Privacy policy
Our alumni and friends are important to us. We take seriously how we collect, store and process your personal data. In line with our values, we want to be an engaged global community that shares ideas, experiences and networks.
London Business School (LBS) is committed to protecting your personal information when you use our services. This Privacy Policy relates to us using any personal information that we collect from you via the following online services:
- any LBS website that links to this Privacy Policy
- social media or official LBS content on other websites
- mobile device applications (apps).
It also relates to us using any personal information that you provide by phone, SMS,
email, in letters and other correspondence, and in person.
This Privacy Policy explains the following:
- who we are what information we may collect about you
- how we will use information we collect about you
- how long we hold information about you
- the legal basis for processing your information
- when we may use your details to contact you
- whether we will disclose your details to anyone else
- your rights regarding the personal information you provide to us
- the use of cookies on our websites and how you can reject them
- what happens when you download a LBS app.
LBS is committed to safeguarding your personal information. Whenever you provide
such information, we are legally obliged to use it in line with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy and Cookies Policy as the ”data protection laws”). LBS websites contain hyperlinks to websites owned and operated by third parties. These third-party websites have their own privacy policies, and also likely use cookies, so we urge you to review them. They govern the use of personal information you submit when visiting these websites, which may also be collected via cookies. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third-party websites and your use of such sites is at your own risk.
We’re a graduate business school established in the UK by Royal Charter (RC 000721). Founded in 1964, we are a member institution of the University of London. When saying “we”, “our” or “LBS”, we’re referring to London Business School.
Our registered office is:
London Business School
Sussex Place, Regent’s Park
London, NW1 4SA
United Kingdom.
The Data Controller is London Business School and our registration number in the Data Protection Register is Z8182937.
We may receive your personal information when you: participate in, access or sign up to any of our services, activities or online content – such as newsletters, competitions, live chats and webinars – phone or email us, vote, donate money to LBS, reserve a place at an event, apply for one of our programmes or create an account on our website.
Please note that we may need additional, sometimes sensitive, personal information from you such as ethnic origin or health (e.g. if you’re applying to join one of our programmes or applying for a job). In these circumstances, we’ll explain further why we’re collecting your information and how we’ll use it. Be aware that sensitive personal information may also be known as ‘special categories of personal information’ in some policies you read about data protection.
What types of personal data do we collect?
- name, nationality, gender preference and date of birth
- contact details including postal address, email and phone
- your communication preference
- employment information, including name of business, industry, job title, level of seniority and number of years of postgraduate work experience
- prior education, including university attended, subject studied and year of graduation
- test scores, including GMAT, GRE and Executive Assessment scores (if you’re interested in our degree programmes)
- dietary requirements, including allergies
- equality monitoring.Further details on the information that we collect about our Alumni can be found here.When providing personalised services, we may ask your permission to review third-party data about you, such as your Twitter or Facebook feeds, to get to know you
better and to provide more effective personalisation.Some of our services enable you to sign-in via a third-party service, such as LinkedIn.
If you choose to sign-in via a third-party app, you will be presented with a dialog box asking for your permission to allow LBS to access your personal information (e.g. your full name, email address and any other information you have made publicly accessible). Please note that any information not required by the particular service you have opted to use won’t be retained by LBS.LBS collects information about how you use LBS mobile apps, websites or other School-related online content, and the device(s) you use to access these services. This includes collecting unique online identifiers such as IP addresses, which are numbers that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the web.
For more information, please see section 9 of this policy, on LBS’s use of cookies and similar technologies.
By accessing our websites you understand that your personal information may be collected, stored, used and shared by us for any of the following purposes:
- To provide you with information about our programmes including course details; application tips; funding advice; faculty and participant profiles; and other information that may be relevant to your interests.
- To send you our latest research and thought leadership content; provide you with invitations to relevant events and reminders or joining details for those events to which you register.
- To identify and prevent fraud.
- To enhance the security of our network and information systems.
- Where the processing enables us to enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services/communications for the benefit of our customers.
- To better understand how people interact with our websites.
- To provide postal communications which we think will be of interest to you.
- To determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and advertising.
- For the direct marketing of LBS products and services.
We may ask for consent to send you marketing communications about our products and services. You’ll be able to opt of these communications at any point by selecting the ‘opt out’ option at the bottom of each email we send you.
Whenever processing data for these purposes, we’ll ensure we always keep your personal data rights in high regard and take account of them. You have the right to object to this processing if you wish. See section 9 for more details. Please bear in mind that if you object, this may affect our ability to carry out the tasks, mentioned above, for your benefit.
We’ll notify you before using your personal information for any other means.
We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with LBS.
If you’ve indicated an interest in taking one of our programmes, we’ll retain your data for a period of two years from the point that you last engage with us.
Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.
However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where we have your consent to do so, (ii) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, or (iii) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.
If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we’ll make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as the possible consequences if you do not provide your information).
Similarly, if we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), we’ll make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.
We offer regular emails to let you know about our products and services and to inform you of the latest LBS research and insights. We may also invite you to take part in surveys about our products and services or issues affecting LBS.
LBS may personalise the message content based on any information you provide to us and your use of our platforms.
You can update your communications preferences and stop receiving any future emails at any time by following the convenient links located at the bottom of our emails. Requests submitted in this manner are processed and effective immediately.
If you believe you have received unwanted, unsolicited emails sent by or purporting to be from LBS, please forward a copy of that email with your comments to our Data Protection Officer dpo@london.edu for review.
Occasionally, we may contract a third party to communicate on our behalf to the third-party’s
contacts. We don’t collect your email address or contact information from this third party, and we don’t have access to their mailing list.
Depending on the nature of the third-party mailing, we may, in order to comply with applicable laws, provide the third party with a suppression list of contacts to exclude from their list. The third party doesn’t have permission to keep or market to contacts this list, or to use it in any way other than as a suppression list for a mailing they’re providing on our behalf.
Apart from meeting the needs of your request, we’ll never share or sell your data to third parties to use for their own purposes unless we’re required to do so by law. For example, we’d do this when receiving a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.
Your information may be shared with our educational partners where necessary to provide you with a service you’ve requested. This would happen when, for example, you request information for or apply to join one of our partnership degree programmes (e.g. EMBA-Global Americas & Europe, EMBA-Global Asia, or Global Masters in Management). When doing this, we’ll provide further information at the time of collecting your information.
List of our degree programme partners:
EMBA-Global Americas & Europe programme
– Columbia Business School, Columbia University in the City of New York, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY10027, USA
EMBA-Global Asia programme
– Columbia Business School, Columbia University in the City of New York, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY10027, USA
– The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
Global Masters in Management programme
School of Management, Fudan University. 670 Guoshun Rd, WuJiaoChang, Yangpu Qu, Shanghai Shi, China, 200433.
LBS sometimes uses third parties to process your information on our behalf, for example to provide services or analysis. We require these third parties to comply strictly with your
instructions and that they don’t use your personal information for their own business purposes, unless you have explicitly consented to them using your personal information in this way.
Although most of the information we store and process stays within the UK, some information may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA). This may occur if, for example, one of our partner’s servers are located in a country outside the EEA. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK; however, we’ll take steps to make sure they provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with UK data protection law. By submitting your personal information to us you agree to this transfer to or storing or processing of data at a location outside the EEA.
We may use information which we hold about you to show you relevant advertising on third-party sites (e.g. Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Twitter). If you don’t want to be shown
targeted advertising messages from LBS, some third-party sites allow you to request that you don’t see messages from specific advertisers on that site in future.
You have following rights:
- Right of access.
Request a copy of the information we hold about you via a Subject Access Request. You have the right to request a copy of the personal information LBS holds about you, except where releasing that information would breach another person’s privacy or where an exemption applies, and to have any inaccuracies corrected.
If we do hold information about you, we’ll:
-
- give you a description of it
- tell you why we are holding it
- tell you who it could be disclosed to, and
- let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.
You may request in writing that LBS disclose details of data which it holds about you and the purpose for which such data is held. A ‘Subject Access Request Form’ will be supplied upon request. We’ll need your passport or driver’s licence for proof of identity. We’ll use reasonable efforts consistent with our legal duty to supply, correct or delete personal information about you on our files.
If we hold information about you, you can ask us to correct any mistakes by contacting the Data Protection Officer.
Please address requests and questions about this or any other issue related to this policy to the Data Protection Officer, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, or email: dpo@london.edu
- Right of rectificationUpdate or amend the information we hold about you if it is incorrect.
You can do this by updating your profile online or by contacting the Data Protection Officer at dpo@london.edu
- Right of erasureAsk us to remove your personal information from our records.
If you request that your data be erased, we’ll securely dispose of it. We’ll continue to retain a core set of personal data (name, email address, unique LBS identification reference) to ensure we don’t contact you again in the future.
Please address requests to delete your data to the Data Protection Officer, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, or email: dpo@london.edu
- Right to restrict processing
You have the right to ‘block’ or suppress processing of your personal data. When processing is restricted, we’re permitted to store the personal data but not further process it. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
If you request that your data processing be blocked, we’ll continue to retain a core set of personal data (name, email address, unique LBS identification reference) to ensure we don’t contact you again in the future.
Please address requests to delete your data to the Data Protection Officer, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, or email: dpo@london.edu
- Right to data portability
You have the right to obtain a copy of your personal data so that it can be reused for your own purposes in another IT environment.
If you want to request a copy of your personal data then please address requests to the Data Protection Officer, London Business School, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4SA, United Kingdom, or email: dpo@london.edu
- Right to object to processing
You have a right to object by withdrawing your consent at any time.
- Right to make a complaint to the supervisory authority
You have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire, SK9 5AF
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)303 123 1113 (local rate)
Web: ico.org.uk
A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer, tablet or mobile phone (all referred to here as a ”device”) web browser from
a website’s computer and is stored on your device’s hard drive.
Each website can send its own cookie to your web browser if your browser’s preferences allow it. Many websites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track online
traffic flows. Similar technologies are also often used within emails to understand whether the email has been read or if any links have been clicked. If you continue without changing
your settings, we’ll assume you’re happy to receive all cookies on the LBS website.
On LBS websites, cookies record information about your online preferences and allow us to tailor our websites to your interests.
During the course of any visit to a LBS website, the pages you see, along with a cookie, are downloaded to your device. Many websites do this, because cookies enable website publishers to do useful things like find out whether the device (and probably its user) has visited the website before. This is done on a repeat visit by checking to see, and finding, the cookie left there on the last visit.
How does LBS use cookies?
Information supplied by cookies can help us to understand the profile of our visitors and help us to provide you with a better user experience. It also helps us recognise when you’re signed in to your LBS account and to provide a more personalised experience. For example, if on a previous visit you went to our faculty research pages, we might find this out from your cookie and highlight faculty research information on your second and subsequent visits. LBS uses this type of information to help improve the services it provides to its users.
Third-party cookies in embedded content on LBS pages
Please note that during your visits to LBS websites, you may notice some cookies that aren’t related to LBS.
We sometimes embed content from social media and other third-party websites. These may include YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and SoundCloud. As a result, when you visit a page
containing such content, you may be presented with cookies from these websites and these third-party cookies may track your use of the LBS website. LBS doesn’t control the
dissemination of these cookies and you should check the relevant third party’s website for more information. If you continue without changing your settings, we’ll assume you’re
happy to receive all cookies on the LBS website. However, you can find out about changing your cookie settings here.
Where LBS embeds content from social media and other third-party websites, some
websites may use Google Analytics to collect data about user behaviour for their own purposes. LBS doesn’t control this. For more information, see the Google webpage “How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps”
LBS cookies and how to reject cookies
Full information about how LBS uses cookies, and how to control what cookies are set on your device through the LBS website, can be found here.
It’s important to note that if you change your settings and block certain cookies, you won’t be able to take full advantage of some of our services’ features – and we might not be able
to provide some features you have previously chosen to receive.
Other information collected from web browsers
Your web browser may also provide LBS with information about your device, such as an IP address and details about the browser you’re using. We use information provided by your
browser or by the link that you’ve clicked to understand the webpage that directed you to LBS and this may be captured by performance cookies.
If you have any concerns about the way that we use cookies or respect your settings, then please email dpo@london.edu.
When you download or use LBS apps on your mobile device, information may be accessed from or stored on your device. Most often this is used in a similar way to a web browser cookie, by enabling the app to ‘remember’ you or provide you with the content you have requested.
Your web browser or device may also provide LBS with information about your device, such as a device identifier or IP address. Device identifiers may be collected automatically, such as the device ID, IP address, MAC address, IMEI number and app ID (a unique identifier relating to the particular copy of the app you’re running).
When signing in to a LBS app, your sign-in details may be stored securely on the device you’re using, so you can access other LBS apps on the same device without needing to enter
your sign-in details again.
If you have any concerns about any information that might be accessed from or stored on your device by LBS, you may wish to only access LBS content through a web browser and
review your web browser settings. See our cookie notice for more information.
If you post or send content which may reasonably be deemed to be offensive, inappropriate or objectionable anywhere on or to LBS websites or social media channels, or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour on any LBS service, we may remove such content.
Where LBS reasonably believes that you are in breach of any applicable laws, we may disclose your personal information to relevant third parties, including law enforcement agencies or your internet provider. LBS would only do so in circumstances where such disclosure is permitted under applicable laws, including data protection law.
This Privacy Policy may be updated so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to LBS. The date of the most recent revisions will appear on this page. If you don’t agree to these changes, please refrain from using LBS websites to submit personal information to us.
If material changes are made to the Privacy Policy, for instance affecting how we’d like to use your personal information, we’ll provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes).
Want to know how we use and protect your data? Take a look at the LBS Privacy Policy.
For any questions regarding the Forever Forward campaign, email alumnirelations@london.edu.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact:
The Data Protection Officer
London Business School,
Regent’s Park, London,
NW1 4SA, United Kingdom.