Over the next few months, we’re going to be making some changes we’re making to how we use data we collect about your school and your students.
These changes are designed to make our privacy and terms of use policies simpler and more age appropriate for your students and to reflect updates we’re making to the BridgeU platform and service.
To coincide with these changes, we’re also making improvements and updates to our Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use and our Privacy Notice.
We’ve designed this article to help you learn more about the changes and updates we’re making, to give you more insight into why we’re making them and to give you guidance on next steps.
When will these changes come into effect?
These changes will go into effect on Thursday 6th May, 2021 and your continued use of BridgeU’s services after this date will be subject to our updated terms.
What are these changes and why are you making them?
Over the next few months we will be improving how we recommend content and relevant events to your students in the BridgeU platform.
For example:
- We’ll share more useful articles and information that might help your students with their career planning and university applications.
- We’ll share extra information with your students related to universities they've recommended, or have shortlisted, in the BridgeU platform.
- We’ll invite your students to showcases and relevant events that we think will be useful and interesting to them.
Under our previous arrangements, BridgeU only processed personal information on behalf of your school, with your school being classed as a data controller.
For some aspects of our service, such as deciding how to recommend information, BridgeU will also now be classed as a data controller.
Additionally, we are developing partnerships with universities, in order to improve the quality and variety of content and events we provide for you and your students and to further connect your school with a wider ecosystem of international universities.
In order to build these partnerships with universities, who pay us for certain services, we may now share limited information about students with universities when the student has explicitly told us they are interested in a particular university (i.e. adding the university to their shortlist or application list).
Where we share these partners with other companies in our group we may also send this personal information to those companies for the purpose of administrative support services.
The only personal information we will share is the student’s name, date of birth and the name of your school. We will not share their email address, or any other contact details, with a university.
What is the impact of this change?
This update will not affect the existing measures we have in place to protect your information or the personal data of you, your staff or your students. There are some extra requirements that BridgeU must now meet in our new capacity as a data controller. These include:
- Notifying both the data subject and relevant authorities of any data breaches where the circumstances are relevant. Previously, a processor would only have to inform the data controller.
- Data controllers must carry out data protection impact assessments (DPIAs). We should note that, in our previous capacity as a data processor, we were already doing this, so nothing will change here.
Our new Privacy Notice also includes the contact details for our Data Protection Officer (DPO) as well as our recently appointed EU representative (see below for more information on this).
What do I need to do next?
If you, your staff and your students are happy with the changes we’ve outlined above, you don’t have to do anything.
If your students have any concerns about their information being shared with universities which they have already added to their shortlist or application list prior to the Effective date of Thursday 6th May 2021, we would encourage them to talk to you. If they don’t want their information shared with those universities, they can contact us here.
After Thursday 6th May, if your students don’t want their information to be shared with universities that they become interested in, they can choose not to add them to their shortlist.
If you or your students do have any questions about these changes, you will have a further four weeks after Thursday 6th May to get in touch with us.
What else is changing?
The end of the Brexit transition period
Now that the UK has left the European Union, the EU GDPR has been incorporated into UK law. BridgeU has now appointed an EU representative and their contact details can be found in our Privacy Notice.
Where to find more information
- We’re introducing new, simplified Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use & Privacy Notices that reflect both the change in how we will manage personal information.
- Our Terms of Use & Privacy Notice for students and their parents has been rewritten with age-appropriate, easy to understand language.
If you have any questions, need further assistance or have some general feedback for us - we’d love to hear from you! Contact our Support team via Live Chat and by emailing hi@bridge-u.com.
You can also ask our BridgeU Community, a space exclusively for our BridgeU counsellors to ask questions, share insights, provide feedback and get help not just from BridgeU, but directly from other BridgeU counsellors.