Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 1, 2022

ESSENTIAL BRANDS, INC. PRIVACY POLICY (the “Policy”)

Kiddie Academy Domestic Franchising, LLC, an affiliate of Essential Brands, Inc., (collectively, “Kiddie Academy”, “our”, or “we”) is the franchisor of early child care educational centers throughout the United States. This Privacy Policy explains how Kiddie Academy collects, uses, discloses, and protects your information. This Policy also explains your choices regarding your information. This Policy applies to all information we obtain about visitors from our website (kiddieacademy.com and all related sites, pages, or subpages) (collectively, the “Site”), our individual franchisee owned academy sites, our corporate academy sites linked from the Site, and all other services offered by Kiddie Academy (collectively, the “Services”) (the corporate and franchisee owned academies shall each individually be referred to as an “Academy” and collectively, the “Academies”). This policy does not apply to information we collect from you offline, at or through, our individually owned and operated franchised academies. Your use of this website or providing us with personal information means you agree to the terms and conditions of this Policy and any updates we make. You will know that changes have been made to this Policy by a change in the effective date. We reserve the right to amend this Policy at our discretion and at any time.

Independently Owned and Operated

Each franchisee owned academy is an individually owned and operated franchise of the Kiddie Academy system.

Kiddie Academy Online Security

We value your trust in providing us your personal information, thus we are striving to use commercially acceptable means of protecting the information we collect and store from loss, misuse, destruction, or unauthorized access. Our security includes physical, administrative, and technology-based measures. You acknowledge that no security measure or modality of data transmission can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, therefore, we cannot guarantee absolute security. If you have any security questions, please contact us via one of the available means provided at the end of this privacy policy.

Personal Information that Kiddie Academy May Collect Online

We process Personal Information from your use of our Site or Services when you:

Request Information about an Academy. When you request information, we collect the parent or guardian’s identifiers such as your name, email, and phone number. We collect this information so that we may fulfill your request for information about that specific Academy.

Schedule a Tour in an Academy. When you schedule a tour, we collect the parent or guardian’s identifiers such as your name, email, and phone number. We collect this information so that we may maintain a record of our tours and communicate with you concerning the tour.

Enroll in our Academies. When you enroll in one of our franchisee owned academies or corporate Academies, we collect the parent or guardian’s identifiers such as your name, mailing address, email, phone number, and signature. We also collect the child’s identifiers such as their name, home address, and phone number, protected classifications such as the child’s race and medical condition(s), and identifiers of others, like emergency contact information.

Request Information on Franchising. When you request information, we collect your name, email and telephone number. We collect this information so that we may fulfill your request for information on Franchising opportunities.

Submit a Preliminary Questionnaire. When you submit a Preliminary Questionnaire to apply to become a franchisee, we collect identifiers such as your name, address, email, phone number, and signature, protected classifications such as, financial information, personal net worth information, and background and criminal history information.

Provide our Services. To provide our Services, we process the parent or guardian’s identifiers such as your name, mailing address, email, phone number, and signature. We process the child’s identifiers such as their name, home address, and phone number.

Apply for Employment. When you apply for employment, we collect your identifiers, such as your name, email, and home address. We collect your professional and employment information, such as your prior employment. We also collect your education information, like the schools you attended, and any other information you decide to share with us. We collect this information so that we may communicate with you and assess your qualifications for the position for which you applied. Employment related decisions related to the franchisee owned Academies are made in the sole and absolute discretion by the independent owner and operator of each such franchisee owned Academy.

Sign Up for a Newsletter. When you sign up to receive our newsletter, we collect identifiers such as your name and email address. We collect this information so that we can share our newsletter with you.

We collect the following personal information from you automatically through your use of our Site:

Device Information. We collect personal information about the device you use when you access our Site, such as your hardware model and operating system. We collect this information so we may monitor for potential risk and fraud and understand how users interact with the Site.

Log data. Our servers automatically record certain information sent by your browser, such as your web page or resource request, your IP address, browser language preference, operating system, device ID, geo-location data and the date and time of your request. We collect this information for security monitoring and to improve our system performance.

Cookie data. We use cookies and similar tools to enable the functionality of our Site and online Services, to assess and improve our Site and Services, and to deliver more tailored content to you.

How Kiddie Academy Uses Personal Information Collected

Kiddie Academy uses the personal information or other information gathered about you for the following purposes:

• Fulfill or meet the reason you provided the personal information to us.
• Respond to your customer service requests.
• To tailor the content and information that we may send or display to you, and to otherwise personalize your experiences while using our website.
• To better understand how users access and use our website, both on an aggregated and individualized basis, to improve our website and respond to user preferences, and for other research and analytical purposes.
• For marketing and promotional purposes. For example, we may use your Personally Identifiable Information, such as your email address, to send you news, special offers and promotions, or to otherwise contact you about information we think may interest you. We also may use the information that we learn about you to assist us in advertising on third-party websites. If at any time, you prefer not to receive any form of communication from Kiddie Academy, you may opt-out by email or by phone

How Your Information May Be Shared

Kiddie Academy does not sell or rent your personal information. We may share your information with our trusted service providers to allow us to provide our services and to communicate with you. Such third parties have access to personal information as needed to perform their functions, but they are not allowed to use it for other purposes. We use contractual or other means to protect your Personal Information disclosed to such third parties.

Kiddie Academy may also disclose personal information under the following circumstances:

• To appropriate governmental authorities if disclosure is required by law (for example, a subpoena) or regulation or is requested by a government agency.
• To appropriate governmental authorities if our records indicate an individual may be engaged in fraudulent activity or other deceptive practices that a governmental agency should be made aware of.
• To appropriate governmental authorities, where warranted by a company’s failure to participate in the advertising self-regulatory process or respond to an online privacy complaint, or where a company fails to honor the recommendations of the National Advertising Division, Children’s Advertising Review Unit or National Advertising Review Board; and
• Legal Purposes. Where we are legally required to do so, such as in response to legal process or law enforcement, to exercise our legal rights, to enforce our terms of service or other contract, or to comply with the requirements of any applicable law, we will share your identifiers (name, email, mailing address, phone number, and username), internet activity information (user ID and IP address), and financial information (bank account information and credit card information).
• To Prevent Harm. We will share your identifiers (name, email, mailing address, phone number, and username), internet activity information (user ID and IP address if we believe it is necessary to detect, investigate, prevent, or take action against illegal activities, fraud, or situations involving potential threats to the rights, property, or personal safety of any person.
• Within Kiddie Academy. We may share your identifiers (name, email, mailing address, phone number), and internet activity information (user ID and IP address) to Kiddie Academy leadership, management, and other staff as appropriate to facilitate the business.
• To our Local Franchisees. We may share your identifiers (name, email, mailing address, phone number, username, and signature) to our franchises to provide our Services, to communicate with you, and conduct data analysis, fraud monitoring, and prevention.
• To our Service Providers. We share your identifiers (name, email, mailing address, phone number, and username), and internet activity information (user ID and IP address), with service providers that provide support services to us, such as marketing services and web hosting providers.

COOKIES AND OTHER SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES THROUGH YOUR USE OF OUR SITE

We use cookies and similar technologies to enable the functionality of our Site and Services and to assess and improve our Site and Services.

What are Cookies?

A cookie is a small piece of data that is sent to your internet browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. Cookies are text files that your web browser places on your device when you visit a website. Cookies can be “persistent” or “session” cookies. Persistent cookies stay on your device for a set period of time or until you delete them, while session cookies expire when you close your web browser. Kiddie Academy uses non-identifying cookies to provide easier site navigation and access to forms. You can still use Kiddie Academy’s site if your browser is set to reject cookies, although some features may not work.

Our website contains web beacons which may collect non-identifying information. A web beacon, also known as an Internet tag, pixel tag or clear GIF, is typically a one-pixel, transparent image located on a webpage which is generally used to transmit information back to a web server.

Our advertising providers use cookies and web beacons on our website to deliver advertisements that are more relevant to you and your interests.

To enable and improve your browsing and user experience, we use the following cookies:

• These cookies are required for making use of the Site. These cookies include security cookies to authenticate users, prevent fraudulent use, and protect user data from unauthorized parties as well as session cookies that remember your log-in session so you can move easily within the Site.
• Functional. These cookies record some of your activity on the Site as well as information about your device, such as what browser you are running and what pages you access. This information helps us and our third-party service providers diagnose server and software errors, and in cases of abuse, track and mitigate the abuse.
• Analytics. Our service providers use cookies as part of their tools. These cookies allow our service providers and us to recognize and count the number of users of the Services, to see how users move around the Site, and how they engage with different functions, including usage statistics, when they are using the Services. This helps us improve the way our Services work, for example by making sure our users are finding what they need easily.

Marketing and Advertising. Our advertising providers use cookies and web pixels to identify and store actions that users take when visiting our Site (such as pages visited). These cookies are used in order to: (i) identify you as a prospect for our Services; (ii) deliver advertisements that are more relevant to you and your interests; (iii) limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as (iv) help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. If a user engages with our content, their behavior on our Site is used to present them with targeted advertising based on their interests. This means that after you are done browsing our Site you may see some advertisements about our Services elsewhere on the Internet.

Third-Party Links and Use

You may find links to third party websites on our Site. These websites should have their own privacy policies which you should check. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for their policies whatsoever as we have no control over them.

We are not responsible for the privacy or security practices of any third party; this includes third parties to whom we are permitted to disclose your personal data in accordance with this policy or any applicable laws. The collection and use of your information by these third parties may be subject to separate privacy and security policies.

Children’s Privacy

We never intentionally collect personal information from anyone under the age of 16. No one under age 16 may provide any personal information on the Website. If you are under 16, do not use or provide any information on this Website. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under 16 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from a child under 16, please contact us.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

We do not knowingly collect Personal Information about individuals residing in the European Union. If you believe we have collected or processed personal information about any individuals residing in the European Union, please contact us immediately at ka@kiddieacademy.com.