Cookie Policy – Updated February 2025
Cookies
As part of offering and providing customizable and personalized services, the non-profit School of Skilled Trades and/or an affiliate uses cookies to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie is a small data file that is sent to your browser from our web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive.
Generally, the School may use cookies to:
(1) Remind us of who you are and to access your information (stored on our computers) in order to deliver to you a better and more personalized service. For example, a cookie is set when you register or “Sign In” and is modified when you “Sign Out” of our services;
(2) Automate certain areas of the School’s web sites or online forms;
(3) Estimate our audience size. Each browser accessing the School of Skilled Trades website is given a unique cookie which is then used to determine the extent of repeat usage, usage by a registered user versus by an unregistered user, and to help target advertisements based on user interests and behavior to avoid inundating you with material in which you have no interest;
(4) Measure certain traffic patterns, which areas of the School’s web site you have visited, and your visiting patterns in the aggregate. We use this research to understand how our users’ habits are similar or different from one another so that we can make each new experience on the School’s website a better one. We may use this information to better personalize the content and promotions that you and other users will see on our sites.
For some of the reasons listed above the School ties personal information such as your email address to our cookies, for instance if you register to access certain areas of our website.
You also have choices with respect to cookies. By modifying your browser preferences, you have the choice to accept all cookies, to be notified when a cookie is set, or to reject all cookies. Please refer to your browser’s help section for further information about your options for controlling or monitoring cookies. However, some parts of the School’s site may not function properly if you choose not to accept cookies.
Web Beacons
The School and third parties employ on our sites a software technology called Web Beacons, that help us better manage content on our site by informing us what content is effective. Web Beacons are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, Web Beacons are embedded invisibly on web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Web Beacons generally work in conjunction with cookies, registering when a particular computer visits a particular page. We tie the information gathered by Web Beacons to our students’/potential students’ personally identifiable information.
We also use Web Beacons in outgoing HTML-based emails to track success of marketing efforts, so we can improve our systems. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. If you do not want to receive Web Beacons in emails you can opt-out of these emails or change the type of email you receive to text only.
We engage a third-party tracking service that uses cookies and Web beacons to track aggregated, non-personally identifiable information about visitors to our site, in order to track usage and volume statistics and our web sites.
