International Music Exams Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. At International Music Exams, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private).

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

  • Our website is musicexams.com. 
  • We are referred to as International Music Exams, Music Exams, MusX or MUSX.
  • Our legal company name is Music Exams Pty Ltd.
  • This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at International Music Exams. Throughout this Privacy Policy, well refer to our website and products and services collectively as Services.” Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information. 

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. 

Information You Provide to Us

Its probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

  • Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a musicexams.com account to provide an email address and password, along with a username and full name, country of residence and mobile phone number, as well as other basic information relevant to our services and other qualitative information you provide about yourself. 
  • Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us well collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us — an exam enrolment for example — youll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases youve made.
  • Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
  • Examination information: As part of the Services, you must provide access to your examination performance. We will also collect your examination marks from the Examiner. If you are an Examiner, we will collect information about your accreditations and other information about you relevant to the Services.
  • Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our team about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form or email, we store a copy of our communications.
  • Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us, you may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV, and work authorisation verification as part of the application process. 

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. This information is generally required to serve websites to you. We also collect log information when you use our Services — for example, when you enrol in an exam at musicexams.com.
  • Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services, ie. who did what and when. We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
  • Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (like when you post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating systems permissions.
  • Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating systems permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile devices camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of your piano to your webpage.
  • Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitors computer, and that the visitors browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. International Music Exams uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log in to your musicexams.com account through another service (like Google) or if you connect your website or account to a social media service (like Twitter), well receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list) via the authorisation procedures for that service. If you are applying for a job with us, we may collect information about you from third party sources such as your Linkedin or other social media profiles. 

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, identify students to examiners, arrange to mark student performances, confirm the accreditation of examiners, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing new versions or improvements of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analysing how users interact with our Services so we can create new Service that we think our users will enjoy.
  • To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users, advertising our Services, analysing the results of our marketing campaigns, and understanding and forecasting user retention.
  • To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents or academic misconduct; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of International Music Exams and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
  • To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
  • To customise the user experience. For example, to personalise your experience by providing you with information about our other Services which may be relevant to you.
  • To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, or keep you up to date on International Music Exams; or texting you to verify your payment. If you dont want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, well still send you important updates relating to your account.)
  • To recruit and hire new International Music Exams examiners. For example, by evaluating job applicants and communicating with them.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that: (1) The use is necessary in order to provide our services to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you, or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to verify your identity against your examination performance and to communicate with you to provide you with your marks; or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to improve or safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalise your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below, as well as in the section called Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others:

  • Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
  • Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe, which powers our Payments, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyse fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you; those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations; and companies that make products available on our websites (like website extensions/plugins), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. Other vendors are listed in our more specific policies (e.g., our Cookie Policy).
  • Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests. 
  • To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of International Music Exams, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that International Music Exams goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. 
  • With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorise us to do so, like if and when you connect your account to a social media service.
  • Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
  • Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when its no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and were not legally required to keep it. For example, as with most academic records, we will generally keep your identity details and results with us indefinitely. However, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to the International Music Examss website, like the visitors IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyse traffic to the International Music Examss website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our website.

Security

No online service is 100% secure, and we do not warrant that your personal information will be 100% secure against unauthorised access, use, alteration, or destruction. You should take proactive measures to ensure your data security when using our Services, such as protecting your recorded performances and ensuring you use reasonable firewall and network security settings on your browser. 

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Limit the information that you provide: You can choose not to provide information about yourself to us. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, we may not be able to provide the Services to you.
  • Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like geotagging for photographs.
  • Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
  • Set your browser to reject cookies: You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using International Music Examss websites, with the drawback that certain features of International Music Examss websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Close your account: While wed be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

  • Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
  • Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
  • Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us);
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take on our website.
  • Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
  • Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one);
  • Professional or employment-related information (for example, information you provide in a job application); and
  • Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

  • Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
  • Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
  • Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
  • Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you arent able to or youd like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us” to, well, find out how to reach us. When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, well need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorisation. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

International Music Examss Services are worldwide. Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data. Generally, the controller” is the International Music Exams company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the product or service you use. In addition, Music Exams Pty Ltd, our Australian-based company, is the controller for the processing activities across all of our Services worldwide.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us through our web form or via email. These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because International Music Examss Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. 

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, International Music Exams may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. International Music Exams encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage) or sending you a notification through email or your account dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Last Update — v1.0 Music Exam Privacy policy 25th March 2020.

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