Privacy Policy

by

Your privacy is important to us. At College Fashion, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use our website.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website as “Services.” And if you’d like to learn more about the controller of information about you, take a look at the section below on Controllers and Responsible Companies.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

  • Basic Information for Comments, Giveaways, and Email Subscriptions: We ask for basic information from you in order to allow you to comment on our blog posts, enter our giveaways, and receive our email communications. For example, we require individuals who sign up for our email list to provide their full name and email address–and that’s it. When you comment on a blog post, we require your name (or a chosen username) and email address. When you enter a giveaway, we collect your name, email address, and any additional information you choose to submit in order to enter the giveaway (e.g. an answer to a poll, your Instagram username should you choose to provide it).
  • Commenting Public Profile Information: If you have a Disqus account, we have access to the information that you provide for your public Disqus profile. For example, if you have a Disqus account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include. (For more information on Disqus, see Disqus’ privacy policy.)
  • Communications With Us (Hi!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, email us an Ask CF fashion question, or post in our public comments section.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information.
  • Usage Information: We collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, interactions with our search form, and other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
  • Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
  • Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. College Fashion uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

  • To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  • To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals clicked on a blog post after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to access our Services after a certain length of time;
  • To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of College Fashion and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  • To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by College Fashion and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, notify you that you’ve won a giveaway, or keep you up to date on College Fashion and our Services; and
  • To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who live in a specific area or have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie section below.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

  • Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  • Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you), those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that allow you to communicate with us (like Disqus, which provides our commenting system), and those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers, e.g. Google Analytics). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
  • Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of College Fashion LLC, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that College Fashion goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
  • Published Questions or Requests: And if you send us a request or question (for example, via a email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like a photo you send to us to publish on the website or other content that you make public on this website are all available to others.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to College Fashion’s website, such as the visitor’s browser type and operating system, for approximately 26 months (via Google Analytics). We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to College Fashion’s website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Limit the Information that You Provide: If you visit our website, you can choose not to provide the optional account information or profile information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services–for example, commenting on blog posts–may not be accessible.
  • Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile website.
  • Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages via email from us. Just follow the “unsubscribe” instructions at the bottom of each email.
  • Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, College Fashion does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using College Fashion’s website, with the drawback that certain features of College Fashion’s website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer via our third party partners (e.g. on Disqus’ website for commenting account data, on Mailchimp for email, and on the Rafflecopter widgets for giveaways), but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

College Fashion’s Services are worldwide. We are the controller of personal information, which means that we are the company responsible for processing that information.

The mailing address of the controller for processing your personal information is below:

College Fashion LLC,PO Box 850674, Braintree, MA 02185

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because College Fashion’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our company, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

  • In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield; or
  • In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, check out Network Advertising Initiative’s Opt-Out page. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by College Fashion and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers.

Cookies

Cookies are parcels of data containing information about your web usage that are stored on your computer. College Fashion uses cookies to remember who you are if you’ve left a comment here before, and also to track statistics such as if you have answered a specific poll question yet or not. College Fashion does allow third-party advertisers like Google Adsense to set and access their cookies on your computer. College Fashion does not have control over cookies sent and accessed by third-party sites, and each advertiser’s unique privacy policy applies to their use. If you wish to block cookies, you can do so using your browser’s privacy settings. You can also use your browser’s privacy settings to delete cookies at any time.

College Fashion may also sometimes use the DoubleClick DART cookie for Google Adsense. This cookie enables Google to serve ads of interest to you based on information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visit to College Fashion and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of this cookie by viewing the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.1)

The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The “help” feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at All About Cookies.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

  • IP Address
  • Operating System type
  • Operating System version
  • Device Type
  • Language of the website
  • Web browser type
  • Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit National Advertising Initiative opt out page. You may also visit Digital Advertising Alliance website and Network Advertising Initiative website to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at Digital Advertising Alliance’s AppChoices app to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please visit Mediavine Partners.

College Fashion contains links to other sites. This site and its owner(s) are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such web sites. Please refer to those sites privacy policies for their information.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, College Fashion may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. College Fashion encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Creative Commons Sharealike License

Thanks to our friends at Automattic who made their privacy policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license.