AIMS.Guide

Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://aims.guide.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your e-mail address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service Privacy Policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

We do not store any data input via contact forms for marketing or resale purposes. We use (and store) data solely for the purposes of responding to your request as necessitated by standard emailing practices.

Cookies

When you visit this website, Cloudflare (a third-party company used for performance and security) will use a cookie (“_cfduid”) to identify you from others using the same IP address. This is a necessary cookie. Our own website or data does not integrate with this data and it does not use personally identifiable information. Cloudflare Cookie Policy, Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

When you visit this website, we use a cookie to identify your session. This is a necessary cookie for all standard PHP applications and contains no personally identifiable information.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt in to saving your name, e-mail address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

In order to track the performance of our website, we rely on two tools: Google Analytics and Cloudflare’s Analytics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our website. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. Our team will utilise analyses of the data to inspect which webpages require improvement and which webpages perform well. Google Analytics is used by many websites.

You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.

For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

Cloudflare

This website is assisted by Cloudflare. This service adds a layer of security and protection for our web servers. In addition to this functionality, we also use the basic analytics functionality offered by Cloudflare. You can read Cloudflare’s Privacy Policy to learn more about their use of this data: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/privacypolicy/ 

Who we share your data with

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information unless we provide you with advance notice. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others’ rights, property, or safety.

However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

For visitors that use our calculator, we will temporarily store (cache) your form input and the respective output on our server. This is so you can filter/progress through your result pages without a need for additional calculations by the server. Your data is interpreted and processed once. The results are then cached for one hour. This means if anybody enters the same inputs (i.e. grades and schools) as you within 1 hour of your calculation, they will access the results that you generated. It is not possible for that user to tell if their results were already calculated (i.e. retrieved from a cache) or are fresh (i.e. no cached results for those inputs). Aside from GCSE and A-level profiles, all inputs are optional; you can provide as much or as little information for caching as you are comfortable. After the one-hour period, the cache is inaccessible and will be deleted when: a) the calculator tries to access it and finds it has expired; or b) all cache is manually cleared as part of our quarterly cache clear (whichever comes first).

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

If you have used the calculator on this website, we accept requests to perform manual cache clears to ensure your inputted data are removed.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

For concerns or more information, please contact us at [email protected]

Additional information

This piece is currently being written. Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to know more about this section.

How we protect your data

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What data breach procedures we have in place

This piece is currently being written. Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to know more about this section.

What third parties we receive data from

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What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

This piece is currently being written. Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to know more about this section.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

This piece is currently being written. Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to know more about this section.