PRIVACY POLICY

What does this Privacy Policy cover?

Taking care of your information is important to us.  This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information on the Agora site and what steps we take to protect your personal information. 

Please read our Privacy Policy carefully before using our site and refer back to it regularly to check for updates. Remember, by accessing and using this site, you agree to all provisions of this Privacy Policy. 

What is Personal Information?

For the purposes of this policy, “Personal Information” is any information that enables us to identify you, directly or indirectly, by reference to any identifiers such as your name, address, phone number, email address, identification number, location data, online identifier or one or more factors specific to you as an individual. 

Any Personal Information you post publicly can be viewed by others. We are not responsible for what others might do with such information, so please remember to be careful with what you post. If you post Personal Information on this site, we will remove it. If you see that someone else has done so, please contact the Agora team immediately so that we can remove such information. 

In brief: How do we protect your Personal Information?

• We will not use your Personal Information other than for the purposes described in this policy.

• We will not sell your Personal Information.

• We will not keep your Personal Information for longer than is necessary for the stated purposes except to the extent required by law.

• We will take all reasonable and necessary technical and organizational measures to protect your Personal Information. For example, we use third parties to host our website and provide services to us. We have implemented the necessary contractual arrangements to ensure the confidentiality and security of your personal data we share with them.

1. WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT FROM YOU?

Account Information

In order to create an account and access this site, certain types of Personal Information will be captured, such as name, city/town, country, e-mail address, username and password. Together with other types of Personal Information collected voluntarily from you (see below regarding such collection), this data will be used to create and maintain your user profile. Only the starred fields are mandatory when creating your account.  We encourage users to use their real name as username as it will be used to issue your personalized certificates of completion for Agora courses. 

For UNICEF users, the following details are fed into Agora from other UNICEF systems: name, e-mail address, duty station, gender, date of birth, organizational unit, division, region, country, contract dates, contract type, position, gender, manager’s position.

Additional data such as interests, profile picture, or additional contact details or social profiles can optionally be added by users on their profile. All of these details are optional. 

Agora also hosts your personal learning record (i.e. courses you have enrolled in and/or completed), where your activities and achievements are saved.

User-Generated Content

We collect any information that you provide to us when you write a comment through a chat session or discussion forums or submit feedback, or post any other sort of content on this site.

Communications

If you contact us directly, we may receive additional information about you. For example, when you contact our Agora team, we may receive your name, email address, phone number, the contents of a message or attachments that you may send to us, and other information you choose to provide. We remind you to never communicate your password by email, even with the Agora team or another UNICEF staff member. 

Awards, Contests, Surveys, Events and Newsletters

We may collect information from you when you participate in awards, contest, surveys, or events posted on this site or when you sign up for our newsletters. 

If you are a UNICEF User, Agora may receive Personal Information about you when you access other sites operated by Agora or UNICEF or through third party sites that provide a service to Agora or connect to Agora education resources. 

2. HOW DO WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will use your Personal Information only for the purposes indicated below and only when it is strictly necessary: 

· Communicate with you (e.g. updates and system notifications) to provide you with services, such as “password reset” options;

· Inform you about latest developments and offerings from Agora. You may unsubscribe from any of these communications;

· Recommend learning opportunities that are relevant to a learner’s context, preferences and needs;

· Establish contact between you and other learners, if you choose to turn on this function in your account;

· Help human resource departments of UNICEF and other partner institutions to keep track of training programmes of their staff;

· Enforce our Terms of Use, to defend our legal rights, and to comply with our legal obligations and policies. 

3. HOW DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We generally do not share your Personal Information. We may share it only for the purposes indicated below and only when it is strictly necessary.

Why and how do we share your Personal Information?

· To individual owners of courses offered on Agora, interesting in knowing more about the use of the courses they developed (e.g. number of enrollments, profile of users, their location). Most of the time this data will be aggregated and anonymized;   

· To human resources representatives of partner institutions to encourage their staff members to complete certain courses on Agora; 

· We may share your learning activity and learning records with your line manager(s), system administrators and course tutors or facilitators;

· To third parties, such as servers and databases providers, for storage purposes;

· We may also disclose your Personal Information with your permission. We may seek your permission in various ways. For example, we may present you with an “opt-in” prompt when you set up an account or access certain content.

We will only transfer your Personal Information to trusted third parties who provide sufficient guarantees that your Personal Information will be kept secure. 

Some of the third parties mentioned in this Privacy Policy may be located in countries outside your country of residence. Where we transfer your Personal Information outside of your country, we take steps to ensure that your Personal Information is treated securely. You agree to us handling your Personal Information in the manner set out in this Privacy Policy and that the obligations imposed by privacy laws in other countries may be less stringent than the requirements established by the privacy laws in your country.  Where we transfer your Personal Information internationally we will take reasonable steps to ensure that your Personal Information is treated securely and the means of transfer provides adequate safeguards.

We will never sell your Personal Information.

Aggregate Data

We may de-identify (i.e. anonymize), aggregate and share information collected through the site to third party providers for statistical analysis and other lawful purpose, including in research studies, publications, help trainers understand the profile of the learners, better understand the usage of the Agora services and improve the operation of the site. 

4. HOW CAN YOU CONTROL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

You can edit most of your profile details at any time by logging into your account and selecting account management. UNICEF users can only edit selected fields. 

You can request the deletion of your account by contacting Agora.

Note that most forum posts can only be edited within a limited timeframe. If you wish to see a post deleted after that, please contact us with the URL of the forum page and details of the post. 

Please note that we have no control over reposts of your content on other sites. Therefore, if we delete your Personal Information from our servers it does not mean that your information will be deleted from the Internet. 

You can delete cookies at any time – we however encourage you to not do so in the middle of a session to avoid issues with course progress or completion tracking. Deleting Agora cookies will terminate your session and you will need to authenticate again to continue using the site. 

If you decide at any time that you no longer wish to receive marketing communications from us, please follow the unsubscribe instructions provided in any of the communications. Please be aware that, even after you opt-out from receiving marketing communications from us, you may continue to receive administrative messages regarding this site.

5. HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will only use and store your Personal Information for so long as it is required for the purposes it was collected for and as specified in UNICEF’s retention policy. We use your Personal Information as necessary to comply with our obligations, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements and rights. Otherwise, we will seek to delete your Personal Information within a 2 month timeframe upon your written request.

6. IS THE AGORA WEBSITE SECURED?

We are committed to protecting your Personal Information through the implementation of encryption methods, secured login, firewalls, regular security patches and antivirus. Unfortunately, such precautions may not be sufficient to guarantee the complete security of your data. It is always a possibility that third parties may unlawfully intercept or access your Personal Information or private communications. So, although we work extremely hard to safeguard your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee that your information or communications will always remain private. 

We also ask that you do your part to safeguard your Personal Information. Select and protect your password appropriately. Limit access to your account and sign out of your account once you have finished using this site. Also, be careful about connecting to the site using an insecure Wi-Fi. Public Wi-Fi, for example, is inherently insecure — so be cautious.

Should you have reasons to question the integrity of this site or your data, please do promptly contact us. Ways to contact us are at the bottom of this page.

7. WHAT ABOUT LINKS TO THIRD-PARTY SITES REFERENCED OR EMBEDDED ON THE SITE?

This site contains links to other websites that are not covered by this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies only to the processing of your Personal Information on this site. It does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information, or other practices of any third parties, including any third party operating any site or service to which this site links. The inclusion of a link on this site does not imply endorsement of the linked site or service by us. Please be aware that the terms of this Privacy Policy do not apply to these outside websites or content, or to any collection of data after you click on links to such outside websites.

8.  NOTIFICATIONS OF CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

If we make changes to our privacy practices, we will post a notification to this site alerting that the Privacy Policy has been amended. Such changes will be effective immediately upon posting them to this site. For this reason, we encourage you to check our Privacy Policy frequently.  The “Last Updated” date at the bottom of this page indicates when this Privacy Policy was last revised. Your continued use of this site following these changes means that you accept the revised Privacy Policy.

9. COOKIES

When you use this site, we and our third-party service providers may collect information about you and your device through automated means, such as cookies and web server logs. Cookies are small text files which identify your computer, phone, and other devices to our server. By using this site, you consent to the placement of cookies and similar technologies in your browser in accordance with this Privacy Policy. The information collected in this manner includes your IP address, network location, what browser you are using, device IDs and characteristics, operating system version, language preferences, referring URLs, and information about the usage of this site.

We use this information, for example, to ensure that the site functions properly, to determine how many users have visited certain pages, or to prevent fraud. We use IP address information to derive location of the device used to access the site. We also work with analytics providers, such as Google Analytics which use cookies and similar technologies to collect and analyze information about use of the site and report on activities and trends. This service may also collect information about the use of other websites, apps, and online resources. You can learn more about Google’s practices by going  to https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/. 

The table below identifies the cookies we may use on this site and explains the purposes for which they are used.  Please note that we may update the information contained in this table from time to time. 

Provider Name Purpose

Google Analytics _ga Understands and tracks engagement of users. The GA cookie we use is anonymous.

UNICEF (Agora) MDL_SSP_AuthToken

MDL_SSP_SessID

TotaraSession Used to manage authentication to the site and details and preferences related to your visit (e.g. selected language)

Needed to use the site

UNICEF 

(Agora) _pk_id.22.4bb3 (or similar) 

Local Storage Used to save preferences from one visit to another.

Can be refused and/or deleted via the browser interface. 

UNICEF 

(Agora wiki) JSESSIONID

language Used to manage authentication to the Agora wiki site.

Used to record language settings selected.

Needed to use the wiki site

If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, most browsers allow you to automatically decline cookies or be given the choice of declining or accepting the transfer to your computer of a particular cookie (or cookies) from a particular site. You may also wish to refer to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/index.html for more general information about cookies.  If, however, you do not accept the UNICEF’s cookies, you may experience some inconvenience in your use of this site.  In order to use the site, you will need to ensure that your browser is configured to accept cookies from the site. You can delete cookies after each visit, if you wish to.

10.  CONTACT US

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact the Agora team. Information about how to contact us is described at the bottom of every page.

Last Updated: 29 June 2023