Privacy Policy
Thank you for joining the world’s largest online learning marketplace. We at Upgraduates respect your privacy and want you to understand how we collect, use, and share data about you. This Privacy Policy covers our data collection practices and describes your rights to access, correct, or restrict our use of your personal data.
Unless we link to a different policy or state otherwise, this Privacy Policy applies when you visit or use the Upgraduates website, mobile applications, APIs or related services (the “Services”).
By using the Services, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy. You shouldn’t use the Services if you don’t agree with this Privacy Policy or any other agreement that governs your use of the Services.
1. What Data We Get
1.1 Data You Provide to Us
We may collect different data from or about you depending on how you use the Services. Below are some examples to help you better understand the data we collect.
When you create an account and use the Services, including through a third-party platform, we collect any data you provide directly, including:
In order to use certain features (like enrolling in a course), you need to create a user account. When you create or update your account, we collect and store the data you provide, like your email address, password, phone number, occupation, skill interests, gender, race, ethnicity, government ID information, verification photo, age, date of birth, and account settings and assign you a unique identifying number (“Account Data”).
You can also choose to provide profile information like a photo, headline, biography, language, website link, social media profiles, country, or other data. Your Profile Data will be publicly viewable by others.
Parts of the Services let you interact with other users or share content publicly, including by posting reviews on a course page, asking or answering questions, sending messages to students or instructors, or posting photos or other work you upload. Such shared content may be publicly viewable by others depending on where it is posted.
When you enroll in and take courses, we collect certain data including which courses, assignments and quizzes you’ve started and completed; course purchases and credits; subscriptions; course certificates; your exchanges with instructors, teaching assistants, and other students; and essays, answers to questions, and other items submitted to satisfy course requirements. If you are an instructor, we store course content that may contain data about you.
If you make purchases, we collect certain data about your purchase (such as your name and zip code) as necessary to process your order. You must provide certain payment and billing data directly to our payment processing partners, including your name, credit card information, billing address, and zip code. For security, Udemy does not collect or store sensitive cardholder data, such as full credit card numbers or card authentication data.
If you are an instructor, you can link your PayPal, Payoneer, or other payment account to the Services to receive payments. When you link a payment account, we collect and use certain information, including your payment account email address, account ID, physical address, or other data necessary for us to send payments to your account. In some instances, we may collect ACH or wire information to send payments to your account. In order to comply with applicable laws, we also work with trusted third parties who collect tax information as legally required. This tax information may include residency information, tax identification numbers, biographical information, and other personal information necessary for taxation purposes. For security, Udemy does not collect or store sensitive bank account information. The collection, use, and disclosure of your payment, billing, and taxation data is subject to the privacy policy and other terms of your payment account provider.
We may obtain certain information through your social media or other online accounts if they are connected to your Udemy account. If you login to Udemy via Facebook or another third-party platform or service, we ask for your permission to access certain information about that other account. For example, depending on the platform or service we may collect your name, profile picture, account ID number, login email address, location, physical location of your access devices, gender, birthday, and list of friends or contacts. Those platforms and services make information available to us through their APIs. The information we receive depends on what information you (via your privacy settings) or the platform or service decide to give us. If you access or use our Services through a third-party platform or service, or click on any third-party links, the collection, use, and sharing of your data will also be subject to the privacy policies and other agreements of that third party.
We may invite you to complete a survey or participate in a promotion (like a contest, sweepstakes, or challenge), either through the Services or a third-party platform. If you participate, we will collect and store the data you provide as part of participating, such as your name, email address, postal address, date of birth, or phone number. That data is subject to this Privacy Policy unless otherwise stated in the official rules of the promotion or in another privacy policy. The data collected will be used to administer the promotion or survey, including for notifying winners and distributing rewards. To receive a reward, you may be required to allow us to post some of your information publicly (like on a winner’s page). Where we use a third-party platform to administer a survey or promotion, the third party’s privacy policy will apply.
If you contact us for support or to report a problem or concern (regardless of whether you have created an account), we collect and store your contact information, messages, and other data about you like your name, email address, messages, location, Udemy user ID, refund transaction IDs, and any other data you provide or that we collect through automated means (which we cover below). We use this data to respond to you and research your question or concern, in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
1.2 Data We Collect through Automated Means
When you access the Services (including browsing courses), we collect certain data by automated means, including:
Technical data about your computer or device, like your IP address, device type, operating system type and version, unique device identifiers, browser, browser language, domain and other systems data, and platform types (“System Data”).
The data listed above is collected through the use of server log files and tracking technologies, as detailed in the “Cookies and Data Collection Tools” section below. It is stored by us and associated with your account.
Usage statistics about your interactions with the Services, including courses accessed, time spent on pages or the Service, pages visited, features used, your search queries, click data, date and time, referrer, and other data regarding your use of the Services (“Usage Data”).
The data listed above is collected through the use of server log files and tracking technologies, as detailed in the “Cookies and Data Collection Tools” section below. It is stored by us and associated with your account.
Technical data about your computer or device, like your IP address, device type, operating system type and version, unique device identifiers, browser, browser language, domain and other systems data, and platform types (“System Data”). An approximate geographic location, including information like country, city, and geographic coordinates, calculated based on your IP address. The data listed above is collected through the use of server log files and tracking technologies, as detailed in the “Cookies and Data Collection Tools” section below. It is stored by us and associated with your account.
2. How We Get Data About You
2.1 Cookies and Data Collection Tools
We use cookies, which are small text files stored by your browser, to collect, store, and share data about your activities across websites, including on Upgraduates. They allow us to remember things about your visits to Upgraduates, like your preferred language, and to make the site easier to use. To learn more about cookies, visit https://cookiepedia.co.uk/all-about-cookies.
Upgraduates and service providers acting on our behalf (like Google Analytics and third-party advertisers) use server log files and automated data collection tools like cookies, tags, scripts, customized links, device or browser fingerprints, and web beacons (together, “Data Collection Tools“) when you access and use the Services. These Data Collection Tools automatically track and collect certain System Data and Usage Data (as detailed in Section 1) when you use the Services. In some cases, we tie data gathered through those Data Collection Tools to other data that we collect as described in this Privacy Policy.
2.2 Why We Use Data Collection Tools
Upgraduates uses the following types of Data Collection Tools for the purposes described:
- Strictly Necessary: These Data Collection Tools enable you to access the site, provide basic functionality (like logging in or enrolling in courses), secure the site, protect against fraudulent logins, and detect and prevent abuse or unauthorized use of your account. These are required for the Services to work properly, so if you disable them, parts of the site will break or be unavailable.
- Functional: These Data Collection Tools remember data about your browser and your preferences, provide additional site functionality, customize content to be more relevant to you, and remember settings affecting the appearance and behavior of the Services (like your preferred language or volume level for video playback).
- Performance: These Data Collection Tools help measure and improve the Services by providing usage and performance data, visit counts, traffic sources, or where an application was downloaded from. These tools can help us test different versions of Upgraduates to see which features or content users prefer and determine which email messages are opened.
- Advertising: These Data Collection Tools are used to deliver relevant ads (on the site and/or other sites) based on things we know about you like your Usage and System Data (as detailed in Section 1), and things that the ad service providers know about you based on their tracking data. The ads can be based on your recent activity or activity over time and across other sites and services. To help deliver tailored advertising, we may provide these service providers with a hashed, anonymized version of your email address (in a non-human-readable form) and content that you share publicly on the Services.
- Social Media: These Data Collection Tools enable social media functionality, like sharing content with friends and networks. These cookies may track a user or device across other sites and build a profile of user interests for targeted advertising purposes.
You can set your web browser to alert you about attempts to place cookies on your computer, limit the types of cookies you allow, or refuse cookies altogether. If you do, you may not be able to use some or all features of the Services, and your experience may be different or less functional. To learn more about managing Data Collection Tools, refer to Section 6.1 (Your Choices About the Use of Your Data) below.
3. What We Use Your Data For
We use the data we collect through your use of the Services to:
- Solicit feedback from users;
- Tailor advertisements across devices;
- As required or permitted by law; or
- Identify unique users across devices;
- Process instructor payments;
- Responding to your questions and concerns;
- Manage your account and account preferences;
- Communicate with you about your account by:
- Improve our Services and develop new products, services, and features;
- Analyze trends and traffic, track purchases, and track usage data;
- Advertise the Services on third-party websites and applications;
- Provide and administer the Services, including to facilitate course participation, issue course completion certificates, display customized content, and facilitate communication with other users;
- Process your requests and orders for courses, products, specific services, information, or features;
- Sending you administrative messages and information, including messages from instructors, students, and teaching assistants; notifications about changes to our Service; and updates to our agreements;
- Sending you information, such as by email or text messages, about your progress in courses, rewards programs, new services, new features, promotions, newsletters, and other available courses (which you can opt out of at any time);
- Sending push notifications to your wireless device to provide updates and other relevant messages (which you can manage from the “options” or “settings” page of the mobile app);
- Facilitate the Services’ technical functioning, including troubleshooting and resolving issues, securing the Services, and preventing fraud and abuse;
- Market and administer surveys and promotions administered or sponsored by Upgraduates;
- Learn more about you by linking your data with additional data through third-party data providers and/or analyzing the data with the help of analytics service providers;
- As we, in our sole discretion, otherwise determine to be necessary to ensure the safety or integrity of our users, employees, third parties, the public, or our Services.
