Controller and scope
SMC Education Group Ltd, trading as Signum Magnum College, is the controller for the processing described here. It is registered in Malta under company number C 91547. Its address is Portomaso Business Centre, Portomaso PTM 01, St. Julian’s, Malta. Privacy questions and rights requests may be sent to office@smceducation.com.
Personal data we process
Depending on your interaction, SMC processes identity and contact details; date of birth, nationality, and residence; academic and professional history; application answers; uploaded degrees, transcripts, identity records, CVs, and research materials; SMC referral attribution and campaign-source information; doctoral tuition proposals; correspondence and Information Desk questions; account, authentication, security, and audit data; admission, agreement, payment-status, enrollment, and academic records; and technical request data needed to protect the service.
SMC does not ask you to send card details, passwords, or authentication codes by email. Payment-card processing is handled through the authorized payment service.
Purposes and legal bases
SMC processes data to answer inquiries; establish and protect secure accounts; assess applications; verify evidence; administer admissions, offers, agreements, payments, enrollment, teaching, assessment, and records; measure registered campaigns; meet accreditation, education, accounting, security, and legal duties; prevent misuse; and improve institutional services.
SMC counts successful public document requests on its server to understand use of the website without identifying visitors. The daily aggregate contains the public page path, language, country code and count, and is kept for up to 790 days to compare seasonal trends. Assets, login and operational screens, failed pages and prefetches are excluded. Known bot signals are filtered where available; these counts are not sessions or unique people. A registered campaign route also records campaign, destination, time, referring hostname, country and whether an advertising identifier was present, for up to 90 days; its value and the visitor's IP address are not stored in that ledger. Optional Google Analytics, browser source records and browser engagement measurement remain off until permission. The service uses contract or requested pre-contract steps, legal obligations, and legitimate interests in security, reliable service administration and minimized server statistics, according to the purpose. Optional analytics relies on consent. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests through the contact below.
AI-assisted internal drafting
The Information Desk processes the name, email address, and question submitted by the visitor. SMC may use AI internally to prepare a draft from approved institutional information. The visitor does not receive an automated AI response: an authorized SMC administrator reviews and approves every response before SMC sends it by email. AI does not make admission, recognition, progression, enrollment, payment, or degree decisions.
Do not include identity documents, payment details, passwords, authentication codes, health data, or unrelated sensitive information in an Information Desk question.
Recipients, processors, and transfers
Access is limited to authorized SMC personnel and service providers that support hosting, security, communications, document storage, payments, optional analytics and academic administration. The platform uses Cloudflare for hosting, security and bot protection, Postmark for transactional email, Stripe for payments, and Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Google campaign-conversion measurement only after analytics consent. AI-assisted internal drafting uses approved model services; do not include unnecessary sensitive information in an inquiry. Professional advisers, regulators, authorities and academic reviewers receive data when their role or the law requires it.
Where processing involves a transfer outside the European Economic Area, SMC uses an applicable transfer mechanism and contractual or technical safeguards. You can request information about the recipients relevant to your interaction and a copy of applicable safeguards at office@smceducation.com.
Retention and security
Google Analytics is configured to retain event-level data for 2 months and user-level data for 14 months, with the user retention period reset by new consented activity. These controls do not govern standard aggregated reports. These server retention settings are separate from cookie expiry. Consented Analytics can include approximate location, language, browser and device information to understand audience markets and resolve user-journey problems; it is not used here for Google signals, customer-data matching or personalized advertising.
SMC retains records for the period required by education, accreditation, contractual, accounting, limitation, and legal obligations, and otherwise only as long as necessary for the stated purpose. Retention decisions account for record type, institutional duties, active relationships, disputes, security, and deletion or anonymization feasibility.
SMC applies access controls, encrypted transport, protected storage, audit records, upload validation, and operational review. No system eliminates all risk; users must protect their account access and report suspected misuse promptly.
Your rights
Subject to applicable conditions and exceptions, you may request access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability, or objection; withdraw consent where processing relies on consent; and request information about safeguards for international transfers. SMC may need to verify identity before acting on a request.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with Malta’s Information and Data Protection Commissioner or another competent supervisory authority.
Cookies, analytics choice, third-party links, and updates
The Cookie Notice describes necessary service storage and the single optional analytics purpose. Google tags and optional browser measurement stay off before permission and after rejection. Choose “Allow analytics” or “Reject optional” in the first prompt, and reopen “Cookie settings” in the footer to change the choice. Withdrawal stops future optional collection and clears accessible analytics cookies and source storage. It does not automatically remove an application, agreement, payment or academic record. Cloudflare's automatically injected Web Analytics browser beacon is disabled; server request counts remain separate from optional browser analytics.
External websites linked from SMC operate under their own privacy notices. SMC updates this notice when the platform, processing, or law changes and identifies the effective date on this page.
Contact: office@smceducation.com · SMC Education Group Ltd, Portomaso Business Centre, Portomaso PTM 01, St. Julian’s, Malta.