Questions. If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy, contact our privacy team by email at [email protected].

Scope. This privacy policy covers all of Academic Room. It does not, however, apply to entities that Academic Room does not own or control. By using or accessing Academic Room, you agree to our privacy practices outlined on this page.

No information from children under age 13. If you are under age 13, please do not attempt to register for Academic Room or provide any personal information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from a child under age 13, please contact us by email at [email protected].

Parental participation. We strongly recommend that minors 13 years of age or older ask their parents for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet and we encourage parents to teach their children about safe internet use practices.

Information you provide to us:

Information About Yourself. When you sign up for Academic Room you provide us with your name, email, gender, birth date, academic discipline, ethnicity, annual household income and other information related to your profession. During the registration process we give you the opportunity to connect with your friends and colleagues. You will also be able to add a picture of yourself. In some cases we may ask for additional information for security reasons or to provide specific services to you. Once you register you can provide other information about yourself by connecting with, for example, your current institution, contact information, education, professional experience, publications, news, activities and interests.

Content. One of the primary reasons people use Academic Room is to share content with others. Examples include sharing publications information and multimedia, create an event or a group, make a comment, write something on someone's Blackboard, recommend a person, write a note, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on Academic Room (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.

Friend Information. We offer contact importer tools to help you upload your friends' addresses so that you can find your friends on Academic Room, and invite your contacts who do not have Academic Room accounts to join. If you give us your password to retrieve those contacts, we will not store your password after you have uploaded your contacts' information.

Information we collect when you interact with Academic Room:

Site activity information. We keep track of some of the actions you take on Academic Room, such as adding connections (including joining a group or adding a friend), uploading or embedding digital content such as books, articles and multimedia, indicating you liked certain content or comment, or attending an event. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact that you shared it.

Access Device and Browser Information. When you access Academic Room from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit.

Cookie Information. We use "cookies" (small pieces of data we store for an extended period of time on your computer, mobile phone, or other device) to make Academic Room easier to use, to make our advertising better, and to protect both you and Academic Room. For example, we use them to store your login ID to make it easier for you to login whenever you come back to Academic Room. We also use them to confirm that you are logged into Academic Room, and to know when you are interacting with websites, our widgets and Share buttons, and our advertisements. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser, but in some cases that may impact your ability to use Academic Room.

Information we receive from third parties:

Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:

• We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn't see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as "conversion tracking," helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
• We may receive information about whether or not you've seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.

If in any of these cases we receive data that we do not already have, we will "anonymize" it within 180 days, meaning we will stop associating the information with any particular user. If we institute these programs, we will only use the information in the ways we explain in the "How We Use Your Information" section below.

Information from other users. We may collect information about you from other Academic Room users, such as when a user uploads a publication, photo or other content that indicates a relationship with you.

Academic Room is designed to make it easy for you to find and connect with others. For this reason, all of the information associated with your profile and content you upload may be visible to everyone on the Internet. If you are uncomfortable with sharing your profile picture, you should delete it (or not add one).

Gender and Birth Date. In addition to name and email address, we require you to provide your gender and birth date to complete the registration process by filling out the Basic tab of the profile. We ask for your date of birth to verify your identity, and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate. Because your date of birth and gender are required, you cannot delete them. You can, however, edit your profile to hide all (or part) of such fields from other users.

Other. Here are some other things to remember:

• Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your connections' Dashboard pages and other pages they visit.
• Even after you remove information from your profile or request deletion of your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.
• You understand that information might be reshared or copied by other users.
• Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.
• When you post information on another user's profile or comment on another user's post, that information will be subject to the other user's privacy settings.
• If you use an external source to publish information to Academic Room (such as a mobile application or a website), you should check the privacy setting for that post, as it is set by that external source.

To reiterate, all Information on Academic Room is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections. Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Academic Room), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Academic Room, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet. If you delete certain content that you posted on Academic Room, we will remove it from your Academic Room profile, but have no control over its use outside of Academic Room.

Minors. We reserve the right to add special protections for minors (such as to provide them with an age-appropriate experience) and place restrictions on the ability of adults to share and connect with minors, recognizing this may provide minors a more limited experience on Academic Room.

Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address book applications, or copy and paste functions, to capture, export (and in some cases, import) information from Academic Room, including your information and information about you. For example, if you share your phone number with your friends, they may use third party applications to sync that information with the address book on their mobile phone.

Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on Academic Room use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.

Links. When you click on links on Academic Room you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.

We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customized experience. Here are some of the details on how we do that:

To manage the service. We use the information we collect to provide our services and features to you, to measure and improve those services and features, and to provide you with customer support. We use the information to prevent potentially illegal activities, and to enforce our Terms of Use. We also use a variety of technological systems to detect and address anomalous activity and screen content to prevent abuse such as spam. These efforts may on occasion result in a temporary or permanent suspension or termination of some functions for some users.

To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time. You may opt out of all communications except essential updates by emailing us. We may include content you see on Academic Room in the emails we send to you.

To serve personalized advertising to you. We don't share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in theoretical physics to show you ads for a journal on physics, but we do not tell the journal publisher who you are. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.

To make suggestions. We use your profile information, the addresses you import through our contact importers, and other relevant information, to help you connect with your friends, including making suggestions to you and other users that you connect with on Academic Room. For example, if another user imports the same email address as you do, we may suggest that you connect with each other. If you want to limit your visibility in suggestions, you should not use the contacts importer.

To help your friends find you. We allow other users to use contact information they have about you, such as your email address, to find you, including through contact importers and search.

Academic Room is about sharing information with others — colleagues and friends in your professional network. We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you, reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. For example:

When you invite a friend to join. When you ask us to invite a friend to join Academic Room, we will send your friend a message on your behalf using your name. The invitation may also contain information about other users your friend might know. We may also send up to two reminders to them in your name. You can see who has accepted your invitations, send reminders, and delete your friends' email addresses on your invite history page.

When you choose to share your information with marketers. You may choose to share information with marketers or electronic commerce providers that are not associated with Academic Room through on-site offers. This is entirely at your discretion and we will not provide your information to these marketers without your consent.

To help your friends find you. By default, we make information you have posted to your profile available in search results on Academic Room to help your friends find you. However, you can control the display of some of this information such as your gender and birthdate. We also partner with email and instant messaging providers to help their users identify which of their contacts are Academic Room users, so that we can promote Academic Room to those users.

To give search engines access to publicly available information. We encourage search engines to access the publically displayed information on our site.

To help improve or promote our service. Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.

To provide you with services. We may provide information to service providers that help us bring you the services we offer. For example, we may use third parties to help host our website, send out email updates about Academic Room, remove repetitive information from our user lists, process payments, or provide search results or links (including sponsored links). These service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time, but when this occurs we implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to limit their use of that information to helping us provide the service.

To advertise our services. We may ask advertisers outside of Academic Room to display ads promoting our services. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie, but in doing so will not share any other information with the advertiser.

To respond to legal requests and prevent harm. We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Terms of Use. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.

Transfer in the Event of Sale or Change of Control. If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

Editing your profile. You may change or remove your profile information at any time by going to your profile page and clicking "Edit Profile." Information will be updated immediately but it may take several days for some information to be re-indexed by Academic Room's search engine and removed from Academic Room's search results.

Deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may delete it by emailing us.

Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to this privacy policy, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Academic Room. (For example, if you post something to another user's profile and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an "Anonymous" user.) Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested.

Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies, but will not be available to others.

Non-user contact information. If a user provides your email address to us, and you are not an Academic Room user but you want us to delete your address, you can do so by emailing us. However, that request will only apply to addresses we have at the time of the request and not to any addresses that users provide to us later.

We do our best to keep your information secure.

Steps we take to keep your information secure. We keep your account information on a secured server behind a firewall. We also use automated and social measures to enhance security, such as analyzing account behavior for fraudulent or otherwise anomalous behavior, may limit use of site features in response to possible signs of abuse, may remove inappropriate content or links to illegal content, and may suspend or disable accounts for violations of our Terms of Use.

Risks inherent in sharing information. Please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you share your information. We cannot guarantee that only authorized persons will view your information. We cannot ensure that information you share on Academic Room will not become publicly available. We are not responsible for third party circumvention of security measures on Academic Room. You can reduce these risks by using common sense security practices such as choosing a strong password, using different passwords for different services, and using up to date antivirus software.

Report Violations. You should report any security violations to us by emailing us.

Changes. We may change this Privacy Policy at any time without notice. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account. We may make changes to this Privacy Policy and it is your responsibility to access this page regularly.

Consent to Collection and Processing in the United States. By using Academic Room, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

Defined Terms. "Us," "we," "our," and "Academic Room" mean the same as they do in the Terms of Use. "Information" and "content" are used more generally and interchangeably here than in the Terms of Use unless otherwise limited by the context.

Spam Policy. Academic Room has a no tolerance spam policy. Every email contains a mandatory unsubscribe link. If you know of or suspect any violators, please notify us immediately at info academicroom.com.