personal correspondence or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.

2. Control of your password

You may not disclose or share your Questia password with any third party. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifying information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change it on your account page.

Use of your information

We use your personally identifying information and information about your usage internally to improve our services. We may use your contact information to send you administrative/renewal notices or information on new services, promotions, and targeted advertisements. While you may not opt out of the administrative/renewal notices, you may do so for the promotional ones by choosing this preference on your account page.

While it is not our practice to monitor or review material you store on our site, we may access this information for system maintenance, troubleshooting activities, or legal reasons. The information that we place in the file that we maintain about you, including your current and past activities on our site, may also be used for similar purposes.

4. Disclosure of collected data

Advertisers.We aggregate information and disclose this information to advertisers and use it for other marketing and promotional purposes. We do not disclose to third parties any information that could reasonably be used to personally identify or contact you.

Co-Branded Service Providers.Questia offers its users and subscribers the opportunity to use a number of third-party services from our site (e.g., moderated chat). If you choose to use these optional services, we will provide only so much of your personal information as is necessary to affect your use of the Co-Branded Service Providers' services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services.

Suppliers and Other Service Providers.We may use third-party Suppliers and Service Providers to facilitate some of our services. In some instances, the Service Provider may collect information directly from you (e.g. we ask a Service Provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional, and we contractually restrict how they may access, use and disclose your information. We do not permit the sale of your information to third parties by these Suppliers and Other Service Providers.

Questia Subsidiaries and Joint Ventures.We may share our data or transfer assets, including personally identifying information about you, with our corporate parent and subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other entities that are in common control with Questia. To the extent that these entities are given access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. As our business develops we may purchase another organization and, in so doing, acquire customer information that will be protected by the guidelines set forth by this privacy policy.

Disclosure of Customer Information Through Business Transfers. As our business develops we may purchase another organization and, in so doing, acquire customer information. Also, in the event that Questia transfers its assets to our corporate parent or to one or more subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other entities in common control, or sells all or substantially all of our assets to a third party, customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets.

Legal Requests.We may decide or be required to disclose information to law enforcement, other government authorities, or third parties under certain circumstances. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you that we, in our sole discretion, believe is necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, infringement of intellectual property rights, third-party lawsuits, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us to legal liability.

5. Other information collectors

In addition to the information we require for registration, Questia also contracts with third parties to help us understand how people use our web site and to provide functionalities such as email distribution, ad serving and customer surveys. These companies also use cookies. They may also use other tracking technologies, such as web beacons (also known as clear GIFs, web bugs, tracking pixels or action tags), which are similar in function to cookies, allowing them to determine when users have reached particular web pages on the Questia site.

6. A special note about children

Questia meets the terms set forth by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). Except for students who use our services through a school-based subscription, we do not knowingly collect information online from children under the age of 13. Additionally, we never gather any information from the children who are using it through their school that could be used to contact them individually. Parents are allowed at any time to access the information that we have collected on their child. We do not condition a child's or school's participation in any activity by requiring them to provide more information about themselves. For questions specifically regarding the privacy of children on our site, please contact Customer Service.

7. A special note about non-U.S. subscribers

If you are a non-U.S. citizen, by subscribing to the Questia service or by providing any personally identifying information as a non-subscriber, you explicitly grant us the right to transfer that information to the United States Government.

8. Security

Questia uses industry standard efforts to safeguard your personally identifying information, such as firewalls and Secure Socket Layers (SSL). However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet and third parties may intercept or access transmissions and/or private communications. Therefore, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifying information or private communications would remain private in all cases. Nevertheless, we will make every effort to make sure that we keep your information safe.

9. Changes to this privacy policy

We reserve the right to make changes to this privacy policy, and recommend that you visit it often. If we make material changes to this privacy policy, we will notify you by posting them here.