Privacy Policy

When we ask information of you, our primary interest is to provide you with more personalized service. We respect your privacy and do not sell, rent or trade your name or personal details to other organizations except as outlined in this policy.

By providing your personal information and photo, you understand and consent to EF using your image, photo, video, and comments. This information is displayed as part of your public profile in our community and can be seen by others. You have the ability to opt-out from the use of your information by updating the choices in the Privacy section on the Account Settings page. From time to time we may use some of our customer information in our marketing materials. However, we will never do this without contacting you first and receiving your prior written and explicit consent.

The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. When you enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number) on our order forms, we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). 

If you ever discover a fraudulent charge from EF English Live on your billing statement, please contact us and you must report it immediately to your credit card provider, in accordance with their standard procedures. 

This site makes use of forums, bulletin boards and chat rooms. Please remember that any information you disclose in these areas becomes public. You should always be cautious about the amount of personal information you give to anyone in this context. 

We also insist on password verification at sign-in to protect against unauthorized access to your personal profile and course history. If you leave the computer unattended without logging out of the site, we log you out automatically after some time has passed. 

Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, billing or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.

Despite these security procedures and practices, as is the case with all computer networks connected to the Internet, EF English Live cannot guarantee the security of your personal information or any other information provided over the Internet and will not be responsible for breaches of security.

No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

To send you an Email English lesson every day, we would, of course, need to know your email address. As an Email English subscriber, you will be added to our mailing list to receive occasional emails about service updates, special offers, and promotions from EF English Live and other companies within the EF group of companies.

You have the ability to unsubscribe from these emails at anytime, by simply clicking on the unsubscribe link included at the bottom of each email we send. 

We will send you strictly service-related announcements on rare occasions when it is necessary to do so. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email. 

Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to deactivate your account.

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children. This and all of our websites are general audience sites and not designed or intended to attract children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from any person we actually know is under the age of 13, nor do we send them requests for personal information, unless we first obtain permission from that child's parent or legal guardian.

EF English Live offers English courses online at competitive prices. To take one of these courses, enjoy a free trial or become a user of our community services, you need to become a member of EF English Live. During registration we collect information such as your name and email address. We also ask for demographic information (such as age and gender) in order for you to create a profile. You may also be asked to supply us with credit card information, so that you can pay for the services you request. This information is encrypted on a secure server. As a member, you will be added to our mailing list to receive occasional emails about service information, special offers, and promotions from EF English Live and other companies within the EF group of companies.

If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, amend or delete your personal information by making the change on our member information page, by contacting our Customer Support or by contacting us by telephone or postal mail at the contact information listed below. We will respond to your request to access your personal information within 30 days. 

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Note that your free account remains active even if your subscription to our paid services has expired.

Editing your profile. You may change your profile at any time by updating the My Profile page in our Community. Your changes will be updated immediately.

Deleting or deactivating your profile. You may delete or deactivate your profile at any time by contacting our Customer Service team.

Removal of an unauthorized profile. If you wish to request the removal of an unauthorized profile you may do so by contacting our Customer Service team.

You may change the privacy settings by updating the Privacy section of the account settings. Changing your privacy settings will allow you to control who is able to see information about you such as your personal information, your photo, your online status, and your status updates.

• We share your personal information with other companies within the EF group of companies so that these companies can market their products or services to you. For a complete picture of what EF Products and Services are available, please visit www.ef.com. The only information we share with other companies within the EF group of companies is your name, age group, email address, and country. If you do not want us to share your personal information with these companies, contact our Customer Service team.

• We may provide your personal information to companies that provide services to help us with our business activities such as processing your payment or offering customer service. These companies are authorized to use your personal information only as necessary to provide these services to us
• We may also disclose your personal information
  • as required by law, such as to comply with a subpoena, or similar legal process
  • when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud, or respond to a government request,
  • if EF English Live is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Web site of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your personal information,
  • to any other third party with your prior consent to do so.
  •  

"Cookies" are small pieces of information that we store on your computer's browser or hard drive. We and our partners use cookies to remember personal information when you visit our website. For example, if you choose the view our site in French we will store that information in your cookie so we can show you our site in French the next time you visit. We also use them to store your login ID to make it easier for you to login to our site. Most browsers allow you the option of preventing cookies from being stored on your computer, though doing so will cause you to lose many of the benefits of EF English Live.

We use both session ID cookies and persistent cookies. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time.

We use the service of a third party tracking utility company to track the behavior of visitors to our site. However, we do not have access to or control over their cookies. The information we collect through our third party tracking utility company is completely anonymous and is used to improve our services and marketing efforts.

As is true of most websites, we gather some information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, browser type and language, Internet service provider (ISP), referring and exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information to understand and analyze trends, to administer the site, to learn about user behavior on the site, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better manage content on our site by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information. 

We use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. 

In some of our email messages, we use a “click-through URL” linked to content on the EF English Live website. When customers click one of these URLs, they pass through a separate web server before arriving at the destination page on our website. We track this click-through data to help us determine interest in particular topics and measure the effectiveness of our customer communications. If you prefer not to be tracked in this way, you should not click text or graphic links in the email messages.

We may provide you the opportunity to participate in quizzes or contests on our site. If you participate, we will request certain personally identifiable information from you. Participation in these quizzes and contests is completely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The requested information typically includes contact information (such as name and email address), and demographic information (such as zip code).

We may use this information to personalize our communications to you and to suggest more relevant products and services.

Our Web site offers publicly accessible blogs or community forums.You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them. To request removal of your personal information from our blog or community forum, contact us. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your personal information, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

This site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that EF English Live is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any website that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies only to information collected by the EF English Live website.

We post customer testimonials on our web site which may contain personally identifiable information. We do obtain the customer's consent via email prior to posting the testimonial to post their name along with their testimonial. If you wish to request to have your testimonial removed you contact our Customer Service.

If you decide to refer a friend to our site as part of EF English Live contests or other promotions, we ask you for the friend's email address and give you the option of sending them a personal message. EF English Live will then send a one-time, automatically generated email message inviting your friend to visit our site. EF English Live stores the email address in your personal file solely for the purpose of crediting you if your friend becomes a member. Your friend may contact us to request that we remove this information from our database.

We also utilize an import contacts feature to help you keep in touch with your contacts and other members. We make it easy for you to invite people from your email address books to join you on our Site. At your request we will search your email address book to help you import your contacts to our site. When we do this, we do not store any of your contacts' information our our servers. We may send an email on your behalf to your contacts, but we do not keep their email address or any other information until they register for our site themselves.

The EF English Live privacy policy is subject to change. If we decide to change the way we collect, use or share information, we will take commercially reasonable steps to notify members by way of an email that explains the changes and gives them the choice as to whether or not we may use their information in the new manner. If you have any questions about this policy statement, or about any of EF English Live's other policies and practices, please contact us here or at EF English Live, Haldenstrasse 4, 6006 Luzerne, CH.