Privacy Statement:
direct-ed (a subsidiary of TQ Education & Training Ltd) are committed to respecting and protecting your privacy. Once you have registered and provide us personally identifiable information (any information by which you can be identified), you can be assured that it will only be used to support your customer relationship with direct-ed. This statement regarding the privacy of the personally identifiable information you provide online covers the five foundation principles of fair information: Awareness, Choice, Accuracy & Access, Security, and Oversight.

For your protection, we are registered under the Data Protection Act 1998 and have given all appropriate notifications to the Data Protection Commissioner.

Awareness:
direct-ed provides this Online Privacy Statement to make you aware of our privacy policy, practices and of the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and from the bottom of every direct-ed.com web page.

What we collect:
On the direct-ed web site, you can order online learning material, make requests, and register to receive materials. The types of personal information collected at these pages are name, contact and billing information, transaction, and credit card information.

In order to tailor our subsequent communications to you and continuously improve our products and services (including registration), we may also ask you to provide us with information regarding your personal or professional interests, demographics, experience with our products, and more detailed contact preferences.

Some direct-ed.com web pages use cookies, a data analysis technique. To learn more, click here. How direct-ed uses cookies.

How we use it:
direct-ed uses your information to better understand your needs and provide you with better service. Specifically, we use your information to help you complete a transaction, access the learning management system and course material, to communicate back to you, to update you on service and benefits, and to personalise our web site for you. Where applicable credit card numbers are used only for payment processing and are not retained for other purposes.

From time to time, we may also use your information to contact you for market research or to provide you with marketing information we think would be of particular interest. At a minimum, we will always give you the opportunity to opt out of receiving such direct marketing or market research contact. We will also follow local requirements, such as allowing you to opt in before receiving unsolicited contact, where applicable.

Who we share it with:
direct-ed will not sell, rent, or lease your personally identifiable information to others. Unless we have your permission or are required by law, we will only share the personal data you provide online with other direct-ed entities and/or business partners who are acting on our behalf for the uses described in "how we use it". Such direct-ed entities and/or business partners, including those in the United States and/or any other countries, are governed by our privacy policies with respect to the use of this data and are bound by the appropriate confidentiality agreements.

Choice:
direct-ed will not use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us online in ways unrelated to the ones described above without first letting you know and offering you a choice. As previously stated, we will also provide you the opportunity to let us know if you do not wish to receive unsolicited direct marketing materials from us and we will do everything we can to honor such requests. Local country laws and policies are applied where they differ from those in the U.S.

Your permission is always secured first, should we ever share your information with third parties that are not acting on our behalf and governed by our privacy policy.

Accuracy & Access:
direct-ed strives to keep your personally identifiable information accurate. We will provide you with access to your information, including making every effort to provide you with online access to your registration data so that you may view, update or correct your information at the direct-ed site where it was submitted. To protect your privacy and security, we will also take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting you access or enabling you to make corrections. To access your personally identifiable information, return to the web page where you originally entered it and follow the instructions on that web page. The LMS and material area of direct-ed's web site will limit access to specific individuals through the use of passwords and through providing personal data.

Links to third party web sites on the site are provided solely as a convenience to you. direct-ed has not reviewed all of these third party sites and does not control and is not responsible for any of these sites, their content or their privacy policy. Thus, direct-ed does not endorse or make any representations about them, or any information, software or other products or materials found there, or any results that may be obtained from using them. If you decide to access any of the third party sites linked to this site, you do so at your own risk.

Security:
direct-ed is committed to ensuring the security of your information. To prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the appropriate use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online. We use encryption when collecting or transferring sensitive data such as credit card information.

Oversight:
If you have comments or questions about our privacy policy, please complete the feedback form.

How direct-ed uses cookies:
A cookie is a piece of text asking permission to be placed on your computer's hard drive. If you agree, then your browser adds the text in a small file. The purpose of a cookie is to help us analyse web traffic or let us know when you visit a particular site. Cookies allow a web application to respond to you as an individual. By gathering and remembering information about your preferences, the web application can tailor its operation to your needs, likes and dislikes. For example, when you visit an electronic store, a cookie makes it easy to shop by allowing you to drop things into a shopping cart; the cart itself is not the cookie, the cookie is placed on your hard drive and keeps track of your cart versus others' in use at the same time.

direct-ed uses traffic log cookies to identify what pages are being used and which ones aren't. This helps us aggregate and analyse data about web page traffic and make improvements to the direct-ed.com web site to better meet customer needs. In this case, direct-ed uses this information only for statistical analysis purposes and then the data is removed from the system. Denial of a traffic log cookie should not prevent you from using one of these sites.

Overall, cookies help us give you a better web site to use, by letting us monitor what's working and what isn't through site traffic analysis. direct-ed wants to be sure you understand that accepting a cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any personal information about you, other than the data you chose to share with us. This practice is strictly enforced. We know that a lot of people have concerns about cookies, but in talking with many of our customers, we believe that the benefit we both gain from their proper use is worthwhile. We value the relationships we have with our customers, so we respect these concerns. direct-ed works to continuously improve the direct-ed.com web experience and personal data privacy policy and practices.

You may set your web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) to notify you of cookie placement requests or decline cookies completely. You can delete the files that contains cookies; those files are stored as part of your internet browser.