Privacy Policy

Thank you for visiting Columbia University School of Social Work’s (CUSSW) website. Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy, we've developed this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used within our sites and services. Please read on for more details about our privacy policy.

Information we collect and how we use it

Personal Information

You may choose to provide personal information (such as your name, address, telephone number and email address) on this web site. Here are some of the ways you may provide the information and the types of information you may submit. We also tell you how we may use the information.

• Contact Us
  If you email us through the “Contact Us” link on this site, we ask you for information such as your name and email address so we can respond to your questions and comments. You may choose to provide additional information as well.
• E-mail Alerts
  If you would like to receive news and events alerts from CUSSW, we ask for your name and email address so we can send you the news alerts.
• Questionnaires and Surveys
  We occasionally may ask visitors to our web site to complete online surveys and opinion polls about their activities, attitudes and interests. These surveys help us serve you better and improve the usefulness of our site. In conducting these surveys we may ask you for your name and email address. We do not keep any personal information about you in connection with your participation in a survey unless you specifically agree to provide that information.

The Columbia University School of Social Work website may contain e-mail services, news feeds, forums, communities, web pages, calendars, and/or other message or communication services designed to enable you to communicate with others. The information we collect in connection with these services is used to provide an interactive experience. We may use the information you provide about yourself to fulfill your requests for our products, programs, and services, to respond to your inquiries about our offerings, and to offer you other products, programs or services that we believe may be of interest to you. We sometimes use this information to communicate with you, such as to notify you when we make changes to our services, to fulfill a request by you, or to contact you about your account with us. Most of our communications provide an "opt-out" feature.

Non-Personal Information

We collect certain aggregate and non-personal information when you visit this website. Aggregate and non-personal information does not relate to a single identifiable visitor. It tells us such things as how many users visited our site and the pages accessed. By collecting this information, we learn how to best tailor our web site to our visitors. We collect this information either through “cookie” technology or with “web beacons,” as explained below.

• Cookies
  To enhance and personalize your experience, some of our web pages use cookies. Cookies are text files that your web browser places on your computer's hard drive to store your preferences. When using cookies, we do not store personally identifiable information within the cookie. 
• Web Beacons
  Certain pages on our site contain “web beacons” (also known as Internet tags, pixel tags and clear GIFs). These web beacons allow third parties to obtain information such as the IP address of the computer that downloaded the page on which the beacon appears, the URL of the page on which the beacon appears, the time the page containing the beacon was viewed, the type of browser used to view the page, and the information in cookies set by the third party. We use log files to store the data that is collected through web beacons. With both cookies and web beacon technology, the information that we collect and share is anonymous and not personally identifiable. It does not contain your name, address, telephone number, or email address. For more information about Google Analytics , including information about how to opt out of these technologies, go to www.google-analytics.com.

Information We Share

We do not sell, rent or otherwise disclose personal information about our website visitors, except as described here. We may share information provided by our visitors to the CUSSW website with service providers retained to perform services by CUSSW or Columbia University. These service providers are contractually restricted from using or disclosing the information except as necessary to perform services on our behalf or to comply with legal requirements. In addition, we may disclose information about you (i) if we are required to do so by law or legal process, (ii) to law enforcement authorities or other government officials, or (iii) to protect the rights, property, or safety of CUSSW, Columbia University, our users, or others.

Links to Other Sites

We provide links to other websites for your convenience and information. These sites may have their own privacy statements in place, which we recommend you review if you visit any linked web sites. We are not responsible for the content of linked sites or any use of the sites.

Children’s Privacy

This website is not directed to children under the age of thirteen and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of thirteen on the site. If we become aware that we have inadvertently received personal information from a visitor under the age of thirteen on the site, we will delete the information from our records.

How We Protect Personal Information

We maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect against unauthorized disclosure, use, alteration or destruction of the personal information you provide on the CUSSW website. We use secure socket layer (SSL) technology to help keep the personal information you provide on this site secure.

Although we take appropriate measures to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures of information, we cannot assure you that personally identifiable information that we collect will never be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this privacy policy. We urge you to protect your own privacy. We recommend that you do not share any account information or passwords used to access our website or service(s).

Updates to Our Privacy Statement

This Privacy Statement may be updated periodically and without prior notice to you to reflect changes in our online information practices. We will post a prominent notice on this website to notify you of any significant changes to our Privacy Statement and indicate at the top of the statement when it was most recently updated.

How to Contact Us

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Statement, or if you would like us to update information we have about you or your preferences, please contact us:

Columbia University School of Social Work
Office of Communications
1255 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
212-851-2300
socialwork@columbia.edu