Privacy Policy

The National Society of High School Scholars, Inc. (NSHSS), including the Young Scholars National Honor Society, takes your privacy seriously. Please read the following to learn more about our privacy practices (the “Privacy Policy”). This is the website and program platform of the Young Scholars National Honor Society, providing an academic honor society that offers programs including events, scholarship opportunities, and other academic resources for parents and guardians to access on behalf of their eligible children (the “Website”). NSHSS is the data controller for information entered on the Website; however, please note that the NSHSS website is subject to a separate privacy policy.

Young Scholars is an academic honor society dedicated to recognizing the highest-achieving young scholars globally. The mission of Young Scholars is to honor academic achievement and provide resources and scholarships that enrich the educational journey, fuel career interests, and drive community impact. 

In general, Young Scholars does not share your personally identifying information with third parties unless you permit it. You can update your information on your parent profile or communications preferences at any time on your Parent Dashboard at https://www.young-scholars.org/dashboard/login/
 
Our policy on information from minors: 

The Website is directed to and utilized by parents/guardians of middle school students who qualify for the YSNHS program.  The Website is not directed to children under 13. Students should not register themselves nor utilize the Website.  You must be 13 years of age or older to use the Website. If you are 13 or over, but still under the age of 18, please ask a parent or guardian to read and agree to these Terms before you use the Website. If you learn that your minor child has provided us with Personal Information without your consent, please contact us at info@young-scholars.org.  

What does this Privacy Policy cover? 

This Privacy Policy applies to the collection, use, storage, and disclosure of your Personal Information by Young Scholars. By using the Website, you consent to the collection and use of Personal Information as outlined in this Privacy Policy. 

Young Scholars may decide to modify or amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post any changes or new language on the Website. Be sure to check regularly for updates. If we make material changes, we will provide prominent notice (such as through a notice or banner or, where feasible, via email). Your continued use of the Website and services after the “Last Updated” date constitutes your acceptance of the changes. If you do not agree to the changes, you should immediately stop using the Website and underlying services.

Personal Information Young Scholars Collects:
"Personal Information" means any data that identifies you as an individual or relates to an identifiable individual. We obtain Personal Information relating to you at various points in interacting with our Website and from various sources described below.

Personal Information We Collect Directly From You:

• Identifiers. We may collect identifiers, such as your first name, last name, alias, email address, phone number, username, physical address, geolocation information, and date of birth.
• Demographic Information. We may collect demographic information, such as your age and gender.
• Internet Activity. We may collect internet activity information, such as your IP address, browser characteristics, device IDs and characteristics, operating system version, and referring URLs.
• Social Media Information. We may collect information from your social media account consistent with your settings within the social media service, such as location, check-ins, activities, interests, photos, status updates, and friend list.
• Payment Information.  You may be required to provide financial and bank information prior to purchasing the services. Please note, we do not store financial and bank information; such information is securely processed and stored by our Payment Providers. For more information regarding the payment processor’s privacy practices, please review the policies provided by such provider.
• Location Information. We may collect location information, such as location based on IP address or geolocation information.
• Audio Recordings. We may collect audio recordings, such as customer service calls.
• Student (Child) Information. We collect Personal Information you provide about your eligible student, including student's name, postal address, school, and anticipated graduation year.  This information is considered sensitive Personal Information under many privacy laws.  We collect this information directly from parents/guardians.  
• Responses and Feedback. If you participate in our surveys or questionnaires, we collect your responses and feedback, such as user satisfaction or other information related to your use of the Website, and any other information you so choose to provide.
• Marketing and Promotions. We collect your email, name, phone number, and preferences. If you participate in promotions we offer, we collect your name and other information related to the activities available through the Website.
• Inferences. We may collect inferences regarding your marketing and communications preferences, interests, and other characteristics.

Personal Information We Collect from Other Sources. 
In addition, we may collect and receive certain Personal Information from schools, business partners, organizations, and public databases, including email list providers and data brokers. As permitted by applicable law, we may combine this information with other Personal Information within our possession and will use it in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Some of the Website allow you to provide us with Personal Information relating to other parties (collectively, “Third-Party Data”).  If you use any feature of the Website that allows you to communicate with other parties (such as to refer another other party to the Website or to provide information on your dependent child), either by submitting Third-Party Data to the Website or otherwise permitting the Website to automatically access Third-Party Data in your possession, you acknowledge, represent, and agree (a) that you have the authority of the relevant other party for us to access and use the relevant Third-Party Data, and (b) that you have notified these other parties and informed them how their information is collected and used by us to provide the Website.  We reserve the right to identify you as the person who has made the referral in any messages that are sent to other parties. We use Third-Party Data to (a) contact such party using the Third-Party Data provided, and/or (b) provide you with an editable template message designed to facilitate communication between you and such party through the Website. We may also send reminders or related messages to you and to other parties on your behalf from time to time, as and where permitted by applicable law.

How does YSNHS use the information it collects?
We use the Personal Information we collect in various ways, including to:

• To Provide the Website and underlying Services: To operate, deliver, and maintain the Website, services, and events.
• Scholarships:  We use the information we collect about you and your child to deliver our membership services and to provide our scholarship and grants program. If your child is selected as a recipient of a scholarship or grant, their name and image may be published on our Website and/or in other promotional materials to announce the award and celebrate their achievement.
• To Monitor and Maintain the Website and Services: To monitor system performance, diagnose issues, administer and troubleshoot the Website and services, analyze trends and usage patterns, and generate statistics.   
• To Respond to Your Requests: To answer your questions, fulfill your requests, and provide customer support.
• To Communicate with You: We may send you marketing communications about the services, promotions, and other information that may be of interest to you.
• To Use Third-Party Data You Provide: If you provide information about third parties (such as to contact those third parties), we may use that information to facilitate communication, send reminders, and support other related features, as allowed by applicable law.
• To Improve the Services. We may use your Personal Information to make the services more stable and user-friendly, analyze service issues, improve the design and content of the services, analyze how the Website is used, offer new services, and develop new services and programs relating to the Website.
• For Marketing and Audience Engagement: To analyze user engagement and improve how we communicate with users, and to market to you. YSNHS does not market to any individual under the age of 13.
• To Provide Customer Service and Notices: To respond to your feedback and send administrative updates, legal notices, or changes to this Privacy Policy or our Terms.
• To Support Business Operations: For internal uses such as audits, market research, analytics, security, and performance monitoring.
• To Enforce Our Agreements: To uphold our Terms, this Privacy Policy, and any other agreements between you and us.
• To Promote Safety and Prevent Fraud: To help protect the security of the services and users by detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, unauthorized access, and other security-related issues.
• To Facilitate Donations and Purchases: When you make a donation to the NSHSS Foundation, we use that information to process the payment and to communicate with you about the Foundation. When you make a purchase from us, your contact information is used by YSNHS or may be shared with third parties for the purposes of processing your transaction, including fraud prevention and credit card authorization.
• For Other Legitimate Purposes, Including:
  • Any other purpose for which you provide Personal Information;
  • Compliance with internal policies or legal/regulatory obligations;
  • Any other use disclosed at the time of collection;
  • Any use with your consent;
  • Any other purpose described in this Privacy Policy.

Sharing and Disclosure
We do not share your Personal Information with others except as indicated within this Privacy Policy or when we inform you and give you an opportunity to opt out of having your Personal Information shared.

We will share your information in the following ways.

• Affiliates and Subsidiaries. We may disclose the Personal Information we collect to National Society of High School Scholars’ corporate affiliates and subsidiaries.
• With third-party service providers, agents, or contractors.  We use other companies, agents, or contractors ("Service Providers") to perform services on our behalf or to assist us with providing services to you. We may engage Service Providers to provide services such as marketing, advertising, communications, infrastructure, and IT services, to provide customer service, to collect debts, and to analyze and enhance data (including data about users' interactions with our service). These Service Providers may have access to your personal or other information to provide these functions. In addition, some of the information we request may be collected by third-party providers on our behalf.
• Marketing and Analytics Providers. We may disclose your Personal Information, including your name and email, to marketing networks, data analytics providers, and other companies that provide marketing or analytics services on our behalf.
  • Analytics.  Specifically, for analytics providers, we use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.  You can opt out of having your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visit activity. For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. Google also recommends installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on - https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout - for your web browser. Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on provides visitors with the ability to prevent their data from being collected and used by Google Analytics.
• Payment Providers: We may provide paid products and/or services within the Website. When we do, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g., payment processors). We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your Personal Information is governed by their own privacy notice.
  • The payment processors we work with are:
    • Braintree Payments (https://www.braintreepayments.com/legal/braintree-privacy-policy), 
    • PayPal (https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full)
    • Stripe (https://stripe.com/us/privacy).
    • Subscription Flow (https://www.subscriptionflow.com/privacypolicy/)
    • To comply with legal process or to protect Young Scholars. If we believe that disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal or governmental request; to enforce applicable terms of use, including investigation of potential violations thereof; to protect the safety, rights, or property of the public, any person, or Young Scholars as required by law; or to detect, prevent, or otherwise address, security or technical issues or illegal or suspected illegal activities (including fraud).
• Business Transfers. We may engage in a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, dissolution, reorganization, or similar transaction or proceeding that involves the transfer of the information described in this Policy. In such transitions, customer information is typically one of the business assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. In the unlikely event that we or substantially all of our assets are acquired or enter a court proceeding, you acknowledge that such transfers may occur and that your Personal Information can continue to be used as set forth in this privacy policy.
• Aggregate and Deidentified Information. Notwithstanding anything else in this Privacy Policy, we may use, disclose, and otherwise process aggregate and deidentified information related to our business and the Website and services in accordance with applicable law.

International Data Transfer

This Website is operated in the United States. If you are located in another jurisdiction, please know that your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States. By using this Website and underlying services and providing us with information, you consent to this transfer, processing, and storage of your information in the United States. It is important to note that the privacy laws in the United States may not be as comprehensive as those in other countries, such as the European Union. 

We may transfer data that we collect from you to locations outside of headquarters for processing and storing. In addition, it may be processed by staff operating outside the office area who work for us or for one of our suppliers. For example, such staff may be engaged in the processing and concluding of your order, the processing of your payment details, and the provision of support services. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storage, or processing. We will take reasonable steps to make sure that your data is treated securely and in agreement with this privacy policy.

The transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure, and therefore, we cannot guarantee the security of data sent to us electronically, and the transmission of such data is entirely at your own risk. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password so that you can access certain areas of the Website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential.

Third-party links
We may have links on the Website to other sites that we do not operate. If you click on a third-party link, you will be taken directly to that site, which is governed by its own privacy notice. We strongly encourage you to read that privacy notice. We do not control that site and assume no responsibility for the content, policies, or practices.

Retention
We retain your Personal Information for as long as required to satisfy the purpose for which it was collected and used, unless a longer period is necessary for our legal obligations or to defend a legal claim.

Choices and Individual Rights:

We outline your choices regarding marketing messages below:

• You may opt out of receiving communications from YSNHS at any time. Please update your Communications Preferences on your Parent Dashboard at https://www.young-scholars.org/dashboard/login/.  
• E-mail. As described above, if you do not wish to receive promotional e-mails from us, you may opt out at any time by updating your Communications Preferences on your Parent Dashboard at https://ww.young-scholars.org/dashboard/login/.  If you opt out of a promotional e-mail, we may still send you transactional and administrative emails about this privacy notice or about the products or services you have purchased.
• Your browser’s help function should contain instructions on how to set your computer to accept all cookies, to notify you when a cookie is issued, or to not receive cookies at any time.
• Text Messages: You may opt out at any time by replying “STOP” to one of our text messages.
• Direct Mail: If you do not want to receive any direct postal mail, you can log in to the parent dashboard and select your preferences.  You may also opt out by emailing info@young-scholars.org. 

Security

We use reasonable administrative, logical, physical, and managerial measures to safeguard your Personal Information against loss, theft, and unauthorized access, use, and modification. Unfortunately, no measures can be guaranteed to provide 100% security. Accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of your information.
Retention

Young Scholars will retain your Personal Information only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your Personal Information to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.
Data Rights

This section describes state-specific consumer rights afforded to residents of those states who have enacted comprehensive privacy laws (“State Privacy Laws”).  Not all of the State Privacy Laws are effective as of the date of this Privacy Policy, and several do not apply to YSNHS; however, even where we are not subject to a particular State Privacy Law, we will endeavor to honor applicable privacy rights requests to the extent we are able under the circumstances, but this is a courtesy only and does not otherwise subject us to or make us liable under these laws, to the extent permitted.  Any terms defined in the applicable State Privacy Laws that we use here have the same meaning as the applicable State Privacy Law. 

Personal Information that We Collect, Use, and Share

Here is a summary of how we currently collect, use, and share Personal Information, and how we have collected, used, and shared the information within the last 12 months.

In particular, in addition to the sources, categories, and reasons for data collection mentioned in the above Privacy Policy, we have collected the following categories of Personal Information from consumers within the last twelve (12) months and shared Personal Information with third parties and Service Providers as described below:

In the last 12 months, we have not sold any Personal Information obtained via the Website.  

Use of Personal Information

We may use or disclose the Personal Information we collect for one or more of the following business purposes stated above in this Privacy Policy

Your Privacy Rights

Access to Information and Data Portability Rights

You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your Personal Information over the past 12 months. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request, we will disclose to you:

• The categories of Personal Information we collected about you.
• The categories of sources for the Personal Information we collected about you.
• Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling that Personal Information.
• The categories of third parties with whom we share that Personal Information.
• The specific pieces of Personal Information we collected about you (also called a data portability request).
• If we disclosed your Personal Information for a business purpose, we will provide a list identifying the Personal Information categories that each category of recipient obtained.

Deletion Request Rights

You have the right to request that we delete any of your Personal Information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request, we will delete (and direct our service providers to delete) your Personal Information from our records, unless an exception applies.
Correction

You may have the right to request we correct incorrect or inaccurate Personal Information, subject to restrictions regarding the determination of accuracy of the existing Personal Information.

Opt-Out of Sale, Sharing, Profiling, Use (or Restriction) of Sensitive Data, or Targeted Advertising

You have the right to opt out of “sales” and “sharing”  or “profiling to produce legal or similarly significant effects” of your Personal Information, and to opt out of the use of your personal information for “targeted advertising” as those terms are defined under applicable state privacy laws. We do not “sell,” “share,” or “profile” your Personal Information.  We do not engage in uses of sensitive Personal Information that would trigger a right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive Personal Information under State Privacy Laws.

Currently, the Website does not recognize all “Do-Not-Track” requests. You may, however, disable certain tracking by disabling cookies. If our site detects that your browser or device is transmitting an opt-out preference signal, such as the “global privacy control”—or GPC — signal, we will opt that browser or device out of the use of cookies or other tools on our site that result in a “sale” or “sharing” or use for targeted advertising of your personal information. If you come to our site from a different device or from a different browser on the same device, or if you clear your cookies, you will need to opt-out again, or use an opt-out preference signal, for that browser and/or device as well.
Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights

To exercise the access, data portability, deletion, and correction rights described above, please submit a verifiable consumer request to us by either:

• Email us at info@young-scholars.org.  
• Call us at 1-844-739-8990

Only you or a person that you authorize to act on your behalf may make a verifiable consumer request related to your Personal Information. You may make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child, to the limited extent we have information related to minors.

We will confirm receipt of the request within 10 business days, describing our verification process. We will respond to your request within 45 calendar days if we are able to verify your identity. Requests for deletion will require a separate confirmation that you want your information deleted.

The verifiable consumer request must:

• Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected Personal Information or an authorized representative.
• Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.
  We cannot respond to your request or provide you with Personal Information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the Personal Information relates to you. Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us. We will only use Personal Information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request. 

Response Timing and Format

We endeavor to respond to a verifiable consumer request within 45 days of its receipt. If we require more time (up to 90 days), we will inform you of the reason and extension period in writing. If you have an account with us, we will deliver our written response to that account. If you do not have an account with us, we will deliver our written response by mail or electronically, at your option. Any disclosures we provide will only cover the 12-month period preceding the verifiable consumer request’s receipt. The response we provide will also explain the reasons we cannot comply with a request, if applicable. For data portability requests, we will select a format to provide your Personal Information that is readily usable and should allow you to transmit the information from one entity to another entity without hindrance.

We do not charge a fee to process or respond to your verifiable consumer request unless it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded. If we determine that the request warrants a fee, we will tell you why we made that decision and provide you with a cost estimate before completing your request.

Non-Discrimination

• We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your rights. Unless permitted by the State Privacy Law, we will not:
  Deny you goods or services.
• Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or other benefits, or imposing penalties.
• Provide you with a different level or quality of goods or services.

How do I find out more about Young Scholars' information practices?
If you have any questions about anything in this Privacy Policy, or about our collection of personally identifiable information, or information generally, please contact Young Scholars as follows:

Young Scholars National Honor Society
National Headquarters
1930 North Druid Hills Rd.
Atlanta, GA 30319

E-mail: info@young-scholars.org or Phone: 1-844-739-8990