Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice applies to www.hbs.edu and other Harvard Business School websites that link to this Privacy Notice (the “Sites”). Harvard Business School understands that the privacy of its users is important. To that end, we have adopted the following notice to provide you with information about the collection, use, and dissemination of personal information of visitors to the Sites. Personal information is information related to an identified or identifiable natural person. We are providing this notice below so that you may understand the terms and conditions associated with the provision of any personal information to us. We may update our Privacy Notice from time to time and will post any changes on this page. We encourage you to check our website frequently to review the most up-to-date versions of our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use. Your continued use of this website constitutes acceptance of such terms.

Information you submit

Certain transactions in which you choose to engage on the Sites will require your submission of identifiers, including, but not limited to, news feed requests, brochure or video requests, listservs and mailing lists, alumni profile updates, applications and certain databases.

Alumni profile information submitted for inclusion in the HBS Alumni Directory or submitted via other University channels is available to HBS alumni, HBS alumni clubs and other HBS alumni organizations, faculty, staff, and students, pursuant to privacy settings chosen by individual alumni participants. Data in the alumni directory include but are not limited to: contact information, employment history, interests, and education history and are intended to facilitate inter-alumni communication, as well as communication between the School and its alumni.

The admissions processes for our academic programs require applicants to provide personal information and preferences. The applicant also has the option of providing additional company information during this process. We encourage our applicants to fill in all of this information, so that the Admissions Committee can select the most qualified and diverse group from among the pool of candidates, ensuring an interactive and invigorating learning experience for all program participants. Except as set forth in the next paragraph, personal information that you provide us will be utilized only for the purpose for which it has been requested.

Harvard Business School may disclose the information you submit to its employees, consultants, service providers and agents, and to Harvard Business School clubs, other Harvard Business School organizations, and to Harvard University. Additionally, we may disclose some basic information you submit (such as email and mailing address) to service providers for marketing purposes as described below in “Information We Collect Automatically”. More sensitive personal information will be kept internal. Harvard Business School also reserves the right to disclose this information under special circumstances, including disclosures required by law, court order or circumstances under which disclosure, in the sole discretion of Harvard Business School, is necessary to protect the legal rights, including the intellectual property rights, of Harvard Business School or Harvard University.

Information we collect automatically

Harvard Business School may collect other information about its users automatically, such as data about usage and service operation. The following summarizes the types of information that we may collect.

When you connect to the Sites, our web server may record the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using, information about your browser and operating system, date and time of access, location information and the internet address and page which linked you to our site. The Schools staff uses such information to help diagnose problems with our server, to administer and improve the Sites, to monitor and improve the security of the Sites, and to generate aggregate statistical reports that analyze general user information and demographics.

If you submit identifying information on the Sites — e.g., to join a mailing list or to establish user credentials to access registration-only pages — we may tie server log information to the information you have disclosed and make internal use of the resulting information set.

We may disclose the information we collect as described in this section to performing marketing, promotions and advertising, either directly or through third-parties. These activities may include interest-based advertising, targeted advertising and online behavioral advertising in order to increase the likelihood that the content would be of interest to you. We may also disclose this information when complying with law or legal process, working with consultants assisting us in fixing or improving our site, or in monitoring and improving the security of our network.

Cookies

Cookies are unique bits of computer data that many major websites will transfer to your computer the first time that you visit. Cookies are stored on your hard drive and may be later accessed by the website to track prior usage. Harvard Business School, directly or through our ad management partners, uses cookies and pixels, or transparent GIF files, to help manage online advertising. These GIF files are provided by our ad management partners. These files enable the adservers to recognize the unique cookies on your Web browser, which in turn enables us to learn which advertisements bring users to our website.

A cookie may also be used to deliver customizable and personalized services and information by tracking which pages a user has already visited. We may also use cookies to track session information, such as pages visited or duration of visit, which will help us continue to improve our format and content.

You may be able to set your browser to refuse cookies or to alert you when one is being sent. It is likely that some portions of our site will not operate properly if cookies are disabled.

We use Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics and other tools to collect information about your use of the Sites, such as how often you visit the Sites, what pages you visit when you do so, and what websites you used before coming to the Sites. These tools may use cookies and similar technologies to collect and store such information.

Do Not Track

Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that users can set in certain web browsers. We do not currently recognize or respond to browser-initiated DNT signals.

Children

We do not intentionally collect personally identifiable information about children age 13 or younger. If you suspect that we have personal, identifying information about your child, please notify us immediately so that we may remove this information from our database.

Users located outside the United States of America

If you are located in a country outside of the United States which has enacted a personal data protection law, please review additional privacy disclosures that may apply to you.

External links

The Harvard Business School Sites contains links to other independently run websites within the Harvard network and to some sites outside both the “hbs.edu” and “harvard.edu” domains that are not controlled by Harvard Business School or Harvard University and are not covered by this Privacy Notice. Harvard Business School is not responsible for the privacy practices, security or content of such websites.

Security

The Sites have security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Internet communications, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. While Harvard Business School remains committed to protecting the privacy of our users, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

Effective date

The effective date of this privacy notice is 11/18/2022.