Cookies and Similar Technologies

Introduction & Definitions Student Data School Professionals, Vendors & Partners Protecting Your Personal Information Cookies & Similar Technologies
 

At GMAC, the security of your information and the experience you have when visiting our websites is important to us.  So we use cookies and other tracking technologies to customize content and advertising, provide social media features, see how you move through our website, and determine what information might want to receive on our site, via email, or messaging. We use this information to make decisions about ways to improve the services we offer you.

GMAC and its authorized third parties use cookies and these other technologies for various purposes, including sign-in and authentication, storing and processing preferences and settings, security, storing information you provide, and capturing information for analytics, promotion, and advertising purposes.  These purposes are described in more detail below. 

You may limit how we and third parties utilize these technologies as described in the “Cookie Controls and Advertising Choices” section below.

Sign-in and authentication 

We use cookies to authenticate you. For example, when you sign in using an account as a registered user, we use a cookie placed on your device to allow you to move across different pages of our websites without having to sign in again on each new page you visit. Cookies also allow you to save your sign-in information so you do not have to sign in each time you visit a particular website or service. 

Storing your preferences, settings, and information you provide

We use information collected through tracking technologies to provide custom, personalized content and information, including targeted content and advertising, recognize you across multiple devices, monitor aggregate usage metrics such as total number of visitors, traffic, usage, and demographic patterns of our visitors, and otherwise enhance our platform and your user experience.
We use cookies to enable you to store your preferences and settings on your device to enhance your experiences and prevent you from having to set your preferences repeatedly. For example, when you place an item in your shopping cart, we may use a cookie to store that data so you do not have to reenter it later.

Security

The Internet is not 100% secure. Like all businesses, we cannot guarantee the security of the personal information you provide to us via our websites. We have, however, taken certain steps designed to reduce the risk that the personal information you provide us will be subject to loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction. We use cookies to support these security practices.

Analytics

We use cookies and other similar technologies for analytics purposes, such as monitoring site traffic and technical performance to administer our websites, improving website visitors’ experiences, for researching and developing new products and services, evaluating site usage, providing site security, and providing localized content based on a website visitor’s geographic location. We also automatically collect certain device identifiers, such as IP address, for this purpose.  

We may also use electronic tags known as web beacons to collect and analyze information about what content you clicked or viewed, including in marketing emails that we send you.
We use a collection of tools to support our efforts to provide you with the best possible experience while on our website. They are:

  • Google Analytics. For more information on Google Analytics, including how Google Analytics collects, uses, and discloses information and your choices regarding Google Analytics, please refer to the following pages:  https://policies.google.com/privacy and https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245.
  • HubSpot. For more information on HubSpot and how it processes the information collected when you open an email from us, or visit a landing page from an email we send you, please see https://legal.hubspot.com/dpa.
  • Meta cookies. For more information on Meta cookies, including how Meta collects, uses, and discloses information and your choices, please refer to the following page: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policies/cookies
  • We also use third party-provided session replay tools to track how visitors move around and interact with our site. These include session replay, heatmaps, funnels, form analytics, feedback surveys, and similar features/functionality. We may utilize third party-provided services to record your clicks, mouse movements, scrolling, form fills (keystrokes) in non-excluded fields, pages visited and content, time on site, browser, operating system, device type (desktop/tablet/phone), screen resolution, visitor type (first time/returning), referrer, anonymized IP address, location (city/country), language, and similar meta data. If you'd like to opt-out, you can decline cookie usage on this site or you can visit: https://mouseflow.com/opt-out.

Push Notifications

We may use tools built by third parties to send you push notifications via a web or mobile application, such as a web browser. If you consent to allowing notifications, these capabilities utilize web and mobile identifiers and collect additional information about your device, engagement with our websites and apps, and engagement with push notifications. This information is used to send you notifications with relevant content and marketing materials, and to monitor and optimize push notifications. You can always opt out by updating your browser or application settings. The process may vary slightly depending on your operating system and application.

Interest-based advertising

GMAC and its authorized third parties acting on our behalf use cookies, web beacons, and other technologies to collect information that we use to show you advertisements that may interest you and to track the performance of our advertisements. We also work with third-party advertising technology providers that collect information about you, such as your IP address and information about your device, browser or operating system, to follow your online activities over time and across different websites or other online services to deliver advertisements on our website and other websites that are tailored to your interests. These providers may combine information about you with information from other companies and may place or recognize their own unique cookie on your browser. These cookies may contain demographic or other data in de-identified form. These cookies used by third-party advertising technology providers and how they use the information gathered from them will be governed by these companies’ privacy policies. 

To learn more about interest-based advertising and your ability to opt out of collection by certain third parties, and to manage the use of interest-based advertising cookies on our websites, see the information in the “Cookie Controls and Advertising Choices” section below. 

Cookie controls and advertising choices

Most web browsers provide controls that allow you to block or delete cookies. Generally, you can go to the Help section on your internet browser and see instructions for blocking or deleting cookies. Please note that certain features that we use on our websites depend on cookies. If you choose to block cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use those features, and preferences that are dependent on cookies may be lost. Please also note that we or our advertising providers may use web beacons on our websites to allow us to count users who have visited certain web pages and to generate statistics about how our site is used. Web beacons, unlike cookies, cannot be declined. However, setting your browser to decline cookies or prompt you for a response will keep most web beacons from tracking your activity.

To learn more about the use of interest-based advertising and opt out of the collection of information for interest-based advertising by certain third parties, you can visit the following sites:

As some of the information collected for interest-based advertising is also used for other necessary purposes (such as analytics and fraud detection), opting out of interest-based advertising does NOT stop that information from being collected. You will also continue to receive non-interest-based advertisements and may not see fewer ads.

Do not track disclosure

Some browsers have a “Do Not Track” feature that allows you to tell a web site not to track you. Since these features are not all uniform, we do not currently respond to those signals. We do not currently respond to web browser “Do Not Track” signals that provide a method to opt out of the collection of information about online activities over time and across third-party websites or online services.