6xue.info is the brand name under which information content, software, and services are provided by ourselves, Beijing Bamboo Technologies, to the operator of the website at the 6xue.info domain (“our site”) and to our other partners. Bamboo Technologies and its parent company were founded by two Americans in Beijing in 2005 and are dedicated to providing reliable, honest, authoritative information to Chinese students. Candor is the core value of the 6xue.info brand and the most important commitment we make to our users, advertisers, investors, regulators, and partners. We take your privacy seriously and commit above all to communicate our privacy policies clearly, provide you with channels for appeal should you be concerned about the use of your personal information.

Our information service relies upon survey data collected from respondents around the world. Additionally, we gather certain types of information about the users who access our data. We want to help you understand the terms and conditions surrounding the collection and use of survey data and personal information about users. These privacy practices apply to the website at the 6xue.info domain, which is operated by us and our partner.

We collect two types of personal information about survey respondents: unique identifying information and demographic/psychographic information. The unique identifying information may be anything that positively identifies the respondent: for example, an email address, a mobile phone number, a national ID number, a name. We collect unique identifying information in order to ensure the validity of survey data. We must make sure that one individual submits only one survey on a given institution and does not “stack” votes by submitting multiple surveys. We must verify that a respondent who reviews a particular institution genuinely attended or taught in that institution. Sometimes, we may need to contact the respondent to verify details of the survey responses. This is why we ask for a piece of unique identifying information.

This unique identifier is disclosed to third parties only in the following cases:

1. At the time of registration or survey completion, or through a subsequent written “opt-in” process, you specifically elect to share your personal data.
2. You volunteer information or create a public profile in the course of your participation in our community features such as forums, user opinions and reviews, chat rooms, photo sharing or other forms of public communication and interaction.
3. You use co-branded services (i.e., sites or services that we offer to you in connection with a partner, who is identified on the site). When you use a co-branded service within our network of sites, you grant us permission to pass your registration information back to that service partner. The partner’s use of your information is subject to that company’s applicable privacy policies.
4. We hire third-party vendors to provide specialized services such as customer support; email message deployment; suppression, merge and de-duplication services; data processing; and special products or services that you have requested. These companies are only allowed to use the information in order to help us fulfill our services to you. We do not provide your information to these companies for their own, permanent use.
5. You unsubscribe for a mailing that we send to you on behalf of a third party. We may share your removal instruction with the third party so that it may be added to that person’s list of people to whom they may not send emails.
6. You are the winner of a contest or a sweepstakes that is co-sponsored with a third party and that third party needs your information in order to manage the prize fulfillment process.
7. When required by law, such as when we respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process. We are committed to providing personal identifying data to government agencies only upon receipt of written notice from a government agency with jurisdiction in the matter.
8. We believe that your actions violate applicable laws or threaten the rights, property, or safety of our company, our users, or others.

From surveys or polls on 6xue.info, we may collect “demographic” and “psychographic” information about you. “Demographic” information refers to information about you that does not change for a long time and is reasonably easy for outside observers to identify, such as your job title, where you live, your salary range, and whether or not you own a car. “Psychographic” data describes your more rapidly changing characteristics, which are more difficult for third parties to identify, such as whether you are interested in visiting France or New Zealand and whether you think a law degree or a PhD in the sciences is more appropriate for you. Neither psychographic nor demographic information identifies you as an individual.

We aggregate this type of data and provide statistical results. For example, we may reveal that, of all the survey respondents who attended Harvard, 10% are from Shandong. We reserve the right to use demographic and psychographic information in this manner when and how we see fit.

We aggregate your numeric responses and display them in a statistical manner. Written comments may be viewed directly by our users. We need to make your survey responses as useful as possible without revealing your identity. Therefore, when we display written comments, we identify the gender and data of birth of the respondent.

We may re-use your survey responses in books or compilations. Please see our copyright statement for further information.

Once you register, you are no longer anonymous to us. We collect personal information in order to provide you with the best and most useful content and services. The type of information we collect may include a record of the portions of the site you visit, the articles or forums that you view most often, what types of content you select to monitor on your “My Stuff” page, which contests you are participating in, which email newsletters you have chosen to receive, and other data. The data we track includes:

A count of your return visits to our site or our advertisers' or partners' sites;

Anonymous, statistical information on Web-site and advertisement usage;

Which features of our site “people like you” like best. “People like you” means others who share demographic or psychographic characteristics that we find meaningful.

Information about content that interests you, so that we can display the most appropriate advertising or content for you.

We use the information we gather for four general purposes:

To customize the advertising and the content you see;

To enhance the user experience on our site. We use tracking information to determine how well each page performs overall based on aggregate user demographics and traffic patterns to those pages. This helps us continue to build a better service for you;

To fulfill your requests for certain products and services, such as sending out electronic newsletters and enabling you to participate in paid services, polls, contests, and message boards;

To send you information you agreed to receive about topics we think will be of interest to you.

We aggregate personally identifiable information and disclose such information in a non-personally identifiable manner to advertisers and other third parties for marketing, promotional, and other purposes. We do not disclose to these entities any information that could be used to identify you personally.

We are always seeking to improve our content and services. To do this, we might buy or sell a company, or one or more of the companies in our corporate family may merge with or be acquired by another company. If we sell a business, we may transfer some or all of your information as a part of the sale in order that the service being provided to you may continue or for other business purposes. If we do that, a condition of the sale will be that the new business owner abides by the 6xue.info privacy policy.

Users who want to maintain maximum privacy while using our site may choose the following options:

Opt not to receive our electronic newsletters or those of third parties when registering. Users who opt in may also remove themselves from mailing lists at any time through the subscription-management pages or by following the instructions at the end of the e-mail they received from us;

Opt not to provide certain personal information when registering for the site.

You can review, correct, or change the information collected during registration for any of our sites. The instructions for doing this can be found in our member-services areas. Users may change information at any time and as often as necessary. Users who are experiencing problems with our services or who have questions about how our services work can contact us using e-mail addresses at the bottom of this page.

Our site is not directed to children under the age of 13. We do not permit registration by, and will not knowingly collect or use personally identifiable information from, anyone under 13 years of age. This requirement is clearly posted during the registration process.

Questions regarding this privacy statement or any other aspects of our content and services should be sent via e-mail below or to our corporate offices at 220 Jingmeng Technology Building, 5-2 Shangdi Donglu, Haidian District, Beijing, China, Attention: Legal Department. We read every message submitted and try to reply promptly to every one. We may also file your comments to improve the site, or review and discard the information.