Privacy Policy.
PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THIS SITE.
This privacy policy gives you information about how The Ear Academy Limited collects and uses your personal data through your use of this website and any of the services that we provide through our online platform on this website.
This includes any data you may provide when you register with us, purchase a service or set up an account as well as any data that you provide to us, or we collect from when you are using any of our services.
This includes information that is provided to or collected by us when a school (or other organisation) or adult does any of these things on your behalf.
The Ear Academy Limited is the controller and responsible for your personal data (referred to as "The Ear Academy", "we", "us" or "our" in this privacy policy).
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or the information we hold about you or if you want to exercise any of your privacy rights (see section 11), then you can contact us at privacy@the-ear.com
Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified.
We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:
- Identity Data includes first name, last name, username or similar identifier, title, date of birth or age. If you are an adult, such as parent or carer, that has purchased our service for a child then we will collect these details in relation to that child and link your details with their details.
- Contact Data includes billing address, contact address, email address and telephone numbers.
- Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of services you have purchased from us. We do not collect any financial data, such as bank account or payment card details, as all payments are made to us via a third party payment services provider which complies with payment card industry technical and operational standards.
- Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, device ID and other technology on the devices you use to access this website or our services.
- Profile Data includes your account username and password, purchases made by you or on your behalf, your interests, preferences, feedback and survey responses, details of the school you or your child attends or that you work at (as applicable).
- Usage Data includes information about how you interact with and use our website and services.
- Service Data includes information that you provide to us when you use our services, such as when you upload or send us any assessments or participate in any online workshops or tutorials. We will let you know in advance if we ever record any online workshops or tutorials.
- Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and your communication preferences. We do not send any marketing communications to anyone under the age of 18.
We also collect, use and share aggregated data (that is where your data is grouped together with other people’s data) such as statistical or demographic data which is not personal data as it does not directly (or indirectly) reveal your identity.
For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data together with other people’s Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific feature in order to analyse general trends to help improve our website and services.
We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:
- Interactions that you have with us or that a school (or other organisation) or adult has with us on your behalf.
You (or they) may give us your personal data by filling in order forms or by corresponding with us by email, phone or otherwise. This includes personal data you (or they) provide when you:
- order our services; create an account with us;
- subscribe to our service or any newsletters or other publications;
- participate in our customer/user onboarding process;
- use our services and send or share with us any assessments or other evidence or work or engage in any online workshops or tutorials, or if you are a teacher or tutor and share any educational materials;
- request marketing to be sent to you (though note that we never send marketing to anyone under the age of 18);
- enter a competition, promotion or survey;
- or give us feedback or contact us. - Automated technologies or interactions.
As you interact with our website and services, we will automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. - Third parties or publicly available sources.
We will receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources as set out below:
- Technical Data is collected from analytics providers such as Google based outside the UK and the EU;
- Contact Data and Transaction Data is collected from providers of technical and payment services, such as Stripe, which may be based inside or outside the UK and the EU.
- Identity Data and Contact Data: if a service is purchased for you by a school (or other organisation) or an adult then they will provide us with this information initially.
We also collect data from data brokers or aggregators, such as Schoolmailing, Sprint and Apollo, and from sources such as LinkedIn and company registries, in each case, which may be based inside or outside the UK or the EU.
Legal basis:
The law requires us to have a legal basis for collecting and using your personal data. We rely on one or more of the following legal bases:
- Performance of a contract with you: Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you or which has been entered into with a school or other organisation or person so that we can provide services to you.
- Legitimate interests: We may use your personal data where it is necessary to conduct our business and pursue our legitimate interests, for example, to prevent fraud and enable us to give you the best and most secure customer experience. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you and your rights (both positive and negative) before we process your personal data for our legitimate interests. We do not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law).
- Legal obligation: We may use your personal data where it is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation that we are subject to. We will identify the relevant legal obligation when we rely on this legal basis.
- Consent: We rely on consent only where we have obtained your active agreement to use your personal data for a specified purpose, for example if you subscribe to an email newsletter.
- Purposes for which we process your personal data: We have set out below, in a table, a description of all the ways we plan to use the various categories of your personal data (as set out in Section 3, above), and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.
Purposes for which we process your personal data:
We have set out below, in a table, a description of all the ways we plan to use the various categories of your personal data (as set out in Section 3, above), and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.
Marketing from us
We will not send any marketing communications to anyone under the age of 18. If you are a school (or other organisation) or adult, you will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased services from us and you have not opted out of receiving the marketing. We may also analyse your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage, Service and Profile Data to form a view on which services and offers may be of interest to you so that we can then send you relevant marketing communications.
Third-party marketing
We will not share your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes unless we get your express consent before we do so.
Opting out of marketing
You can ask to stop sending you marketing communications at any time by following the opt-out links within any marketing communication sent to you or by contacting us on unsubscribe@the-ear.com. If you opt out of receiving marketing communications, you will still receive service-related communications that are essential for administrative or customer (or user/learner) service purposes.
We may share your personal data where necessary with the parties set out below.
- Amazon Web Services, based in South Africa; for the purposes of hosting our data;
- The Ear Academy, based in South Africa. We are not part of the same corporate group, but do have some of the same shareholders. The Ear Academy in South Africa originally developed the services that we provide and so we license some of our content and technology from them and they provide us with some administrative and back-office assistance;
- Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy policy;
- Third party service providers. We may share your data with other organisations that provide services on our behalf. We may do this to perform a contract we have entered into with you, where it is in our legitimate interests or with your consent. Examples of when we may share your data with service providers include sharing with:
- Software service providers such as Apollo that assist us with our customer relationship management;
- Providers of insights and analytics software that help us to improve our services, such as Google Analytics;
- IT service providers, such as Microsoft, so that we can run our business, provide our services and perform our contracts;
- Providers of video call / meeting software, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams; which we use to provide online workshops and tutorials to you as part of our services; - Agencies and authorities if required by law. We may reveal your personal data to any law enforcement agency, court, regulator, government authority, or in connection with any legal action if we are required to do so to meet a legal or regulatory obligation, where the request is proportionate, or otherwise to protect our rights or the rights of anyone else. We will take reasonable steps to attempt to notify you prior to disclosing your data unless (i) prohibited by applicable law from doing so, or (ii) there are clear indications of unlawful conduct in connection with your use of our website or services.
We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
Third party links Our website and parts of our services may include links to third-party websites, software, plug-ins and applications. For example, we show a variety of embedded content across our website, including Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) feeds, YouTube videos, SoundCloud players and Google Maps. We also use third party service providers, such as Zoom, if we provide online workshops or tutorials to you. Clicking on any of those links or embedded content or enabling those connections may allow those third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites, software, plug-ins, applications or service providers and are not responsible for their privacy policies. When you leave our website or service platform, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website or application that you visit and of every service provider that you use as their privacy policy will apply to any information that you share with them or that they collect from you and it may be very different from this privacy policy.
For more information about the cookies we use and how to change your cookie preferences, please see https://ear-academy.com/home/cookiepolicy
The eAr Academy is based in the UK and will access and process your data in the UK, including if you are based outside the UK, for example in the EU. We may also transfer your personal data to service providers that carry out certain functions on our behalf (see Section 7, above). This may involve transferring personal data outside the UK to countries which have laws that do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK law.
Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK to service providers, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring that one of the following safeguards are in place:
• by transferring your personal data to a country that has been deemed by the UK to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data, such as any country in the EU; or
• by using specific standard contractual terms approved for use in the UK which give the transferred personal data the same protection as it has in the UK, namely the International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses for international data transfers.
The Ear Academy takes your privacy seriously and we have put in place several layers of appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements.
We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.
By law we have to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers for tax purposes.
In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see section 12, below for further information.
In some circumstances we will anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.
You have a number of rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.
These include rights to:
- Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “subject access request”);
- Request correction of any mistakes in your information that we hold, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us;
- Request the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain circumstances, including where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request;
- Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) as the legal basis for that particular use of your data. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your right to object;
- You also have the absolute right to object any time to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes (see Section 6 for details);
- Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you;
- Withdraw consent at any time, if we have relied on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent;
- Request restriction of processing of your personal data.
This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in one of the following scenarios:
- If you want us to establish the data's accuracy;
- Where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it;
- Where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or
- You have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
If you would like to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at privacy@the-ear.com.
No fee usually required You will not usually have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
What we may need from you We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
Time limit to respond We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it could take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK regulator for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk) or to the applicable supervisory authority for the country you live in. We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach them so please contact us in the first instance at privacy@the-ear.com.
We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This version was last updated in April 2024.
It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us, for example if you have a new address or email address.