General Privacy Policy

Personal data is generally used for the purposes of managing our relationship with you, communicating with you and/or to provide you with information you may request from us. More specifically, in line with applicable law, personal data may be used for the following purposes and for other purposes compatible with the purposes described below:

• to support student learning
• to monitor and report on student progress
• to provide appropriate first-aid and pastoral care
• to assess the quality of our services
• to meet the statutory requirements placed upon us by the cantonal and federal authorities
• to support our admissions process
• to inform parents about events, activities, and other things happening in the school
• to help investigate any concerns or complaints you may have
• to establish, defend or exercise claims
• to terminate our contractual relationship
• build and maintain the ISB community
• make you aware and inform you about our services, news, events, and activities
• alumni: respond to your request regarding historic information about your time at ISB

Personal data may further be used for any other purpose you give your explicit consent to, or for purposes that may be of a legitimate interest to ISB.

Most of the personal data mentioned is provided by you during the admission process and in the course of our contractual relationship or collected through the use of ISB online services. Insofar as permitted, we may also hold personal data about our business partners, students and their families that we have received from publicly accessible sources (e.g., social media channels), authorities or other third parties, such as other schools.

When submitting personal data please make sure that the data is correct. When providing personal data about a person other than yourself, please make sure that you are permitted to provide the data and that this other person is aware of this Privacy Notice.

Personal data is essential for ISB’s operational use. While the majority of personal data you provide to us is mandatory for the conclusion and performance of our contractual relationship, some of it may be provided on a voluntary basis. We will inform you when providing personal data is voluntary, or necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations.

For security and safety reasons, specific parts of the school campus may be under camera surveillance. ISB retains video images for maximum 30 days after which they are deleted, unless the images must be retained for further investigation or law enforcement processes.

Photographs and videos of students, parents and employees may be taken to record and share daily campus life in the course of the school year. Students, parents, and employees may be identifiable in these photographs or videos. Such photographs and videos may be used for educational and internal informational purposes (e.g. keeping records of lessons, field trips, sports, events, employee training, yearbook, internal newsletter), for the identification of students, parents or employees for health related purposes (e.g. allergies), or for marketing and publication purposes, if and to the extent you gave us your consent where required under applicable data protection laws.

Personal data is stored in line with the Swiss data protection regulations and EU GDPR on servers located in Switzerland, EU-EFTA countries, USA and UK. ISB maintains appropriate technical and organizational measures to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of your personal data (protection against unauthorized or unlawful access or processing, accidental loss, destruction or damage, cyber-security).

ISB does not store personal data indefinitely; data is only stored for as long as is necessary to serve the purposes described above. It may be processed beyond the end of our contractual relationship to establish, defend or exercise claims (during the applicable limitation period), meet legal or post-contractual obligations, including legal documentation requirements, and to safeguard other legitimate interests of ISB.

ISB restricts the use of and access to personal data to those who have an absolute need to know in order to provide the services and serve the purposes described above (authorized personnel or agents). ISB will not share your personal data with any external parties other than set out in this Privacy Notice, or except with your explicit prior consent, or as required under applicable laws or regulations.

External recipients who ISB routinely shares personal data with are the following:

• any company or provider where sharing the information is necessary to make payments or book benefits to you
• schools that the students attend after leaving us
• our local, cantonal and federal authorities to meet our legal obligations
• the Swiss education authorities
• the student’s family and representatives
• educators and examining bodies
• service providers to enable them to provide the service we have contracted them for (e.g., providers of IT services; academic service providers; providers of extra-curricular activities, internships and field trips; tertiary education institutions)
• our auditors
• health authorities and child protection authorities
• police forces, courts, tribunals

Where necessary, ISB will oblige external recipients to comply with this Privacy Notice and to process personal data securely and exclusively for the purposes allowed by ISB.

Transfer of personal data is usually limited to recipients located in Switzerland. However, transfer of personal data may occur to recipients located in the following countries: EU-EFTA, UK, USA.  If external recipients or external service providers are located in countries whose legislation does not guarantee an adequate level of data protection, ISB will implement suitable safeguards in the form of appropriate contractual clauses, namely standard contractual clauses and model contracts for data transfers recognized by the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, in order to ensure compliance with this Privacy Notice and applicable laws.

We usually do not use automated data decisions (these are decisions affecting data subjects that are completely automated, i.e. without human influence). Should this exceptionally be the case, we would inform you separately.

Under data protection legislation, you have some rights regarding your personal data processed by us in order to verify the lawfulness of processing. In particular, you have the right to:

• request information about your personal data processed by ISB
• request a copy of the personal data ISB holds on you; this includes the right to data portability, i.e., the right to receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used format
• restrict processing and/or object to the processing of personal data, in which case we may, however, no longer be in a position to provide any related services or perform our contractual obligations
• request that your personal data is erased where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing
• request that your personal data is amended if it is inaccurate or incomplete

Where the processing of your personal data is based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. Such withdrawal of consent will not affect the lawfulness of the processing based on consent before the withdrawal.

Please note that your rights pursuant to this section may be limited in order to preserve any preponderant interest of ISB or any third parties.

In addition, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the competent data protection authority. The competent data protection authority of Switzerland is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (http://www.edoeb.admin.ch).

This website may contain links to other sites. Please be aware that ISB is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personally identifiable information.

The ISB website may use “cookies” to help you personalize your online experience. A cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard disk by a web page server. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you.

One of the primary purposes of cookies is to provide a convenience feature to save you time. The purpose of a cookie is to tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of the ISB website.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers’ respective websites.