University of Southern California (“USC”) is committed to delivering information services that recognize and respect users’ privacy concerns. This Privacy Notice is intended to inform you of our general policies and practices regarding our collection, use, and disclosure of the information that you submit to us and that we collect from you during your use of the www.usc.edu website.
The types of information we collect may vary depending on the specific USC site you visit or application you use. Accordingly, this Privacy Notice is intended to be a general statement and may be supplemented by more specific privacy notices that pertain to personal information exclusively associated with a specific department, unit or function.
Our Information Collection and Use Practices
Information you submit voluntarily through our websites, such as your name, email, or other contact information, may be collected by USC to respond to your inquiries, as well as for internal marketing and development purposes.
USC websites may use online data entry forms to collect personally identifiable information, including your name and contact information (email, address, telephone number) and other identifiers in order to allow you to provide website feedback, register for events, or use USC’s online applications and services.
We may reveal personally identifiable information about you to unaffiliated third parties:
- if you request or authorize it;
- if the information is provided to help complete a transaction for you;
- if the information is provided to comply with the law, applicable regulations, governmental and quasi-governmental requests, court orders or subpoenas, to enforce our Terms of Use or other agreements, or to protect our rights, property or safety or the rights, property or safety of our users or others (e.g., to a consumer reporting agency for fraud protection etc.);
- if the information is provided to our agents, outside vendors or service providers to perform functions on our behalf (e.g., analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, providing customer service, processing orders, etc.); or
- as otherwise described in this Privacy Notice or in a more specific privacy notice associated with a particular department, unit or function.
We may share information that does not personally identify you without restriction.
Cookies and Website Analytics
We use cookies and similar technology to collect aggregate (non-personal) information about website usage by all of our visitors and to help us remember you and your preferences when you revisit the websites. These cookies may stay on your browser into the future until they expire or you delete them. We also use technology to remember you the next time you log in. Some of these cookies are erased when you close your browser window and some persist for a period of time. Further general information about cookies and how they work is available at www.allaboutcookies.org. You can decline cookies by adjusting your browser settings but some features of the websites may not function.
We may allow selected third parties to place cookies through the website to provide us with better insights into the use of the website or user demographics or to provide relevant advertising to you. These third parties may collect information about a user’s online activities over time and across different websites when he or she uses our website.
Many USC.edu websites use Google Analytics (or other similar web analytics tools) to collect information about visitor traffic and behavior. This allows us to identify usage trends and to improve the performance and content of our websites.
We do not use this tool to collect or store your personal information, and it cannot be used to identify who you are.
You can use the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on to disable tracking by Google Analytics.
We currently do not use technology that responds to do-not-track signals from your browser.
Access and Choice
USC students can manage privacy settings for their directory information by following the instructions in https://arr.usc.edu/forms/RestrictDirectoryInformation.pdf. Faculty and staff can manage their directory information in Workday.
You can choose not to receive certain emails from us by “unsubscribing” using the instructions in any email you receive from us. This will not stop us from sending emails about your account or education with us.
Updates to Privacy Notice
USC reserves the right to modify this privacy notice at any time. We encourage visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to this Privacy Notice. If we make changes, we will post an updated effective date below. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.