Privacy Statement

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting it through our compliance with this Privacy Policy (this “Policy”). The Policy describes the types of information we may collect from you or that you may provide to us when you visit the website www.optometry.org, any of its subpages or any other website where we post this Policy (collectively, our “Website”) or when you use our services related to the development, administration, scoring and reporting of optometry competency examinations (our “Services”) and our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting and disclosing that information.

This Policy applies to any information that we collect on the Website or otherwise in connection with your use of the Services, including any information in any forms or messages submitted by you to us through our Website or using the contact information provided on our Website, and any information collected when you interact with our Services or communicate with us by phone or e-mail messaging. This Policy does not apply to any information that we collect by any other means.

Please read this Policy carefully to understand our policies and practices regarding your information and how we will treat it. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, you can choose not to use our Website and Services. By accessing or using our Website and Services, you agree to this Policy. This Policy may change from time to time. Your continued use of the Website and Services after we make changes is deemed to be acceptance of those changes.

We may collect several types of information from and about users of our Website and Services. This may include information by which users may be personally identified or information about a user that is maintained in personally-identifiable form (collectively “Personal Information”). Specifically, we (or our third-party service providers acting on our behalf) may collect the following:

• Your name.
• Your mailing and/or physical address.
• Your e-mail address.
• Your telephone and/or fax number.
• Your gender.
• Your answers to security questions used to verify your identity.
• Payment information such as your credit card number, debit card number, financial account number, expiration dates and security codes, and other similar or related account and authentication data necessary to process payment transactions in connection with our Website and Services (“Payment Information”). Please note: the third-party payment processor that we have engaged to securely process payment transactions on our Website and in connection with our Services collects this information directly from you and processes this information on our behalf without sharing this information with us. We do not directly collect or store or have access to any Payment Information other than the last four digits of your payment card and the transaction ID assigned to your transactions.
• Your date of birth.
• Your OE Tracker®, a unique online identifier assigned to candidates during the account registration process (“OE Tracker”).
• A password you select to verify your identity in conjunction with your OE Tracker.
• Information about your educational background, such as the name of the optometry school(s) you attended, the years you began attending and graduated from such optometry school(s) and any optometry residency programs you attended.
• Medical information you may provide in connection with your use of the Services, such as information provided to corroborate requests for accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• Information about previous exams you have taken that were administered by us.
• Your IP address or mobile device ID.
• Your transaction history in connection with your use of the Website and Services.
• Your photograph in connection with the administration of certain exams.
• Your biometric data in connection with the administration of certain exams, such as your fingerprint scan or palm scan. Please note: a third-party service provider that we have engaged to administer exams collects this information directly from you and processes this information without sharing this information with us. We do not collect or store any biometric data directly.
• Other information and documentation in connection with the processing of special requests, such as the last four digits of your Social Security number, and copies of your drivers license, passport, marriage license, divorce documents or Social Security card. Please see the below section titled “How We Use Your Information” for specific information regarding the collection of this information.
• Any other information (including Personal Information) you choose to provide in any forms or messages submitted by you to us or to others through our Website or using the contact information provided on our Website.

With the exception of your IP address or mobile device ID (which we collect automatically as you navigate through or interact with our Website, as described below in the section titled “Traffic, Usage and Computer/Device Information”), we collect this information directly from you when you submit it to us or our service providers in connection with your use of the Website or the Services, including by providing the information in connection with registration for or administration of an exam, submitting information through any of the Website forms, registering to obtain additional information from us (such as by signing up to receive periodic e-mail notifications or other marketing and promotional information about us or third parties), registering for a OE Tracker on the Website, contacting us for customer service inquiries or to report a problem with our Website or Services, submitting a request or inquiry to us using the contact methods provided on our Website, responding to a voluntary survey you have agreed to complete or otherwise contacting us about our Website or Services (whether by e-mail, phone or otherwise).

Additionally, as you navigate through and interact with our Website or interact with e-mail messages you receive from us, we may automatically collect certain traffic data, usage information, and information about your computer equipment or mobile device, such as your browser and operating system, your wireless carrier, time stamped logs regarding access times and duration of visits, the pages of our Website that you visit, whether you opened the e-mail message we sent to you and whether you clicked on any links in the message, configuration data, clickstream analytics and your actions and patterns when you use our Website or interact with our e-mail messages (collectively, “Technical Information”). The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include cookies that are stored on the browser of your computer or mobile device, small embedded electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags and single-pixel gifs) and other types of embedded code. We collect this information to manage our content and improve users’ use of our Website and Services; to count and review the number of users of our Website and their usage patterns; to track key performance indicators such as pages accessed, frequency of access and other statistical information related to our Website, our Services and the performance of our e-mail messages (for example, recording the popularity of certain content and verifying system and server integrity); to identify the portion of users who access our Website via different web browsers or mobile operating systems; to recognize if a user is a return user of our Website; to store information about a user’s visits; to remember a user’s preferences; and for similar purposes in connection with monitoring, maintaining and improving our Website, our Services and our e-mail messaging.

We may use the information we collect about you or that you provide to us, including Personal Information, to:

• Provide our Website and its contents to you.
• Provide our Services to you.
• Provide you with information or services you request from us.
• Process your transactions and payments via the Website or otherwise, including by transmitting certain of your Personal Information (including Payment Information) to the third-party payment processor that we use for securely processing payment transactions, and to prevent transactional fraud.
• Create, maintain, customize and secure your account with us, including by generating your OE Tracker.
• Authenticate or otherwise verify your identity in connection with your requests, inquiries, submissions, transactions and payments via the Website or otherwise.
• Provide you with support and respond to your inquiries and customer service and support requests, including to investigate and address your concerns and to monitor and improve our responses.
• Update and maintain subscription, e-mail or mailing lists (such as our e-mail lists to receive newsletters or alerts by e-mail).
• Develop and administer surveys used to collect Personal Information, as discussed above in the section titled “How We Collect Information.”
• Provide you with informational content and promotional materials regarding our Website and Services, and our other services.
• Provide you with informational and promotional content and materials regarding the products and services of affiliates or third parties with whom we have partnered that we believe may be of interest to you.
• Maintain accurate and definitive records of your exam results and other information related to your use of our Website and Services.
• Transmit to certain third parties, such as our service providers, state licensing boards, affiliated organizations and other exam candidates, under the specific circumstances and for the purposes described in the section below titled “Disclosure of Your Information.”
• Help maintain the safety, security and integrity of our Website, databases and other technology assets and our operations.
• Perform research and development activities, which may include, for example, conducting data analyses in order to develop new services or improve existing services, and performing quality control activities.
• With respect to Technical Information, fulfill the purposes described in the section above titled “Traffic, Usage and Computer/Device Information.”
• Notify you about changes to our Website, our Services, our other services or this Policy.
• Respond to lawful requests for information through court orders, subpoenas, warrants and other legal processes or obligations.
• Enforce any contracts between you and us, including for billing and collection, or for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims.
• Evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution or other sale or transfer of some or all of our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation or similar proceeding, in which information (including Personal Information) held by us is among the assets transferred.
• Fulfill any other purpose for which you provide the information.
• Serve any other purpose that we describe when you provide the information and for any other purpose with your consent.

Please note: we may use the last four digits of your Social Security number to identify your exam results, or in connection with a name change or Social Security number change request. We may also use certain identifying documentation you provide to us to verify your identity in connection with a name change or Social Security number change request, such as a drivers license, passport, marriage license, divorce documents or Social Security card.

We may use your Personal Information to provide you with marketing and promotional information about our Website, Services or our other services, or the products and services of third parties that we believe may be of interest to you. We may also disclose certain Personal Information to third parties who may contact you directly with marketing and promotional information about their products or services. If you do not want us to use your information in this manner, see the section below titled “Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information” for more information about how to opt out of such use.

Our Services may include links to blogs, social media and third-party websites. These third-party sites have their own privacy policies and terms of use and are not controlled by this Policy. You should carefully review any terms, conditions and policies of such third-party sites before visiting them or supplying them with any personal information. If you follow a link on our Website to any third-party site, any information you provide to that site will be governed by its own terms of use and privacy policy and not this Policy.

We are not responsible for the privacy or security of any information you provide to a third-party website or the information practices used by any third-party site, including links to any third-party site from our Services. We make no representations, express or implied, concerning the accuracy, privacy, safety, security or the information practices of any third-party site. The inclusion of a link to a third-party site on our Services does not constitute any type of endorsement of the linked site by us. We are not responsible for any loss or damage you may sustain resulting from your use of any third-party website or any information you share with a third-party website.

We may convert or combine some Personal Information of users into de-identified or aggregated data that does not disclose any of the Personal Information of any individual user. We may use and disclose to third parties any such de-identified or aggregated data (including but not limited to traffic and usage data that does not identify you personally) for any lawful purpose.

Tracking involves the use of cookies, web beacons, or other embedded code or tracking technologies to collect, analyze and store information on a user’s behavior over time on multiple sites, including information on the sites visited, items viewed, items purchased and other online interactions. Tracking information can be used to enable companies to make interest-based (behavioral) advertising available to users on multiple sites that they visit.

We do not currently collect Personal Information about your online activities over time and across third-party sites for tracking purposes. In addition, we do not currently allow third parties to collect Personal Information through or using our Website that could be used by them to analyze and store information about your online activities over time and across third-party sites for tracking purposes. Therefore, our Website does not respond to any “DO NOT TRACK” signals sent by your browser or mobile device, and if your browser or mobile device sends a “do not track” signal to our Website, our Website will not treat you differently from users who do not send such signals.

We may share your Personal Information with third parties in the following circumstances:

• We may disclose Personal Information to any contractors, service providers and other third parties who need to know such information (or such contractors, service providers or other third parties may collect Personal Information directly from you on our behalf while you use our Website or Services) in order to provide services to us that support our hosting, maintenance, operation and promotion of our Website, our Services and our other services and our permitted uses of Personal Information under this Policy. For example, we may use a third-party cloud-hosting infrastructure service provider, we may use a third-party payments processor to securely process payment transactions in connection with our Website and Services, we may use exam administration and identity verification services offered by certain third parties and we may use an e-mail marketing software platform offered by a third-party service provider.
• We may disclose certain Personal Information to third parties for their own marketing and promotional purposes, as discussed in the section above titled “Use of Personal Information for Marketing Purposes.”
• We may disclose certain information (including Personal Information) to state licensing boards, such as your name, mailing address, birth year, information about your attendance at optometry schools, OE Tracker, the last four digits of your Social Security number and your exam results.
• We may disclose certain information (including Personal Information) with our affiliated organizations, such as the information we share with the Association of Regulatory Boards of Optometry, Inc., for the purposes of creating a data bank of licensed optometrists. This information may include your name, mailing address, e-mail address, date of birth, information about your attendance at optometry schools and OE Tracker.
• We may disclose certain information (including Personal Information) to the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry, Inc. (“ASCO”) and its third-party residency matching organization(s) for the purposes of the Optometry Residency Match (“ORMatch”) program. This information may include your name, date of birth, OE Tracker, and your exam results.
• Upon your specific request, we may disclose your name, optometry school and e-mail address to other candidates who will be taking the Part III Clinical Skills Examination® on the same day as you.
• We may disclose Personal Information to our affiliates or to a buyer or other successor to our business in the event of a sale of equity or assets, reorganization, merger, divestiture or a similar corporate transaction, whether as a going concern or as part of a bankruptcy, liquidation or similar proceeding, and any due diligence review with respect to any such proposed transaction.
• We may disclose Personal Information to comply with any court order, law or legal process, including to meet national security and law enforcement requirements or to respond to any government or regulatory request or audit.
• We may disclose Personal Information to enforce or apply any legal agreements between us and you, or if we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property or safety of our customers or others.


We may also disclose your Personal Information for any purpose disclosed when the information is provided, and for any other purpose with your consent.

You have certain choices regarding the Personal Information you provide to us. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies. If you choose not to accept cookies, you may be unable to access certain parts or pages of our Website, or certain parts, pages or features of our Website may not function properly. To learn more about cookies and how to disallow or manage them, go to: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.

If you do not wish to have your Personal Information used by us to contact you with promotional content or messages, you may send us an e-mail stating your request to nbeo@optometry.org, or you can opt-out by simply clicking on the “Unsubscribe” link in the most recent promotional e-mail you received from us (if any) and following the prompts that appear. These opt-outs do not apply to informational, transactional or relationship messages we may send to you in connection with the operation of our Website or the performance of our Services, such as notifications about changes to our Services or this Policy.

You may send us an e-mail at nbeo@optometry.org to request access to any Personal Information you have provided to us, or to correct or delete that Personal Information. For security reasons, we may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity before we correct, update or delete any Personal Information you provide us. Except as specifically described below in the section titled “Canadian Users: Individual Access,” the following will apply with respect to each such request:

• We will evaluate such requests on a case-by-case basis.
• In certain cases we cannot delete your Personal Information. For example, we must retain certain Personal Information (such as candidate test results) for official recordkeeping purposes relating to state licensure requirements and in accordance with our organization’s mission statement (available online at https://www.optometry.org/about), and we cannot continue to maintain your account on the Website without retaining certain portions of your Personal Information.
• We may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement or cause the information to be incorrect.

If you are a user accessing and using our Website or Services from Canada, then upon your request, and subject to certain exceptions under applicable law, we will inform you of the existence, use, and disclosure of your Personal Information and give you access to that information, and you may challenge the accuracy and completeness of the information and have us amend it as appropriate. You may submit a request under this section by sending us an e-mail stating your request to nbeo@optometry.org. Regardless of the method you use to contact us, please indicate in your communication that you are making an individual access request under Canadian law.

Our Website is hosted in the United States and provided from the United States. It is possible that certain information will be stored on servers in multiple other countries on the “cloud” or other similar distributed hosting platforms. If you are accessing our Website from the European Union, Asia or any other jurisdiction with laws governing personal data collection, use, and disclosure that differ from United States laws, please note that by using the Website and providing your Personal Information to us and others through the Website you are expressly and knowingly consenting to the transfer of your Personal Information from your home country to the United States and other jurisdictions as indicated above (where laws may differ from the laws of your jurisdiction) and you are expressly and knowingly consenting to our use and disclosure of such Personal Information in accordance with this Policy.

The California Civil Code permits California residents with whom we have an established business relationship to request that we provide a list of certain categories of Personal Information that we have disclosed to third parties for their direct marketing purposes during the preceding calendar year. To make such a request, please send an e-mail to nbeo@optometry.org or otherwise contact us using the information set forth below. Please mention that you are making a “California Shine the Light” inquiry.

Nevada residents who wish to exercise their sale opt-out rights under Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 603A may submit a request to this designated address: nbeo@optometry.org. Please mention that you are making a “Nevada Sale Opt-Out Right” request. However, please know we do not currently sell data triggering that statute’s opt-out requirements.

Our Website and Services are not intended for children under 18 years of age, and no one under age 18 may provide any information to us or others on or using the Website or Services. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under age 18. If you are under 18 years of age, do not use or provide any information on the Website, make any purchases through the Website, or provide any information about yourself to us or to other users, including your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, IP address or mobile device ID, or any screen name or username you may use. If we learn we have collected or received Personal Information from a child under 18 years of age without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under age 18, please contact us at nbeo@optometry.org.

We have implemented measures designed to secure your Personal Information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration and disclosure. The safety and security of your information also depends on you. When we have given you (or when you have chosen) a password for access to certain parts of our Website, you are responsible for keeping that password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone. Unfortunately, the transmission of information over the Internet is not completely secure. Although we have implemented security measures that we think are adequate, we cannot guarantee the security of your Personal Information transmitted to or using our Website or Services. Any transmission of Personal Information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for the circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on our Website or employed in connection with our Services.

We post any changes we make to our Policy on this page. If we make material changes to how we treat our users’ Personal Information, we will notify you through a notice on the Website home page. The date the Policy was last revised is identified at the top of the page. You are responsible for periodically visiting our Website and this Policy to check for any changes.

We are the National Board of Examiners in Optometry, Inc., a Maryland nonstock corporation with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. To ask questions about this Policy or our privacy practices, you may e-mail us at nbeo@optometry.org, call us at (800) 969-3926 or write to us by mail at 200 S. College St. # 2010, Charlotte, NC 28202.