Collection and Use of Personal Information

Personal information is data that can be used to identify or contact a single person.

You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with American Laser Study Club (ALSC) or an affiliated company. The ALSC and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising. You are not required to provide the personal information that we have requested, but, if you chose not to do so, in many cases we will not be able to provide you with our products or services or respond to any queries you may have.

Here are some examples of the types of personal information the ALSC may collect and how we may use it:

What personal information we collect

When you create an ALSC ID, purchase a product, register for a class at the ALSC Online Store, connect to our services, contact us or participate in an online survey, we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, device identifiers, IP address, location information, and credit card information.

When you share your content with friends using ALSC products, send products, or invite others to participate in ALSC services or forums, the ALSC may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.

ALSC will use such information to fulfill your requests, provide the relevant product or service, or for anti-fraud purposes.

How we use your personal information

We may process your personal information for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy with your consent, for compliance with a legal obligation to which the ALSC is subject or when we have assessed it is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the ALSC or a third party to whom it may be necessary to disclose information.

The personal information we collect allows us to keep you posted on the ALSC’s latest product announcements and upcoming events. If you don’t want to be on our mailing list, you can opt-out anytime by updating your preferences.

We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes. We may also use your personal information for account and network security purposes to protect our services for the benefit of all our users. Where we use your information for anti-fraud purposes it arises from the conduct of an online transaction with us. We limit our uses of data for anti-fraud purposes to those which are strictly necessary and within our assessed legitimate interests to protect our customers and our services. For certain online transactions, we may also validate the information provided by you with publicly accessible sources.

We may use your personal information, including date of birth, to verify identity, assist with identification of users, and to determine appropriate services. For example, we may use date of birth to determine the age of ALSC ID account holders.

From time to time, we may use your personal information to send important notices, such as communications about purchases and changes to our terms, conditions, and policies. Because this information is important to your interaction with the ALSC, you may not opt-out of receiving these communications.

We may also use personal information for internal purposes such as auditing, data analysis, and research to improve the ALSC’s products, services, and customer communications.

If you enter into a sweepstake, contest, or similar promotion we may use the information you provide to administer those programs.

Source of your personal information where they are not collected from you

We may have received your personal information from other persons if that person has shared their content with you using ALSC products, sent products, or invited you to participate in ALSC services or forums. We may also validate the information provided by you when creating an ALSC ID with a third party for security and fraud prevention purposes.

Collection and Use of Non-Personal Information

We also collect data in a form that does not, on its own, permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:

We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.

We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure the quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address.

With your explicit consent, we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps.

If we do combine non-personal information with personal information the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.

Cookies and Other Technologies

A cookie is a small data file that is placed on the hard drive of your computer when you visit a website. The ALSC’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use “cookies” and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches. We treat information collected by cookies and other technologies as non-personal information. However, to the extent that Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or similar identifiers are considered personal information by local law, we also treat these identifiers as personal information. Similarly, to the extent that non-personal information is combined with personal information, we treat the combined information as personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.

The ALSC and our partners also use cookies and other technologies to remember personal information when you use our website, online services, and applications. Our goal in these cases is to make your experience with the ALSC more convenient and personal. For example, knowing your first name lets us welcome you the next time you visit the ALSC Online Store. Knowing your country and language — and if you are an educator, your school — helps us provide a customized and more useful shopping experience. Knowing someone using your computer or device has shopped for a certain product or used a particular service helps us make our advertising and email communications more relevant to your interests. And knowing your contact information, hardware identifiers, and information about your computer or device helps us personalize your operating system and provide you with better customer service.

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some serviced and functionalities may not work.

Activate Marketing-Cookies

As is true of most internet services, 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 websites and applications, 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, to improve our product and services, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. The ALSC may use this information in our marketing and advertising services.

In some of our email messages, we use a “click-through URL” linked to content on the ALSC 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.

Pixel tags enable us to send email messages in a format that customers can read, and they tell us whether mail has been opened. We may use this information to reduce or eliminate messages sent to customers.

Third-party Cookies

A number of our partners are placing third-party cookies on this website. These services are:

Disclosure to Third Parties

At times the ALSC may make certain personal information available to strategic partners that work with the ALSC to provide products and services, or that help the ALSC market to customers. Personal information will only be shared by the ALSC to provide or improve our products, services, and advertising; it will not be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes.

Service Providers. The ALSC shares personal information with companies who provide services such as information processing, fulfilling customer orders, delivering products to you, managing and enhancing customer data, providing customer service, assessing your interest in our products and services, and conducting customer research or satisfaction surveys. These companies are obligated to protect your information and may be located wherever ALSC operates.

Others. It may be necessary — by law, legal process, litigation, and/or requests from public and governmental authorities within or outside your country of residence — for the ALSC to disclose your personal information. We may also disclose information about you if we determine that for purposes of national security, law enforcement, or other issues of public importance, disclosure is necessary or appropriate.

We may also disclose information about you if we determine that disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce our Website Terms of Use or protect our operations or users. Additionally, in the event of a reorganization, merger, or sale we may transfer any and all personal information we collect to the relevant third party.

Protection of Personal Information

The ALSC takes the security of your personal information very seriously. The ALSC online services such as the ALSC Online Store protect your personal information during transit using encryption such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). SSL encrypts your form submissions so only ALSC is able to decode your information.

When you use some ALSC products, services, or applications or post on an ALSC forum, chat room, or social networking service, the personal information and content you share is visible to other users and can be read, collected, or used by them. You are responsible for the personal information you choose to share or submit in these instances. For example, if you list your name and email address in a forum posting, that information is public. Please take care when using these features.

Integrity and Retention of Personal Information

The ALSC makes it easy for you to keep your personal information accurate, complete, and up to date. We will retain your personal information for the period necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy and our service specific privacy summaries. When assessing these periods we carefully examine our need to collect personal information at all, and if we establish a relevant need we only retain it for the shortest possible period to realize the purpose of collection unless a longer retention period is required by law.

Access to Personal Information

You can help ensure that your contact information and preferences are accurate, complete, and up to date by signing in to your ALSC ID account page. For other personal information we hold, we will provide you with access (including a copy) for any purpose including to request that we correct the data if it is inaccurate or delete the data if ALSC is not required to retain it by law or for legitimate business purposes. We may decline to process requests that are frivolous, vexatious, jeopardize the privacy of others, are extremely impractical, or for which access is not otherwise required by local law. We may also decline aspects of deletion or access requests if we believe doing so would undermine our legitimate use of data for anti-fraud and security purposes as described earlier.

Children & Minors

We do not knowingly allow minors to use any of our online services. If you are a parent and become aware that your child has provided us with information, please contact us, and we work with you to address the issue. If we learn that we have collected the personal information of a child under 13, or equivalent minimum age depending on jurisdiction, outside the above circumstance es we will take steps to delete the information as soon as possible.

Third-Party Sites and Services

The ALSC websites, products, applications, and services may contain links to third-party websites, products, and services. Our products and services may also use or offer products or services from third parties. The ALSC is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such websites. Information collected by third parties, which may include such things as location data or contact details, is governed by their privacy practices. We encourage you to learn about the privacy practices of those third parties.

Our Companywide Commitment to Your Privacy

To make sure your personal information is secure, we communicate our privacy and security guidelines to ALSC employees and strictly enforce privacy safeguards within the company.

If you have any questions or concerns about the ALSC’s Privacy Policy or data processing, please contact us.

The ALSC may update its Privacy Policies from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way, a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated Privacy Policy.

The ALSC’s Privacy Policies last updated on June 7, 2023.