Last Updated: September 18, 2023Privacy Policy
Introduction
The Product Advisory Collective (PAC) (“our Organization”, “we” or “us”) values the privacy of the online visitors (“Visitors”) to our website, www.productadvisorycollective.com (our “Website”). This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes how we handle and protect personal and non-personal information we collect, use, maintain, and disclose. We are committed to protecting personal information shared with us in connection with accessing our Website or engaging in our business activities, information, products and services, which may include, but are not limited to, online communications, online surveys, professional advisory services for clients and professional growth and development services for members and associates. Collectively, our Website and our business activities and services are referred to herein as the “Services.”
This Policy summarizes what we will and will not do with your information and covers our relationship with Visitors as well as prospective or existing clients (“Clients”) and prospective or existing members and associates (collectively, referred to as “Members”). Collectively, Visitors, Clients and Members are referred to herein as “you.”
The Policy is effective July 1, 2023. By using our Services, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Policy. Unless otherwise defined in this Policy, the terms used in this Policy have the same meanings as in our Terms of Service.
Our Organization’s owners, directors, officers, employees, contractors, managers, investors, attorneys, assigned agents, and Members (collectively, “Representatives”) are required to comply with all applicable laws and regulations and expected to conduct themselves above minimum legal and regulatory standards. We will not condone activities of any Representatives who may try to achieve results by violating the law or unethical business dealings.
Location of the Services and Information Processing
We operate in the United States, and our Services are intended for Visitors, Members and Clients located in the United States. If you are located outside of the United States, please be aware that information we collect, including personal information, will be transferred to, processed, and stored in the United States.
By using the Services or providing us with any information, you consent to the transfer, processing, and storage of your information in the United States or any other country where our Organization or our vendors, partners, subsidiaries, affiliates, or service providers (collectively, “Associated Entities”) maintain facilities. If you are located in the European Union or other jurisdictions with laws that govern data collection and protection differently than United States’ laws, you acknowledge that we may transfer your personal information to a country or jurisdiction with different data protection laws than those of the country where you reside, and you expressly consent to the transfer of information, including your personal information, to a jurisdiction where our Organization or our vendors, partners, subsidiaries, affiliates, or service providers maintain facilities.
You are also consenting to the application of United States federal and applicable state law in all matters concerning the Services and this Policy.
General Privacy
Our Organization may:
Collect, use, and retain personal or professionally identifying information as set forth herein.
Retain personal or professionally identifying information only for as long as necessary or as required by law.
Limit internal access to and use of personal or professionally identifying information to those with a valid business reason.
Use personal or professionally identifying information only as set forth herein.
Protection of any business information or documentation, whether shared by a Client, Member, Associated Entity or other type of business, that is considered sensitive, confidential or proprietary in nature is covered by any Confidentiality or Proprietary Matters Agreements entered into.
Personal and Non-Personal Information
Personal Information Collected
We may collect personal information to operate our Website, or we may use it in the course of providing other Services to Clients and Members. Whether you disclose personal information to us is your choice, although, if you elect not to do so, some aspects of our Services may not be available to you.
Personal information may include professionally identifiable information. Professionally identifying information includes any professional information that Members or Clients choose to make available publicly, such as content typically available on online resumes or social media or community platforms (e.g., LinkedIn). Collectively, personal information and professionally identifiable information is referred to as “personal information.”
How we protect, store, secure, use and disclose personal information is described in the “Use of your Information” section.
Personal information may be collected from Members and could be used to identify Members as individuals. It includes information typically collected for the purpose of making online payments and managing professional memberships and networking. Examples of this information include:
Name
Email address
Phone number
Payment information, including billing address
User profile name or identification number
Images, videos or audios showing or representing personal likeness
Current or past employer(s) or company ownership or board role(s)
Professional title(s) held
Educational degree(s) or other credentials attained
Other professional information made available publicly, such as content typically found on resume or a social media or community platform (e.g., LinkedIn)
Personal information may be collected from Clients as part of Client screening, on-boarding and/or to receive our Services. Examples include:
Name
Email address
Phone number
Payment information, including billing address
Current employer or company owned or founded
Professional title
If you provide personally identifiable feedback to us about any of our Services, we may use this feedback for any purpose, including to continuously improve our offerings, engagement, experience or marketing. We will only make your feedback personally identifiable (e.g., associate your name) if you do not request that your feedback remain anonymous. We will collect and store any information contained in such communication and will treat it in accordance with this Policy.
Anonymized Data
If we create anonymous or aggregated data records using your personal information, excluding any private or personally identifiable information (e.g., your name), at our discretion, we may use this anonymous information or data to enhance our Services or disclose to trust third parties that we are contractually engaged with. If anonymized data is shared for research, contractual or compliance purposes, you may be notified.
If you provide anonymous feedback on our Services, we may use such feedback for any purpose, provided we will not associate such feedback with you personally. We will collect and store such feedback and treat your personal information in accordance with this Policy.
Non-Personal Information
We may collect other non-personal information that cannot be easily used to identify you, such as, for example, the domain name and IP address of your computer or the browser type you use to access the internet. We may use this information, individually or in the aggregate, for administration of our Website, other Services, or to help continuously refine and improve our engagement, experience, offerings or communications.
How we Collect Information
Voluntarily
You may voluntarily provide personal and professionally identifiable information to us by completing a survey, filling out a form, providing payment information or conducting a search on our Website or other sites supporting and connected to our Website. Information may be collected at the time of requesting to use our Services, during the provision of our Services or after Services have been engaged in or provided. We may collect details on the transactions and activities you carry out through our Website.
In certain cases, we may ask you to share information for internal use only or for research purposes. You may be notified if non-personally identifiable and anonymized information is shared for research, contractual or compliance purposes.
Automatically
We may automatically collect information about the devices you use while interacting with our Services. Information we may automatically collect, either on our Website or via a third party, includes: your IP address, unique identifier, general geographic area, web browser, and browsing information collected through cookies or other similar tracking technologies.
We may potentially automatically collect information about your online activity on our Website or via our other Services. Online activity may include pages viewed, time spent on a page, navigation paths between pages, access times, and duration of access.
Cookies
Our Organization and Associated Entities may use first and third party cookies. The reason we might use cookies is to enhance our Services. Our cookies do not identify you by name.
A cookie is a small data file containing a string of characters, which is transferred by a website to your device. Cookies are used for a variety of reasons including effective page navigation, security, remembering your personal preferences and providing insight on user activity patterns. Information that cookies and other tracking technologies may collect include:
Usage info (e.g., IP address, cookies, etc.)
Device info (e.g., browser used, operating system, etc.)
Referral source (e.g., survey or weblink referral source)
Page tag data (e.g., web beacons, web bugs)
You have the option to accept or disable cookies at any time through your browser. You may refuse to accept browser cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser (refer to your browser’s ‘help’, ‘tool’ or ‘edit’ sections). If you choose to disable your cookies, your experience on our Website or with other Services may be limited. For more information about cookies, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
External Sites Collecting Information
Our Services may contain links to other sites online that are not operated by us. If you click a third party link, you will be directed to that third party's site. We strongly advise you to review the privacy policies of every site you visit. We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.
Our Website or communications may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.) or links to third party, external websites. When you engage with embedded content or links owned by external websites, it is the same as visiting the other website. We neither claim nor accept responsibility for any privacy policies, practices, and/or procedures of other websites, which may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content.
The policies and procedures described in this Policy do not apply to these external, third-party websites, even if you access them through our Website or communications. The display of our logo or other intellectual property on external websites does not imply that we endorse, have reviewed, or are in any way formally affiliated with the third party. We encourage all Visitors to read the privacy statements of every website that collects personally identifiable information, automatically or voluntarily.
Use of your Information
General
We may use your personal or professionally identifying information to:
Communicate with you about our Services;
Provide our Services to you;
Verify your email address;
Create, activate, secure and maintain your account, membership or documentation with us;
Engage in and manage communications and information sharing;
Identify you in our system;
Collect and evaluate survey information;
Analyze and assess your experience, expertise, metrics, interests, priorities and preferences;
Determine eligibility for activities, meetings, opportunities, or other offerings;
Create anonymized (non-personally identifiable) marketing and business development content;
Personalize marketing or other information about our Services;
Gather information to improve our Services;
Send updates, notifications or marketing information about our Services;
Request or respond to your feedback.
We may use your personal or professionally identifying information to contact you with marketing or promotional content that may be of interest to you. You may opt out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or the instructions provided in any email we send.
When we need to collect personal or professionally identifying data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you, and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to provide you with the Services we committed to or are in the process of committing to provide to you. In this case, we may have to cancel a product or service you have with us; but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.
Any personal or professionally identifying information shared, submitted, emailed or uploaded into any of our systems will not be available to or shared with any other Visitors, Members, Clients, Associated Entities or other third parties that we do not have a contractual relationship with, along with specific stipulations or protocols on the access, analysis or use of the personal information we protect.
If you provide personal or professionally identifying information to us, including via a referral or other third party, we will:
Not sell or lease it to a third party (unless expressly stated in this Policy or other signed agreement between us);
Provide you with information we believe you need to know or may find useful, such as news about our Services and modifications to the Terms of Service;
Take commercially reasonable precautions to protect your information and data from loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction;
Not use, make accessible or disclose your personal information except:
as necessary to provide services you have signed up for or requested, which may include providing access to independent contractors who are advisors, consultants and coaches;
in other ways described in this Policy or to which you have otherwise consented;
in the aggregate with other information in such a way that your identity cannot reasonably be determined (for example, statistical compilations);
as required by law;
to outside auditors who have agreed to keep the information confidential;
as necessary to enforce our Terms of Service;
if we are involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, your personal information may be transferred. We will provide notice before your personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
as necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of our Organization, Visitors, Clients or Members; this may include exchanging information with third parties for fraud protection and/or risk reduction.
Marketing
We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. We may use your personal contact data and usage data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide what services, offers or benefits may be relevant for you.
You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased from us previously and not opted out of our marketing communications. You may opt out of receiving marketing communications from us by using the unsubscribe link in the communication sent or by contacting us at join@productadvisorycollective.com.
Third-Party
We would obtain your express, opt-in consent before sharing your personal information or data with any third party for marketing or operational purposes. We currently do not, nor do we plan to, provide your personal data to third parties for their direct marketing purposes.
Disclosing your Personal Information
We will only share personal information with our Associated Entities, when and if they require access to it in order to provide our Services or technical support related to any of our Services. Associated Entities will only have access to your data and information to perform specified and essential activities, so that we may provide our Services, on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.
Any payment information you may submit to purchase our Services is collected and processed directly by our payment processor. We do not receive nor store your full payment information. Our payment and invoicing service provider (e.g., credit card payments, check payments, invoicing and related services) is Quickbooks. Quickbooks’ Privacy Policy is available at www.intuit.com/privacy.
Online surveys that you may take before, during or after engaging in our Services may request personal information. Your privacy is important and protected by the survey platform, as well, including via their privacy policy, located here: www.alchemer.com/privacy.
We will not intentionally disclose or transfer your personal information or data to third parties without your consent, unless they are an Associated Entity, engaged by our Organization to manage specific activities, data, documentation, communications, processes or offerings that enable us to provide our Services, as described in our Terms of Service or signed agreements.
We may disclose personal information about you:
If we are required to do so by law or legal process, to law enforcement authorities or other government officials;
When we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical harm or financial loss or in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity;
If disclosure is necessary to protect the vital interests of a person;
If necessary to protect or defend the rights, property or Services of our Organization;
To prevent fraud against our Organization or Associated Entities
To support auditing, compliance, and corporate governance functions; or
To comply with any and all applicable laws.
We may share information with subsidiaries, joint ventures, parents or other companies under a common control (collectively, "Related Entities") that we may have in the future. We may share some or all of your data and information with these Related Entities, in which case we will require our Related Entities to honor this Policy.
We may sell, divest, transfer our Organization (including any equity or ownership), or any combination of our products, services, assets and/or businesses. Personal information may be sold or otherwise transferred in these types of transactions, but you would be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Website of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your personal information. We may also sell, assign or otherwise transfer such information in the course of corporate divestitures, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, dissolutions, reorganizations, liquidations, similar transactions or proceedings involving all or a portion of the company.
Security of your Personal Information
We respect and are committed to protecting your personal information. We use generally accepted standards of technology and operational security to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, alteration, destruction or disclosure. Our Website’s hosting service employs security measures, such as firewalls to protect against intruders, server redundancies and network testing to protect against vulnerabilities. The primary communications platform, where we manage Member communications, engagement and work, has earned internationally recognized security certifications. The document management system we use implements leading encryption technology like HTTPS and Transport Layer Security and has built-in authentication tools and services. However, no security safeguards are impenetrably secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.
External Data Storage
We store your data on servers provided by third party hosting vendors with whom we have entered into consensual or contractual agreements. Information and data we collect may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country where our Organization or its Associated Entities maintain facilities. As necessary, we may transfer information that we collect about you, including personal information, to Associated Entities, to provide our Services.
Information from Children
Our Website is not designed for or targeting children 16 years of age or younger. We do not intentionally collect or maintain personal data about anyone under this age. If you are under the age of 13, you are not permitted to share any personal information with us.
Privacy Responsibilities
To help protect our Visitors’ privacy, we advise Website visitors to take precautions to guard against “malware,” e.g., by installing and updating anti-virus software.
To help protect our Clients and Members’ privacy, we advise Clients and Members to be sure to:
Protect access to devices with password-protection, biometric data or two-factor authentication;
Not to share your user login information with anyone else;
Not to leave open browsers or software applications in public or non-private places;
Take precautions to guard against malware (e.g., by installing and updating anti-virus software).
Information Retention
We strive to keep your information only as long as necessary for business purposes and as permitted by applicable legal requirements. We may establish general practices and limits concerning use of our Services, including, for example, a maximum period of time that data, information or documentation may be retained. You agree that we do not have responsibility or liability for the deletion or failure to store any data or other content maintained by us or shared with us.
If and when a Client engagement with our Organization ends or a membership with our Organization terminates, we may retain some information and data for analytical purposes, record-keeping integrity or to continuously improve our Services, as well as to prevent fraud, comply with laws or regulations, enforce our Terms of Service or take actions deemed necessary to protect the integrity of our Services or agreements entered into with Clients or Members. In addition, if certain information has already been provided to third parties as described in this Policy, retention of that information will be subject to those third parties’ policies.
Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless our Organization and our Representatives from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, costs (including without limitation to reasonable attorney’s fees) or other expenses that arise directly or indirectly out of or form (a) your breach of any provision of this Policy; (b) your activities in connection with our Services or (c) unsolicited information you provide to our Organization through our Services.
Changes to this Policy
We reserve the right to change this Policy as we deem necessary or appropriate because of legal compliance requirements or changes in our business practices. If you have provided us with an email address, we will notify you by email of any material change to how we will use personally identifiable information and personal health information.
"Do Not Track" under the California Online Protection Act (CalOPPA)
Do Not Track is a preference you can set in your web browser to inform websites that you do not want to be tracked. You may enable or disable Do Not Track by visiting the preferences or settings page of your web browser. While some Internet browsers may be configured to send “Do Not Track” signals to the online services that you visit, we currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” or similar signals. To find out more about “Do Not Track,” please visit http://www.allaboutdnt.com.
California Privacy Rights
Under California law, a California resident with whom our Organization has an established relationship has the right to request certain information about the categories of personal information that a company has collected, used, disclosed, or sold in the preceding 12 months for direct marketing purposes. Categories and information includes:
Categories of sources of that information;
Commercial or business reason(s) we collected, used, disclosed, or sold that information; and
Categories of third parties to whom the company has disclosed or sold that information.
After receiving a verifiable request from you, establishing your identity, you may have the right to know about the specific pieces of personal information, if any, that our Organization may have collected about you and/or shared with third parties in the prior 12 months. You may also have the right to request deletion of personal information about you that we have collected or continue to maintain, which we will respect, subject to certain exceptions, in California law. Since we do not provide your personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes, it is not necessary for us to establish this procedure; nonetheless, if you do not want us to use your personal information to provide this type of information for direct marketing purposes, follow these cost-free opt-out procedures in this Policy.
Questions or Comments?
If you have any questions about this Policy, please contact us at join@productadvisorycollective.com, or contact us via any of the options listed on our Website.