IBM SkillsBuild Data Privacy Policy (for High School Students)

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Effective: 05 Nov 2024 Privacy Statement archive

This Policy was last updated on August 14, 2024. IBM SkillsBuild, an IBM initiative (IBM) (sometimes, "we", "us" or "our") is committed to protecting the data privacy of all individual and organizational users. This policy discloses how IBM will collect, use, and disclose information that we gather related to your organization's engagement with our online learning platform (the "Services").

The Services do not include websites, mobile applications, or other services that link to another Data Privacy Policy. This Data Privacy Policy also describes the choices your organization has regarding our use of and your organization’s ability to access, correct, or delete your personal information. IBM may seek the individual and proactive consent of end-users coming from the affiliated organization for data that will enhance the learning and user experience for the IBM SkillsBuild program by other means such as by asking users to click on a button or to change a setting. In each case, consent will be entirely voluntary and IBM will provide a way for the end users to revoke their consent. If the end user is below the digital age of consent the revocation can be requested by the parent or guardian.

1. How and Why We Collect and Use Personal and Other Information

In order to operate the Services and to maximize the end-user experience, we may collect and use information, some of which may be considered personal information. In general, we use your personal information to serve you best, including to create your account, to maintain, operate, and improve the Services, to personalize your experience, and to administer the Services. Please note that you may choose not to provide us with certain information; by doing so, however, you may not be able to receive the full range of Services from us. We collect information in the following ways:

1. Information Provided By You (Student). You may provide us with information, some of which may be personal information, when you interact with the Services in the following ways:
- Account Registration—For example, students must provide us with the following information to register for the Services: name, profile picture (students may select to either have their initials appear or upload a profile photo), email address, country of residence, and the name of the student’s school. We also require users to create a member name and password. We may request additional information from users (such as your parent’s emails when applicable), but this information is optional. We specify whether information is required or optional when we request it. If your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator registers your account on your behalf, then the school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator may view or edit the account registration information; view the content of your Submissions (as defined below); and view data related to the use of the Services such as badges, courses completed, and credentials.
- Learning Records—We process your Learning Records (Transcripts). The Learning Records contain information about what learning you take and the status of the learning like in-queue, enrolled, completed.
- Digital Credentials—We may process your Digital Credentials / Badges. We store information like the name of the badge and when you earned it. Badges are processed by students on a voluntary basis. This happens when you make your badges public in the Badge provider or when you provide a badge URL when you add a personal badge manually. The badges can be removed at any time by changing the badge settings to non-public or be removing the manually added personal badges.
- Account Transfer—You will be notified if a school you attend wants to include your existing individual account under the school’s account. After your account is transferred to a school, it allows your school, SkillsBuild for Students Administrator or teachers to view and edit your registration information, view the content of your Submissions (as defined below), and view data related to the use of the Services such as badges, courses completed, and credentials. If you do not want to have your individual account registered your school, you may refuse. Likewise, if you have a school-registered account and your school is no longer affiliated with the Services, then you will have the option of transferring your account to an individual registration (and the school will no longer have the ability to view or edit your registration information, view the content of your Submissions (as defined below), or view data related to the use of the Services such as badges, courses completed, and credentials). If you do not want to have your school account registered as an individual account, you may refuse.
- Commenting & Submissions—The Services may from time to time offer areas where you and other users can post or otherwise submit comments (e.g. discussion boards), information, creative suggestions, ideas, notes, concepts, ratings, tags, contributions to learning content, assignments or other materials on or to the Services (collectively, "Submissions"). Your name and profile photo, if any, will be associated with any Submission you make and will be available to other users of the Services, including your school, IBM SkillsBuild Administrator or teacher (if you have a school registered account). You agree that your Submissions will comply with our Terms of Use. We do not monitor or review this content before it is posted, and we cannot control and are not responsible for how others may use the information contained in your Submissions. We encourage parents and student administrators to educate their children about safe internet use and to monitor their children's Submissions.
- Responding to Your Request for Information or Support—When you contact us (online or offline) in connection with a request for information, to provide you with support, or to participate in a forum, we collect information necessary to fulfill your request, to grant you access, to provide you with support, and to be able to contact you. For instance, we collect your name and contact information, details about your request and your agreement with us. We retain such information for administrative purposes, defending our rights, and in connection with our relationship with you. If you have a school registered account and wish to make any corrections or updates to the registration, you must contact your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator to have them make the corrections.
- If you use the virtual assistant (AI chatbot), we may email or securely transmit your personal information to our help system if necessary to respond to your inquiry. After the conclusion of your conversation with the assistant, we will store anonymized data about the conversation for quality assurance purposes.
- Surveys—We may occasionally invite you to fill out a survey in order to help us measure the effectiveness of our program and improve upon it. The surveys are not required for participation in the IBM SkillsBuild program. In these surveys we may ask you to provide personal information such as name or email address, as well as your personal opinions. The data you provide will be reported as aggregates, with your information removed. The companies who will have access to your answers are IBM administrators and a third-party survey platform which serves as our data processor.
- Administrators–If you are an administrator your name and email may be used for documenting administrative activities. Examples are requests for new organizations or changes on organizations or access management activities.
2. Information Provided By Your School or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator. Your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator may provide us with personal information about you (e.g., your name, name of your school, parental consent to use the Service), and, if applicable, after it has obtained your parent or legal guardian's consent to help us register your account and to provide the Services. We will combine this with the information we collect from you. Your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator can only register an account for you with your consent and, if required by law, your parent’s consent. Your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator must collect your registration information in an appropriate manner and be responsible for properly entering the information into your account. If your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator registered your account and you wish to update your account registration information to correct any inaccuracies, then you must contact your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator to modify your account registration. If you do not approve of how your account is registered or modified by your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator, you can close your account.
3. Information Used By Your School. Whether you or your school registers your account, your school cannot disclose to third parties (except your parents or legal guardians) any data relating to your use of the Services. Where you are registered through your school, your school (i) must not use or view your account other than to register or edit the account information; view the content of your Submissions; and view data related to the use of the Services for the sole of monitoring of student performance; (ii) may enable up to two (2) IBM SkillsBuild Administrators or teachers to register, monitor or track groups or classes of students; (iii) is responsible for ensuring that IBM SkillsBuild Administrators and teachers access the Services in compliance with law and our Terms of Use; and (iv) must inform us of any change in IBM SkillsBuild Administrators or teachers so that we can discontinue their access, as appropriate, and re-assign you to new IBM SkillsBuild Administrator or teacher. If you do not wish to be re-assigned, you can close your account.
4. Information Used By Your IBM SkillsBuild Administrator or Teacher. Whether you or your school registers your account, your SkillsBuild for Students Administrator or teacher cannot disclose to third parties (except your parents or legal guardians) any data relating to your use of the Services. Where you are registered through your school, your IBM SkillsBuild Administrator or teacher must (i) not use or view your account; other than view the content of your Submissions; and view data related to the use of the Services for the sole of monitoring of student performance (ii) accurately register students and update registrations to keep them current or as otherwise requested by students for accuracy; (iii) access the Services only in compliance with law and our Terms of Use; and (iv) inform us of any change in their status in supporting the Services, so that we can discontinue their access, as appropriate, and re-assign you to new IBM SkillsBuild Administrator or teacher. If you do not wish to be re-assigned, you can close your account.
5. Automatic Collection. When entering one of our websites, or using an online service, we will record information necessary to provide you with access, for the operation of the website and for us to comply with security and legal requirements in relation to operating our site, such as passwords, IP address and browser settings. We also collect information about your activities during your visit in order to personalize your website experience, such as recording your preferences and settings, and to collect statistics to help us improve and further develop our websites, products and services.
6. We may use your email address and name for sending you technical / operational emails. For example, updates of the privacy notice and terms of use, planned maintenance, application changes which may affect you.
7. Ticket / Helpdesk. Your email address or person ID may be shared in tickets with people with a need to know in order to analyze and troubleshoot problems related to your data.

2. Data Collection Technologies / Form of processing

We may contract with analytics partners to track, analyze, and report data about the use of the Services and to analyze and optimize the performance of the Services ("Analytics Partners").

Information that we collect via the data collection technologies described in this section may be linked to other information about you and may be considered personal information. We use the technologies described in this section, alone or in combination, to understand user behavior, help diagnose problems, recognize repeat visitors, and facilitate your access to and use of the Services.

1. Use of Cookies, Web Beacons, and Information Saved by Other Technologies
Third parties may use cookies and other technologies through use of our Services to support or deliver online services. The data collection technologies we and third parties use on web include but are not limited to:
- Cookies: Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website and stored within your browser. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit to that website or to another website that recognizes those cookies. Some cookies on our Services collect IP and MAC addresses, which may be considered personal information in some jurisdictions. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device. You can find more information about cookies at www.allaboutcookies.org The cookies used on this website can be categorized in the following ways:
  Category 1: Strictly Necessary Cookies
  These cookies are essential in order to enable you to use the Services and its features.
  Category 2: Performance Cookies
  These cookies collect information about how you use the Services (such as which pages you go to most often and if you receive error messages). In general, these cookies do not collect information that directly identifies you. However, some such cookies may collect GeoIP or other identifiers that may be considered personal information in some jurisdictions.
  Category 3: Functionality Cookies
  These cookies allow Services to remember choices you make such as language or the region you are in. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to customize the Services.
- Web beacons: Certain pages on the Services may contain web beacons. Web beacons allow third parties to obtain information, such as the IP address of the computer that accessed the page on which the web beacon appears, the URL of the page on which the web beacon appears, the time the page containing the web beacon was viewed, the type of browser used to view the page, and the information in cookies sent by the third party.
- Web Storage: We may use local storage, such as HTML5 localStorage and indexedDB, to enhance user experience by, for example, storing your user preferences and settings (e.g., volume/mute) in connection with animated content on the Services. Local storage is similar to browser cookies but can store data more complex than simple text. By itself, local storage cannot do anything to or with the data stored on your device.
2. Web-Related Opt Outs
Your browser, such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, may allow you to manage your cookies and local storage. Because each browser is a little different, we encourage you to check your browsers’ "Help" feature to learn how to block cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, and how to disable existing cookies. Please note, however, that without some cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of all the Services and some parts of the Services may not function properly. For more information about managing cookies, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.

3. How We Share or Disclose Your Information with Others

As a global organization offering a wide range of products and services, with business processes, management structures and technical systems that cross borders, IBM has implemented global policies, along with standards and procedures, for consistent protection of personal information. As a global company, we may share information about you with our subsidiaries world-wide and transfer it to countries in the world where we do business in accordance with this Data Privacy Policy.

Where appropriate and reasonable, IBM may also share your personal information with selected partners to help us provide you, or the school you attend, products or services, or to fulfill your requests, or with your consent. When selecting our suppliers and partners, we take reasonable steps to ensure proper data handling processes.

If IBM decides to sell, buy, merge or otherwise reorganize businesses in some countries, such a transaction may involve the disclosure of personal information to prospective or actual purchasers, or the receipt of such information from sellers. It is IBM's practice to require appropriate protection for personal information in these types of transactions.

Please be aware that in certain circumstances, personal information may be subject to disclosure to government agencies pursuant to judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process. We may also share your personal information to protect the rights or property of IBM, our business partners, suppliers or clients, and others when we have reasonable grounds to believe that such rights or property have been or could be affected.

We may share certain information with your school or IBM SkillsBuild Administrator, including but not limited to the content of your Submissions and data related to the use of the Services such as badges, courses completed, and credentials.

If you take the My Inner Genius assessment, we will share your login information with them. SkillsBuild only receives aggregate data on assessment completions, no result data is shared with SkillsBuild.

For students who are registered through the Apprentice program: PTECH at IBM Summer Internships – IBM runs reports about the completion of the learning assignments. These reports are used as one of the decision factors for choosing interns. The learner has to take the pre-work to be considered for an internship.

4. Information Security and Accuracy

We intend to protect your personal information and to maintain its accuracy. IBM implements reasonable physical, electronic, administrative, managerial and technical safeguards to help us protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure. For example, we encrypt certain personal information when we transmit such information over the Internet. We also require that our suppliers protect such information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure. Of course, we cannot guarantee that your communications with the Services will never be unlawfully intercepted or that your data will never be unlawfully accessed by third parties. Any transmission of information is at your own risk.

5. Retention Period

We will not retain personal information longer than necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it is processed, including the security of our processing complying with legal and regulatory obligations (e.g. audit, accounting and statutory retention terms), handling disputes, and for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims in the countries where we do business.

For Brazilian Data Privacy ("LGPD") purposes we will retain your personal information for ten (10) years. However, you can request to delete your personal information at any time as Section 6 below.

6. Your Information and Data Rights

You may access and change some of your personal information by editing your profile at any time. At any time, you can review, change, or delete your personal information by using the virtual assistant (chatbot) at https://students.yourlearning.ibm.com/?pageAction=openChat. To protect your privacy and security, we may require you to take certain steps or provide additional information to verify your identity before we provide any information or make corrections.

The processing of your personal information is subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"). You have the right to object to the processing on grounds relating to your specific situation. Under GDPR you may also have the right to request to have your personal information deleted or restricted and ask for portability of your personal information.

If the processing of your personal information is subject to the LGPD, in addition, you have the right to request: (i) confirmation of the existence of the treatment; (ii) anonymizing, blocking or deleting; (iii) data portability to another service or product provider; (iv) elimination of personal data processed with your consent; (v) information about public and private entities with whom the controller shared your personal information; (vi) information about the possibility of not providing your consent and the consequences of the refusal; (vii) revocation of consent. Under the LGPD, you also have the right to object to the processing when it is not based on consent and when the data is processed illegally, as well as the right to petition the National Data Protection Authority.

In the event that you consider our processing of data related your use of the Services not to be compliant with the applicable data protection laws, you can contact us or lodge a complaint:

Directly with IBM by using the virtual assistant (chatbot) at https://students.yourlearning.ibm.com/?pageAction=openChat. If you do not have an account on the SkillsBuild platform, please email us at [email protected] instead.
With the competent data protection authority. The name and contact details of the Data Protection Authorities in the European Union can be found here.

7. Student Privacy

We are committed to protecting the safety and privacy of young people using the Internet. We do not knowingly collect personal information from young persons who are below the age of digital consent applicable in their place of residence unless and until we have received consent or authorization from the proper authority for the young person to use the platform and services and for us to collect such information as required by applicable law. If you become aware that we have collected personal information from a person below the applicable age of digital consent without proper consent or authorization, please notify us promptly at [email protected]. If we become aware that a person below the applicable age of digital consent has provided us with personal information without the necessary consent or authorization, we can take steps to remove personal information in accordance with the SkillsBuild Terms of Use. In accordance with the SkillsBuild Terms of Use, persons under the age of 13 are not permitted to use the SkillsBuild platform and services.

8. International Transfer

The international footprint of IBM involves a large number of transfers of personal information between different subsidiaries, as well as to third parties located in the countries where we do business. Some countries have implemented transfer restrictions for personal information, in connection with which IBM takes various measures, including:

Where required, IBM implements Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the EU Commission, or similar contractual clauses in other jurisdictions. This includes transfers to suppliers or other third parties. You can request a copy of the EU Standard Contractual Clauses here.
IBM complies with the APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules.
IBM certified to the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks. More information can be found here.

9. How to Contact Us

If you have a question related to this Data Privacy Policy, please contact us through the virtual assistant (chatbot) at https://students.yourlearning.ibm.com/?pageAction=openChat or at:

IBM
Attn: Privacy Office (IBM SkillsBuild:for High School Students)
1 New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
U.S.A.

Please, consult the IBM Privacy Policy available at to learn https://www.ibm.com/privacy about the Controller of your personal data.

10. California Residents

If you are a California resident, you have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). This section of the Privacy Policy is an overview of the information required by the CCPA and provides instructions on how to exercise the rights granted by the CCPA.

IBM SkillsBuild Data Privacy Policy (for High School Students)

1. Use of Cookies, Web Beacons, and Information Saved by Other Technologies

2. Web-Related Opt Outs