My Instructor Privacy Policy
- Last updated – August 3rd 2023
The My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services are available to you for access and use, and this Privacy Policy explains how we obtain, use, handle, and disclose your information—including personal information – in connection with such activities.
If a word (such as “User,” “Learner,” or “My Instructor Platform”) in this Privacy Policy is not defined, it has the same meaning as in our service terms of use.
In this policy, references to “My Instructor,” “we,” “us,” or “our” relate to the My Instructor firm, which is the “Data Controller” and is in charge of your information.
If you reside in the United States, My Instructor Inc. is the data controller.
1. DATA THAT WE COLLECT
We primarily gather information in three areas.
1.1 Data You Provide to Us.
1.1.1 Information required utilizing the My Instructor Platform.
When you use the My Instructor Platform, the following personal information is requested of you and collected by us. This information is required so that we may adequately carry out the terms of our agreement with you and so that we can meet our legal duties. Without it, we might not be able to offer you all the services you’ve asked for.
Account Specifics.
We ask for information like your phone number, first name, last name, email address, and date of birth when you sign up for a My Instructor Account.
Information about the profile and session.
We may ask you for additional information, such as your address, phone number, and a profile photo, in order for you to access specific aspects of the My Instructor Platform (such as interacting with Instructors and requesting a Session).
Payment details.
You may be required to supply some financial information (like your bank account or credit card information) in order to access certain features of the My Instructor Platform (like connecting with Instructors and requesting a Session). This is done to make it easier to execute automatic payments (via My Instructor Payments).
The exchange of messages with My Instructor and other users.
We gather information about your conversation as well as any information you choose to supply whenever you communicate with My Instructor or use the My Instructor Platform to connect with other Users. To better understand and avoid bullying, harassment, and other improper conduct, among other things that help us keep the My Instructor community safe, we gather this information for research purposes.
1.1.2 Information you voluntarily provide to us.
For a better user experience when using the My Instructor Platform, you may decide to give us extra personal information. Using your permission, this extra information will be handled.
Additional profile details
You have the option to add more details to your My Instructor profile, such as your location, favorite language(s), and a brief personal statement. Your public profile page includes some of this information, as stated in your Account preferences, and other people will be able to see it openly.
List of contacts in the address book.
For some My Instructor Platform services, such asking others to use My Instructor, you can opt to import your address book contacts or manually enter the data for your connections.
Additional Information
You can also choose to provide us information when you use the My Instructor Platform’s other features, fill out forms, search, update or add information to your My Instructor Account, answer surveys, post in forums, take part in promotions, or utilize other My Instructor Platform services. Additionally, we gather data from your smartphone about how you use specific My Instructor features, such as scrolling, tapping, and refreshing, which enables us to distinguish between real users and bots and spot phony accounts.
1.1.3 Data that is required in order to utilize the payment services.
The following information must be gathered by the Payments Services Provider in order to fulfill its obligations under your contract with them and to comply with any legal requirements (such as anti-money laundering regulations). You won’t be able to utilize Payment Services without it:
Payment details.
In order to process payments and adhere to relevant laws, the Payments data controller needs specific financial information (such as your bank account or credit card information) when you use the Payment Services.
1.2 Details About Your Use of the My Instructor Platform and Payment Services That We Automatically Gather.
We automatically gather information, including personal information, about the services you use and how you use them when you use the My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services. Due to our legitimate interest in being able to provide and enhance the functionality of the My Instructor Platform and Payment Services, as well as to enable us to comply with legal responsibilities, this information is required for the proper fulfillment of the contract between you and us.
Geographical information.
In order to provide you with a better user experience when you use specific features of the My Instructor Platform, we may gather information about your precise or rough location as indicated by information like your IP address or the GPS on your mobile device. In the settings menu of the majority of mobile devices, you may regulate or turn off the usage of location services for applications. If this connection is permitted by your settings or device permissions, My Instructor may even gather this information while you are not using the program.
Information about use.
We keep track of your activities with the My Instructor Platform, including the sites or material you visit, the Sessions you search for and schedule, as well as other actions you do on the platform.
Log information and device details.
When you access and use the My Instructor Platform, we automatically record log data and information about your device. Among other things, that data consists of information about how you used the My Instructor Platform (such as whether you clicked on links to third-party applications), your IP address, access dates and times, device information, device event information, hardware and software information, unique identifiers, crash data, cookie data, and the webpages you visited or interacted with before or after using the My Instructor Platform.
Technologies similar to cookies.
In addition to cookies, we also utilize pixels, web beacons, and mobile identifiers. The My Instructor Platform may also be used by our commercial partners, or we may hire third parties to track your activity on our behalf. The My Instructor Platform does not currently respond to a “Do Not Track” signal in the HTTP header from your browser or mobile application due to a lack of standardization regarding how that signal should be interpreted, even though you can disable the usage of cookies through your browser’s settings.
Information about payment transactions.
Through the My Instructor Platform, My Instructor Payments gathers data about your payment transactions, such as the payment method used, the date and time, the payment amount, the expiration date of the payment method, the billing postcode, the PayPal email address, the IBAN information, your address, and other relevant transaction specifics. The provision of the Payment Services and the proper execution of the agreement between you and My Instructor Payments depend on the availability of this information.
1.3 Data We Gather from Outside Sources.
When others use the My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services, My Instructor and My Instructor Payments may gather information, including personal information, about you from them. We may also obtain information from other sources and combine it with information we gather through the My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services. Any information requests about the disclosure of your personal information to us should be made to such third parties as we have no control over, oversight of, or responsibility for how they treat your personal data.
Service Providers.
A third-party service (such as Google, or Facebook) may send us information such as your registration and profile details if you link, connect, or log into your My Instructor Account with that service. This information varies and is managed by that service, or as permitted by you through that service’s privacy settings.
Your evaluations and ratings.
Without your permission, a rating or review that someone has given you will be made public on your My Instructor profile page.
Informational Background.
To the extent authorized by relevant laws, My Instructor and My Instructor Payments may collect reports from open databases of criminal convictions or sex offender registrations for Users in the United States.
Various Sources.
In accordance with relevant legislation, we may combine information we already have about you with new information we acquire about you, such as demographic data or information used to identify fraud. For our efforts to prevent fraud and analyze risk, we could get fraud alerts from service providers like identity verification services or the results of background checks (with your permission, if needed). Through partnerships or information about your interactions and experiences from our partner ad networks, we may get information about you and your activities on and off the My Instructor Platform.
2. OUR USE OF THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
To deliver, comprehend, develop, and enhance the My Instructor Platform, build and maintain a trustworthy and secure environment, and to meet our legal duties, we utilize, store, and process information—including personal information—about you.
2.1 Establish, Develop, and Provide the My Instructor Platform.
- assist you in using and accessing the My Instructor Platform.
- allowing you to interact with other users.
- operate, safeguard, enhance, and optimize the My Instructor Platform and user experience, including via analytics and research.
- Offer client support.
- Send you account notifications, security alerts, service or support communications, and updates.
If you give us the contact information for your contacts, we may use that information for the following purposes: I to facilitate referral invitations; (ii) to send reference requests; (iii) for fraud detection and prevention; and (IV) for any other purposes you explicitly approve at the time of collection.
We conduct profiling based on your interactions with the My Instructor Platform, your search and Session history, your profile information and preferences, and other content you submit to the My Instructor Platform in order to operate, protect, improve, and optimize the My Instructor Platform and experience, as well as personalize and customize your experience (such as making Session suggestions or ranking search results).
We handle your data because it is necessary for us to carry out our contract with you and because it serves our legitimate interest in enhancing the My Instructor Platform and the user experience.
2.2 Establish and uphold a trustworthy and safer environment.
- Identify and stop undesirable behavior such as fraud, spam, abuse, security problems, and more.
- Identify security risks and conduct investigations.
- Check the accuracy of any information or identity you have supplied (such as to verify your address or compare your identification photo to another photo you provide).
- To the extent authorized by relevant laws and with your cooperation where necessary, conduct checks against databases and other information sources, including background or police checks.
- Obey the law as it is written.
- Enforce our agreements with third parties and settle any issues we may have with any of our Users.
- Enforce our non-discrimination rules, community guidelines, and other regulations, as well as our service terms of use.
Based on your interactions with the My Instructor Platform, your profile information, other content you provide to the My Instructor Platform, and information we get from third parties, we may profile you in connection with the aforementioned activities. If automated procedures identify a User or conduct that we believe constitutes a security or other risk to the My Instructor Platform, other Users, or third parties, we may, in some circumstances, block or suspend access to the My Instructor Platform.
Due to our legitimate interest in safeguarding the My Instructor Platform, gauging the effectiveness of our relationship with you, and adhering to legal requirements, we handle this information.
2.3 Offer, Customize, Assess, and Enhance Our Advertising and Marketing.
Send you marketing, advertising, and promotional communications as well as other material that may be of interest to you depending on your choices (including details about My Instructor or partner campaigns and services as well as social media advertising through websites like Facebook or Google).
- Individualize, evaluate, and enhance our advertising.
- Administering referral schemes, incentives, questionnaires, competitions, and other marketing campaigns My Instructor or its third-party partners sponsor or organize.
- To send you promotional messages, marketing, advertising, and other information we believe may be of interest to you, we profile your characteristics and preferences (based on the information you provide to us, your interactions with the My Instructor Platform, information obtained from third parties, and your search and Session history).
Due to our legitimate interest in conducting marketing campaigns to present you with goods or services that may be of interest to you, we shall use your personal information for the reasons indicated in this section. By following the unsubscribe instructions in our marketing messages or adjusting your notification settings in your My Instructor Account, you can choose not to receive marketing communications from us.
2.3 What actions the Payments Data Controller does with the data gathered.
- Assist you in using and accessing the payment services.
- Fraud, abuse, security problems, and other wrongdoing are identified and stopped.
- Identify security risks and conduct investigations.
- Verify data in databases and other sources of information.
- Respect legal requirements (such as anti-money laundering regulations).
- Enforce the conditions of payment and other payment regulations.
- Send you marketing, advertising, and other information that could be of interest to you in accordance with your preferences.
We use Stripe and Gusto (Only for instructors) as our payment processing company. The Payments Data Controller processes this information when it is required for the proper fulfillment of the contract with you, to comply with relevant laws, and for the purposes of enhancing the Payment Services and the experience of its users.
3. TRANSMISSION & DISCLOSURE
3.1 With Your Permission.
When you give us permission to do so—for instance, when you permit a third-party application or website to access your My Instructor Account or when you take part in promotional activities run by My Instructor partners or third-parties—we share your information, including personal information, as described at the time of consent.
3.2 User-to-User Sharing
We may need to communicate some information, including personal information, with other Users to assist support Sessions or other interactions between Users. This is important for the proper fulfillment of the contract between you and us and includes the following:
The learner’s initial name, learner profile, profile statistics, learner rating, profile images, biography, and other profile information are communicated with the Instructor when the learner tries to connect with them. However, a Student’s profile is fully secret unless they issue a connection request. Instructors are unable to find students in any way, and they are unable to connect to students until the student initiates the connection request.
When an Instructor completes their profile, all My Instructor learners may read their first name, profile statistics, ratings and reviews, profile photographs, biography, and the whole profile. Any time a learner searches a topic that an Instructor has listed on their Tutor profile, they have access to examine that Instructor’s profile.
However, until an Instructor accepts the learner’s initial connection request, learners cannot freely message that Instructor. Once accepted, learners can mail the Instructor as frequently as they wish and request sessions.
Your billing and payment information is kept private from other Users.
3.3 Public Information, such as Profiles and Sessions.
You can publish content on the My Instructor Platform that is accessible to the public, including personal information. For instance:
- Your initial name, description, and city are some elements of your public profile page that are accessible to others.
- The location (neighborhood and city), approximate location (where you have given your consent), session description, calendar availability, your public profile photo, aggregated demand information (like page views over time), and any additional information you choose to share are all included on session pages, which are accessible to the general public.
Learners and Instructors may submit Reviews and rate one another when a Session is over. Your public profile page includes reviews and ratings, and they may also appear elsewhere on the My Instructor Platform (such as the Session page).
When you utilize a comparable tool on the My Instructor Platform or post content in a community or discussion forum, blog or social media post, it becomes publicly accessible.
We may use widgets or APIs to show portions of the My Instructor Platform (like your Sessions page) on websites run by My Instructor’s commercial partners if doing so serves our legitimate purpose in promoting the My Instructor Platform. Information from your public profile page could also be shown if your Sessions are shown on a partner’s website.
On the My Instructor Platform, information you provide in the open may be indexed by outside search engines. You may occasionally disable this function in your account settings. These search engines might not update their databases if you alter your preferences or publicly accessible material. Third-party search engines may employ caches holding your out-of-date information; we have no control over their policies.
3.4 Adherence to the Law, Meeting Legal Demands, Avoiding Harm, and Protecting Our Rights
If and to the extent that it is required or permitted by law, or if it is deemed reasonably necessary, My Instructor and Payment Services may release your information, including personal information, to courts, law enforcement or governmental agencies, or authorized third parties: I uphold and administer our Service Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, Non-Discrimination Policies, the payment terms, or other agreements; (ii) respond to verified requests relating to a criminal investigation; (iii) comply with legal process and respond to claims made against My Instructor; and (iv) uphold and administer our Service Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, Non-Discrimination Policies, or other agreements. Where appropriate, we may inform Users of legal requests unless: I doing so am prohibited by the legal process itself, by a court order we receive, or by applicable law; or (ii) we feel that doing so would be ineffective, futile, increase the risk of fraud against My Instructor’s assets, its users, and the My Instructor Platform. We will try to tell that User about the request after the fact where appropriate and when we judge in good faith that we are no longer prohibited from doing so in situations where we abide by legal requests without notification due to these reasons.
3.5 Service Providers,
To assist us in providing services linked to the My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services, My Instructor and My Instructor Payments work with a number of third party service providers. Both inside and outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) are possible locations for service providers. Our service suppliers are mostly headquartered in North and South America, Europe, India, and the Asia-Pacific region.
For instance, service providers may assist us in the following ways: I confirming your identity or authenticating your identification documents; (ii) checking information against public databases; (iii) carrying out background checks or police checks; (iv) conducting fraud prevention and risk assessment; (v) performing product development, maintenance, and debugging; or (vi) enabling the provision of the My Instructor Services through third-party platforms and software tools (e.g. through the integration with our APIs). These service providers are contractually required to secure and use your information only for the reasons for which it was supplied and in accordance with this privacy policy. They have restricted access to your information to carry out these activities on our behalf.
To facilitate the proper execution of our contract with you, My Instructor and the My Instructor Payments will need to exchange your information, including personal information.
3.6 Corporate Partners.
We may share your information, including personal information, among our corporate family of companies like Digitizer Inc., which is our subsidiary (including financial and non-financial organizations) that are connected by shared ownership or control in order to allow or support us in offering the My Instructor Platform and the Payment Services.
3.7 Platforms for social media.
To generate leads, drive traffic to our websites, or otherwise promote our goods and services or the My Instructor Platform, we may use limited personal information about you, such as your email address, to hash it and share it with social media platforms, like Facebook or Google, as permitted by applicable law. These processing operations are supported by our lawful interest in conducting marketing campaigns to present you with goods or services that could be of interest to you.
The social networking sites that we could share your personal information with are not under My Instructor’s direct control or supervision. Therefore, any inquiries regarding the processing of your personal data by the provider of your social media platform should be made to that provider.
You can request that My Instructor stop using your data for these direct marketing reasons at any time by sending an email to [email protected].
3.8 Registration with the government.
In jurisdictions where My Instructor facilitates or requires an Instructor to register, notify, permit, or license application with a local governmental authority through the My Instructor Platform in accordance with local law, we may share information of participating Instructors with the relevant authority, both during the application process and, if applicable, on an ongoing basis, such as the Instructor’s full name and contact details, tax identification number, and Session number.
3.9 Transfers of Business.
If My Instructor engages in or is associated with any merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, bankruptcy, or insolvency event, we may do so in conjunction with or in consideration of such an event by selling, transferring, or sharing any or all of our assets, including your information (e.g., due diligence). If this occurs, we will provide you advance notice before your personal data is moved and is subject to a new privacy policy. Aggregated Data,
3.10. Additionally, for the purposes of regulatory compliance, market and industry analysis, demographic profiling, marketing and advertising, and other business needs, we may also share aggregated information (information about our users that we combine so that it no longer identifies or refers to a specific user) and other anonym zed information.
4. ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT DATA
4.1 Analyzing your Communications
Our communications on the My Instructor Platform may be reviewed, scanned, or analyzed for the prevention of fraud, risk assessment, regulatory compliance, investigation, product development, research, and customer support needs. For instance, as part of our efforts to combat fraud, we scan and examine communications to hide references to other websites and contact information. We may occasionally scan, evaluate, or analyze messages in order to enhance our product offerings, fix bugs, and improve our services. Where it is practical to do so, we employ automated techniques. To analyze and enhance the operation of these automatic systems or in certain rare cases for customer support and fraud investigations, we may need to manually review some conversations. In addition, we won’t sell reviews or analyses of these communications. We also won’t examine, scan, or analyze your communications in order to send you third-party marketing messages.
These actions are taken in accordance with My Instructor’s legitimate interest in preventing fraud, promoting safety, and ensuring the adequate performance of our services, as well as in ensuring compliance with applicable laws and our Service Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, and Non- Discrimination Policies.
4.2 Connecting Accounts of Third Parties.
You can connect your My Instructor account to the one you have at a different social networking site. When establishing this link:
A portion of the data you give us during the account connecting process can be made public on your My Instructor Account profile;
Your actions on the My Instructor Platform may be shown to your friends on that third-party website as well as the My Instructor Platform;
Your My Instructor public profile may contain a link to your public profile on that third-party social networking site;
Other My Instructor users could be able to see any friends you share or, if relevant, that you are a friend of their friend;
Other users of My Instructor could be able to view the schools, hometowns, or other affiliations you share with them on your connected social networking site;
We may keep, analyze, and communicate the data you give us through the connection of your accounts for the purposes of preventing fraud and evaluating your level of risk; and
Your preferences and authorizations on the My Instructor Platform and the third-party website govern the publishing and display of the data you give My Instructor through this connection.
In order to ensure the proper execution of our contract with you, to ensure that we are in compliance with applicable laws, or with your consent, we only collect the minimum amount of information from linked third party accounts.
4.3 Google Earth/Maps.
Google Maps/Earth services, particularly the Google Maps API, are utilized in several portions of the My Instructor Platform (s). The Google Maps/Earth Additional Terms of Use and the Google Privacy Policy apply to the use of Google Maps/Earth.
5. INTEGRATIONS & THIRD PARTY PARTNERS
Links to other websites or services, such as third-party integrations, co-branded services, or third-party-branded services (“Third-Party Partners”), may be found on the My Instructor Platform. When you connect with these Third-Party Partners, you may be giving information directly to the Third Party Partner, My Instructor, or both. My Instructor neither owns nor controls these Third-Party Partners. When it comes to the gathering, utilizing, and disclosing of information, these Third Party Partners will have their own policies. Reviewing the privacy policies of the other websites you visit is something we strongly advise.
6. YOUR RIGHTS
By sending an email to [email protected], you can exercise any of the rights outlined in this section before the relevant My Instructor Data Controller and Payments Service Controller. Please be aware that before proceeding with your request, we might need you to prove your identity.
6.1 Taking control of your data.
Through your Account settings, you have access to and may alter some of your information. You can modify your account settings and revoke the app’s authorization if you have opted to link your My Instructor Account to a third-party application, such as Facebook or Google. You are in charge of maintaining the accuracy of your personal data.
6.2 Correction of Incomplete or Inaccurate Information.
You have the right to request that we correct any false or incomplete information on you that we may hold (and which you cannot update yourself within your My Instructor Account).
6.3 Data Portability and Access.
You may have the right to obtain copies of your personal information that we maintain under the law in some areas. Additionally, you may be able to ask for copies of your personal information that you have given to us in a manner that is organized, generally accepted, and machine-readable as well as the transfer of such data to another service provider (where technically feasible).
6.4 Data Erasure and Retention.
In general, we keep your personal information as long as it’s required for us to fulfill the terms of our agreement with you and to abide by the law. You can ask us to delete your personal data and terminate your My Instructor Account if you no longer want us to use it to offer you with the My Instructor Platform. Please be aware of the following if you ask for the removal of your personal data:
For the sake of fraud prevention, safety enhancement, and other legitimate business objectives, we may keep some of your personal information on file. To prevent a User from creating a new My Instructor Account in the future, for instance, if we suspend a My Instructor Account due to fraud or safety concerns, we may keep track of certain information from that My Instructor Account.
To the extent required to meet our legal requirements, we may keep and utilize your personal information. For instance, My Instructor and My Instructor Payments could preserve part of your data to comply with reporting, auditing, and tax requirements.
Even after your My Instructor Account is terminated, information you have shared with others (such as Reviews and postings) might still be accessible to the general public on the My Instructor Platform. However, any references to you in such information will be taken down. Furthermore, some copies of your data (such as log records) could still be stored in our database but be separated from personal identifiers.
Remaining copies of your personal information might not be deleted from our backup systems for a short while since we maintain the My Instructor Platform to guard against unintentional or malicious loss and destruction.
6.5 Withdrawing Consent and Processing Restriction.
If you have given My Instructor permission to handle your personal information, you may withdraw that permission by sending a notification to My Instructor indicating which permission you are rescinding. Please be aware that the legality of any processing operations carried out in reliance on your permission before it was withdrawn is unaffected by your decision to withdraw it. Additionally, you may have the right to restrict how we use your personal information in some jurisdictions, particularly if I you disagree with the accuracy of your personal information, (ii) the processing is unlawful and you object to its deletion, or (iii) we no longer need your personal information for the purposes of the processing, but you need it to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
6.6 Refusal of Processing.
When processing is based on a legitimate interest, you may be able to demand under some countries’ laws that My Instructor and Payment Service refrain from using your personal information for those particular reasons (including profiling). Unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds for the processing or the processing is necessary for the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims, My Instructor and/or Payment Service will stop processing your personal information for these purposes if you object to the processing.
If your personal information is used by My Instructor for direct marketing, you can ask the company at any time to stop using it for those reasons by sending an email to [email protected].
6.7 Filing Complaints
You have the right to file complaints with the relevant data protection authorities regarding the data processing practices used by My Instructor and Payment Services.
6.8 Residents of California.
Except as needed or authorized by your state’s legislation, Payment Services will not divulge any of the information it gathers about you to its affiliates or other parties (both financial and non-financial).
6.9 Californians’ rights to privacy.
California law entitles California residents who use our services to request and obtain from us once a year, without charge, a list of the third parties to whom we have disclosed their personal information (if any) for those third parties’ direct marketing purposes during the immediately preceding calendar year. This list must also include the type of personal information that was disclosed to those third parties. For information on how to send such requests, see the “Contact” section. Without your prior agreement, My Instructor and Payment Services do not divulge personal information to other parties for their own direct marketing needs. Therefore, by withdrawing consent, you can stop the dissemination of your personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes.
7. SECURITY
We constantly adopt and update administrative, technological, and physical security measures to help safeguard your information against loss, destruction, modification, and unauthorized access. Firewalls, data encryption, and information access restrictions are a few measures we use to secure your information. Please get in touch with us by following the instructions in the Contact Us section below if you know or have reason to suspect that your My Instructor Account credentials have been misplaced, stolen, misappropriated, or otherwise compromised. This also applies to any actual or suspected unauthorized use of your My Instructor Account.
8. AMENDMENTS TO THIS POLICY ON PRIVACY
In compliance with this clause, My Instructor has the right to change this Privacy Policy at any moment. The “Last Updated” date will be updated at the top of this Privacy Policy whenever we make changes to it and the updated Privacy Policy will be posted on the My Instructor Platform. Additionally, we will send you an email at least thirty (30) days prior to the modification’s effective date notifying you of the change. You can deactivate your Account if you don’t agree with the updated Privacy Policy. Your continued access to or use of the My Instructor Platform will be governed by the updated Privacy Policy if you do not terminate your Account before the date the revised Privacy Policy takes effect.
9. GET IN TOUCH
You can send us an email at [email protected] if you have any concerns or questions about our Privacy Policy or My Instructor’s information handling procedures. Payment Services: [email protected] for payment-related inquiries