Policies

Privacy policy

What this website collects, which tools it loads, and what we do with any of it.

This policy describes exactly what this website does today, tool by tool. It is pending review by the institute and its counsel. If anything here does not match what we actually do, tell us and we will correct it.

Last updated August 2026.

Who we are

International Institute of Event Management (IIEM) is an educational institute based at 15466 Los Gatos Blvd, Suite 109-26, Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA. We are the controller of the personal information described here. Contact us at admissions@ii-em.org.

What we collect

Information you give us

Your email address, when you request the syllabus, the AI Starter Kit or a guide, or subscribe to our emails.
Your name, email address and message, when you use the contact form.
Payment details, when you enroll. These are collected by our payment provider, not by this website. We never see or store your card number.
Your coursework, when you study with us. That means the assignments you submit, the marks and written feedback on them, which lessons you have read, and the certificate issued to you. This is held by us, in our own student portal.

Information collected automatically

Standard server and CDN logs: IP address, browser and device type, the pages you requested and when.
Analytics and session data, described in the next section.

Analytics and measurement tools

These are the measurement tools that load on this site in production. Nothing loads on preview or development builds. Each is named because you are entitled to know which companies receive data about your visit.

Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC). Measures page views, traffic sources and conversions such as a guide download or an enrollment. It sets first-party cookies, including one that holds a random client identifier. We do not send it your name or email address. We do send it a server-side event when an enrollment completes, so that a purchase can be attributed to the visit that produced it.
Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights (Vercel Inc.). Aggregate, cookieless measurement of page views and real-world page performance.

Global Privacy Control

We honor Global Privacy Control (GPC). If your browser or extension sends a GPC signal, this site treats it as a valid opt-out request: session replay is not loaded at all, and we do not sell or share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, which we do not do for anyone, GPC or not.

We do not show a cookie consent banner. We are a US business operating under an opt-out regime, and we would rather honor a machine-readable signal you have already set than ask every visitor to dismiss a dialog. You can enable GPC in Firefox and Brave directly, or through an extension in other browsers.

Cookies

If you sign in to the student portal we set one cookie, iiem_portal, which holds your signed session. It is strictly necessary: without it we cannot tell that the person requesting your coursework is you. It is HTTP-only, so page scripts cannot read it, and it is cleared when you sign out.

Beyond that, this site sets first-party analytics cookies as described above. We do not run advertising cookies or third-party ad pixels. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; the public pages work without them.

Other services that process data for us

Vercel: hosting and CDN.
Cloudflare Turnstile, bot protection on our forms. It checks that a submission comes from a real browser and does not track you across sites.
Resend, sends the emails you ask for and stores the address you gave us.
WhatsApp (Meta Platforms), if you choose to message us there. We do not embed WhatsApp on this site and it sets nothing in your browser; the button is an ordinary link that opens the app. Anything you send arrives in Meta’s service under Meta’s own privacy policy, exactly as it would if you had messaged us first.
Sanity, the content management system behind our blog and guides.
Neon, the database provider that stores student records, coursework and grades on our behalf.
Vercel Blob, storage for any file you attach to an assignment. Those files are served only to you and to the person marking your work, through a signed link, never from a public URL.
Paddle, our payment provider. Paddle is the merchant of record, which means it is the seller on your receipt and it collects and remits sales tax and VAT. It handles checkout and your card details, and its own privacy policy applies to the payment itself. We receive the fact of the payment, its amount, and the email address you used.

How we use your information

To send you the thing you asked for.
To answer your question.
To deliver your program, mark your work and issue your certificate.
To send occasional emails about our programs, if you gave us your address. Every one has an unsubscribe link and it works.
To understand which pages help people and which do not, in aggregate.

What we do not do

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not buy email lists and we do not add you to ours because you contacted us about something else.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email admissions@ii-em.org and we will action it. We will not charge you for it and we will not make the site worse for you because you asked.

California residents have specific rights under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, including the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information, and we honor GPC as an opt-out signal.

How long we keep it

Enquiries and marketing addresses, until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them, and we act on either straight away.
Student and credential records, indefinitely, and deliberately. A graduate is entitled to have their qualification confirmed years after they earned it, and a credential register that forgets people is worth nothing to the employer checking it. If you ask us to erase your record we will, and we will tell you first that it ends our ability to verify your credential to anyone.
Payment records, for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep them.
Sign-in links, minutes. We store only a hash of the link, never the link itself, and the row is deleted the moment it is used or expires.

Where your information goes

We are a US institute and our students live in about 70 countries. Your information is processed in the United States, on servers in the US East region, and by the providers named above, some of which operate in other countries too. If you are in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, that is a transfer out of your jurisdiction.

We rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, and the UK Addendum where it applies, as the transfer mechanism with our providers. Ask us and we will tell you which provider handles what.

Our legal bases, if you are in the UK or the EEA

Under the UK and EU GDPR we have to name a lawful basis for each thing we do. Ours are:

Performance of a contract, for delivering your program, marking your work, issuing your certificate and taking payment.
Consent, for marketing emails and for sending you a guide you asked for. You can withdraw it at any time with the unsubscribe link, and withdrawing it does not undo what we did before you did.
Legitimate interests, for keeping the site secure, preventing bot abuse of our forms, and understanding in aggregate which pages help people. We have weighed these against your interests, which is why there is no advertising tracking anywhere on this site.
Legal obligation, for keeping payment and tax records.

Alongside the rights described above you can ask us to restrict or object to processing, and ask for a portable copy of what you gave us. You can also complain to your data protection authority, in the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office. We would rather you told us first, but that right does not depend on it.

Automated decisions, and where AI touches your work

No decision about you is made solely by a machine. We say this precisely because our portal does use an assistant: it can draft a mark and written feedback against the rubric for an assignment you submit.

A draft is not a grade. Nothing is shown to you, and nothing counts toward completing your program or earning a credential, until a person has reviewed that draft and released it. That is enforced in the system itself, not by policy alone: an unreleased mark is invisible to you and uncounted by the software. If you want to know how your work was marked, ask us and a person will explain it.

How we protect it

Everything is served over HTTPS. We never see or store your card number. Sign-in is by emailed link rather than a password you have to invent, and we store only a hash of that link, so a copy of our database cannot be replayed as a login. Files you attach to an assignment are served through signed links, not public URLs. Access to student records is limited to the people who mark work and administer the institute.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever suffer a breach affecting your personal information we will tell you and the relevant authority, within the deadlines the law sets.

Children

Our programs are for adults. This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Changes to this policy

If we change how any of this works we will change this page and update the date at the top of it.

Contact

International Institute of Event Management, 15466 Los Gatos Blvd, Suite 109-26, Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA. Email admissions@ii-em.org, phone +1 650 308 4436.