StudentCrowd Site Terms, Privacy and Cookie Policy

Version 1.4

Issued 25^th July 2023

StudentCrowd provides certain web enabled platform services from its website (StudentCrowd.com) and these terms apply to all of StudentCrowd’ customers, visitors and users who use the Site.

Terms of site use

These Terms (together with any other documents or policies referred to in it) tells you the terms of use on which you may make use of our Site, whether as a guest, registered user or otherwise as a visitor. Use of the Site includes accessing, browsing, or registering to use the Site. Please read these Terms carefully before you start to use the Site, as these will apply to your use of the Site. We recommend that you print a copy of this for future reference.

By using the Site, you confirm that you accept these Terms and you agree to comply with them.

By agreeing to the Terms you also agree to our Acceptable Use Policy and any other policy published on the Site by us from time to time. If you do not agree to any of the foregoing, then you must not use our Site.

Changes to these terms

From time to time we may revise these Terms by amending them and publishing them on our Site. When we do this we will also update the Issued date at the top of this policy. By any visitor, customer or other user accessing the Site, they are deemed to have accepted these Terms and any other terms referenced on the Site, and shall abide by such terms at all times whilst accessing the Site.

Changes to our site

We may update our Site from time to time, and may change the content at any time. However, please note that any of the content on the Site may be out of date at any given time, and we are under no obligation to update it.

We do not guarantee that the Site, or any content on it, will be free from errors or omissions.

Accessing our site

We do not guarantee that the Site, or any content on it, will always be available or be uninterrupted. Access to the Site is permitted on a temporary basis. We may suspend, withdraw, discontinue or change all or any part of the Site without notice. We will not be liable to you if for any reason the Site is unavailable at any time or for any period.

You are responsible for making all arrangements necessary for you to have access to the Site.

You are also responsible for ensuring that all persons who access the Site through your internet connection are aware of these terms of use and other applicable terms and conditions, and that they comply with them.

Your account and password

For your own security, all passwords created by users of our website must meet our password requirements of a minimum of eight characters, including an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, and number.

If you create or are provided with a user authentication code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential. You must not disclose it to any third party and it is for your personal use only.

We have the right to disable any user authentication code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of use.

If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your user authentication code or password, you must promptly notify us.

Intellectual property rights

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in the Site, and in the material published on it. Those works are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved. Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of content on the Site must always be acknowledged. You must not use any part of the content on the Site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors. If you print off, copy or download any part of the Site in breach of these terms of use, your right to use the Site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.

Uploading content to our site

Whenever you make use of a feature that allows you to upload content to our site, or to make contact with other users of our site, you must comply with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.

We also have the right to disclose your identity to any third party who is claiming that any content posted or uploaded by you to our site constitutes a violation of their intellectual property rights, or of their right to privacy. We will notify you of this if the need arises.

We will not be responsible, or liable to any third party, for the content or accuracy of any content posted by you or any other user of our site.

We have the right to remove any posting you make on our site if, in our opinion, your post does not comply with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.

The views expressed by other users on our site do not represent our views or values.

Your Information, and how we use it

StudentCrowd collects and stores two types of data, as you use the site.

Firstly, we collect and store data that could potentially be used to identify you as an individual. This includes your name and contact information like your email address that you provide when you create an account on the StudentCrowd website.

Secondly, we collect and store non-personally identifying data, like information about the way our site is used, clicks and page views, and opinions (reviews) of universities and other review subjects on our site.

We collect both types of data in order to help us provide and improve the services we offer, both free services to website users, and paid services to commercial customers and partners.

We utilise a number of third party tools to help us store and process this data.

StudentCrowd is committed to being transparent and clear about the data we collect,and how we use it. What follows below are details of the types of data we store, the reason and justification we have for storing it, as well as information about the third party services that may have access to this data.

Account Details

When you create an account on StudentCrowd you provide us with your email address and first name, and optionally you provide us with additional information like full name and phone number.

We collect this information where it is explicitly provided by you, and we use it only to contact you about StudentCrowd news or activity on the website relating to content you have submitted (e.g. reviews, questions, answers), to notify you if you are a prize winner and/or as proof of your identity if you ever contact us about your review. We make this clear at the point we collect this information from you.

If you have specifically opted-in to additional marketing communications via email or sms then we may also contact you for that reason.

You are able to manage communication preferences, or remove all of this data apart from your email address from your account at any time you wish by logging in to your account and altering your settings.

Your email address must remain valid for you to have a functioning account, but if you require us to remove your account completely, simply email your request to support@studentcrowd.com and we will close your account and remove your email address from our record of your account within ten working days.

When this data has been deleted from your account settings it may still exist for a while in the logs and backups of ourselves or our partners (see Third Party Services below) but will not be processed as active data.

Profile Details

When you create your StudentCrowd account or subsequently manage your account, you can optionally provide additional profile information such as your start year at university, and whether you are a UK or international student.

We ask for this information to add weight and context to your reviews and other contributions. We may display this data on the website next to your reviews and other contributions. We make this clear at the point that we give you the option of entering this profile data.

We also process this data in an anonymised fashion (where individual records cannot reasonably be separated out and traced back to your account as an individual) in order to provide generic trend data. For example specific differences between a group of users who started at university in one year, compared to a group who started in a different year.

We may display some of this processed data on the website in order to further assist website users.

We may also make this data, in an anonymised format, available to commercial partners and customers for their own research, processing, and commercial activities.

You are able to remove this data from your account at any time you wish by logging in to your account and removing this data from your profile settings.

When this data has been deleted from your profile it may still exist for a while in the logs and backups of ourselves or our partners (see Third Party Services below) but will not be processed as active data.

Reviews and other Submitted Content

As you use the StudentCrowd website you may submit reviews, questions, answers, or other content for use on our site.

We collect and display this content in order to provide help to other website users who want access to such information. We also process this data in an anonymised fashion (where individual records cannot reasonably be separated out and traced back to your account as an individual) in order to provide generic scores and aggregated information about specific subjects. We display some of this aggregated data on the website (e.g. the overall University league table based on aggregated data from the reviews we hold) in order to further assist website users.

We also make this data, in an anonymised format, available to commercial partners and customers for their own research, processing, and commercial activities.

When you provide us with this content it becomes part of the website, and will remain part of our live dataset even if you ask us to delete your account. Once you have deleted your account, then as long as there is nothing to link the content to any specific individual author it remains as part of our website content, and as anonymous data available to be processed by us or our partners. If you are concerned that a piece of content you have submitted allows another person to identify you as the author, and you would like this to be removed, then contact us at support@studentcrowd.com, and if we can verify your claim we will address the issue either by editing out the part that makes it personally identifiable or by removing the entire item from our dataset, at our discretion.

Surveys and Competitions

StudentCrowd may hold surveys and competitions from time to time. Participation in such a survey or competition is subject to the specific rules of the relevant survey or competition and the following general rules:

1. entrants must be a UK resident.
2. entrants must be the copyright owner of the content submitted.
3. a prize winner must supply their full name and UK postal address and be contactable within 14 days of the survey and competition's closing date. If a prize winner does not respond after reasonable efforts at contact have been made, we reserve the right to withdraw that winning entry and select another winner.

Other specific rules will be shown within the survey or competition itself. By taking part in a survey or competition you will be deemed to accept these rules.

Technical information

We track and store detailed information about the way our website is used. This enables us to measure the service that we are providing to commercial partners, measure the positive and negative impacts of changes that we make to the website and improve our website over time, as well as report on its overall performance on different types of browsers, from different locations, and at different times of the day. For the most part this is facilitated by the websites use of cookies, and data is stored both on our own secure internal systems, and also in the systems of third party tools that we make use of. See Cookies, below, and Third Party Services, below, for more information.

Logs and Backups

As per normal operation of a complex website like StudentCrowd, logs and backups are created on a regular basis. These may contain personal information such as account and profile data, IP addresses and activity on the website, and emails sent by our systems. These are stored securely within our infrastructure or the infrastructure of third party services (see Third Party Services below) that we use, and are deleted periodically as their usefulness expires over time.

Further Disclosure of your information

In addition to other statements made in these Terms, we may share your personal information as part of a corporate reorganisation or other similar event, with any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006.

We may also disclose your personal information to third parties in the event that all, or substantially all, of StudentCrowds assets are acquired by another party, in which case data held by us would be transferred as part of the assets (e.g. the user database for the website).

Additionally we may disclose your personal information if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal or regulatory obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use, policies or any terms and conditions of supply and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of StudentCrowd or any third party, our customers, visitors or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

Security of your data

We take your privacy seriously, and only to share and use your data in line with the relevant sections of this policy document (see “Your Information, and how we use it“). We have both procedural as well as technical safeguards in place, which are designed to protect your information and keep it safe. However, while we make appropriate and reasonable effort in this regard, the inherent nature of the internet means that no security system is 100% secure. Therefore we cannot guarantee that any data is absolutely safe from intrusion by others, either during transmission, while stored on our systems, stored on the systems of third party service providers, or while otherwise in our care.

Third Party Services

In order to provide both our free and commercial services, we make use of a wide range of third party tools. Our usage of these services may involve us transmitting data that we hold (personally identifying and otherwise) to them, and using their services to store, process and analyse that data in accordance with the policy set out elsewhere in this document.

These third parties include:

- providers of cloud based hosting and technical infrastructure, who we may use to collect, store, process, and serve, the data that we hold;

- providers of cloud based CRM and marketing software, who’s services we may use to collect, hold, process and act on information that we legitimately hold about our users and customers, both free and commercial;

- providers who collect information on our behalf, including as necessary to operate features of the Website, such as cloud based log aggregators, customer satisfaction surveys, as well as analytics, performance, tracking, and advertising partners, in accordance with the “Your Information, and how we use it” section of this document.

We use third parties that are based both inside and outside of the European Economic Area ("EEA").

External resources

Our Site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites and resources of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Subject Access Requests

This sets out our policy for responding to Subject Access Requests (SAR’s) under the General Data Protection Regulations May 2018 (GDPR).

You have the right under this legislation to know what information is held about you, and to request a copy of this information to be provided to you, at no charge, subject to reasonable requests that are not unfounded or excessive.

You can make a Subject Access Request by contacting StudentCrowd by email on support@studentcrowd.com with the email subject “Subject Access Request”. We will then get in touch with you to establish your identity and fulfill the request.

It is important for the security of all users data that identity is proved before a SAR is fulfilled, so when we get in touch with you to fulfil the SAR we will request a number of personal documents as proof, which may include, but not be limited to, photographic ID (passport, driving license) and address proofs (utility bills, bank statements).

Once we have received all the information necessary to identify you and to establish the information requested, we will provide an electronic copy of all data that we hold about you, which can be accessed using a key and password that will be sent to your proven postal address, by recorded post.

Providing that we can establish your identity and address proof within seven days of your request, then we can make the requested information available to you within the thirty day window specified under the GDPR legislation.

If you are not able to make the requested documents available, sufficient for us to confirm your postal address and identity, within seven days of your SAR, then it may take us longer than thirty days to fulfil your request as we work to establish your identity.

There is no fee for this service, subject to reasonable requests.

Applicable Law

If you are a User or visitor of our Site, please note that these Terms of Use, their subject matter and their formation, are governed by English law. You and we both agree that the courts of England and Wales will have exclusive jurisdiction except that if you are a resident of Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in Northern Ireland, and if you are resident of Scotland, you may also bring proceedings in Scotland.

If you are a business, these Terms of Use, their subject matter and their formation (and any non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by English law. We both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

If a court finds part of these Terms of Use illegal, the rest will continue in force. Each of the paragraphs of these Terms of Use operates separately. If any court or relevant authority decides that any of them are unlawful, the remaining paragraphs will remain in full force and effect

Even if we delay in enforcing these Terms of Use, we can still enforce it later. If we do not insist immediately that you do anything you are required to do under these Terms of Use, or if we delay in taking steps against you in respect of your breaking these Terms of Use, that will not mean that you do not have to do those things and it will not prevent us taking steps against you at a later date.

Trading Name

“StudentCrowd” is a trading name of StudentCrowd Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales under company number 08869362, with registered office is at The Point, Granite Way, Mountsorrel, Loughborough, Leicestershire, England, LE12 7TZ.