Privacy Statement
This privacy statement (“Statement”) is effective as of May 1, 2013.
Your privacy is important to SMSB Consulting Group, Inc. (“SMSB”, “we”, “us” or “our”); maintaining your trust is paramount to us.
This Statement discloses the online information practices for SMSB, including what type of information is gathered and tracked, how the information is used and secured, and with whom the information is shared.
This Statement may be updated periodically and without prior notice to you to reflect changes in our personal information practices or relevant laws. When we make changes, we will post them here. You may wish to check this section of our Web site from time to time, because by visiting our Web site or utilizing our Web site after such changes have been posted, you agree to accept any such changes to this Statement.
This Statement is incorporated into, and part of our Terms of Use, which governs your access to and use of our Web site in general. This Statement shall be interpreted under the laws of the United States, regardless of the location, residence or nationality of individual users or the physical or virtual location of any information collected by or provided to us.
If you access our Web site from a third party Social Networking Site (“SNS“), you may be required to also read and accept the SNS Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
If you have questions regarding this Statement or our collection and use of information, please contact us as described in the “Privacy Questions and Access” Section below.
Collection of Personal Information
You may choose to give us personal information directly in a variety of situations. For example, you may want to give us your name and contact information to communicate with you, to order a product, to register for a service, to provide you with a subscription, or to do business with us. You may also provide a description of your education and work experience in connection with a job opening at SMSB or any of its affiliates for which you wish to be considered. If you tell us that you do not want us to use your information to make further contact with you beyond fulfilling your request, we will respect your wishes.
We may also collect information relating to your use of our Web site and SaaS offerings through the use of various technologies. For example, when you visit our Web site or access our SaaS offerings, we may log certain information that your browser sends us, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access time, and referring Web site addresses, and we may collect information about the pages you view within our Web site and other actions you take while visiting us. We may also use such technologies to determine whether you’ve opened an e-mail or clicked on a link contained in an e-mail. Collecting information in this manner allows us to collect statistics about the usage and effectiveness of our Web site and our SaaS offerings, personalize your experience and tailor our interactions with you. For details regarding the technologies we employ, see Cookies, Web Beacon and Other Technologies below.
From time to time, we may also collect information that pertains to you indirectly through other sources, such as list vendors. When we do so, we may ask the vendors to confirm that the information was legally acquired by the third party and that we have the right to obtain it from them and use it.
The information that we collect, either directly or indirectly, may be combined to help us improve its overall accuracy and completeness and to help us better tailor our interactions with you.
Use of Personal Information
The following paragraphs describe in more detail how SMSB may use your personal information.
Fulfilling your Request
If you request something from SMSB, for example, a product or service, a callback, or specific marketing materials, we will use the information you provide to fulfill your request. To help us do this, we may share information with others, for instance, SMSB’s affiliates, suppliers and business partners.
Personalizing your Experience on our Web Site
We may use information we collect about you to provide you with a personalized experience on our Web site, such as providing you with content in which you may be interested and making navigation on our Web Site easier.
Providing Support
We may use your personal information to support products or services you have obtained from us, such as notifying you of a product update or fix.
We also may provide “Live Chat” sessions on our Web site to assist you while you’re navigating through our Web site; we will use personal information you provide via these sessions in accordance with this Statement.
In the course of providing technical support to you, we may sometimes have incidental access to data that you have provided to us or data that is located on your system. This data may contain information about you, your organization’s employees, customers, partners, or suppliers. This Statement does not apply to our access to or handling of this information; the conditions regarding the handling and processing of that data is covered by the applicable terms or other agreements between you and SMSB.
Marketing
The information you provide to SMSB, as well as the information we have collected about you indirectly, may be used by SMSB for marketing purposes. You may at any time choose not to receive marketing materials from us by following the unsubscribe instructions included in each e-mail you may receive, by indicating so when we call you, or by contacting us directly (please refer to “Privacy Questions and Access” below).
Some of our offerings may be co-branded, that is sponsored by both SMSB and third parties. If you sign up for these offerings, be aware that your information may also be collected by and shared with those third parties. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with their privacy policies to gain an understanding of the manner in which they will handle information about you.
Recruitment
In connection with a job application or inquiry, whether advertised on an SMSB Web site or otherwise, you may provide us with information about yourself, such as a resume. We may use this information throughout SMSB and its affiliates in order to address your inquiry or consider you for employment purposes. Unless you tell us not to do so, we may keep the information for future consideration.
Monitoring or Recording of Calls, Chats and Other Interactions
Certain online interactions may involve you calling us or us calling you. They may also involve online chats. Please be aware that it is SMSB’s general practice to monitor and in some cases record such interactions for staff training or quality assurance purposes or to retain evidence of a particular transaction or interaction.
Protect the Rights and Property of SMSB and Others
We may also use or share your information to protect the rights or property of SMSB, our business partners, suppliers, clients, or others when we have reasonable grounds to believe that such rights or property have been or could be affected. In addition, we reserve the right to disclose your personal information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, or the rights of others, or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process.
Sale or Merger
In the event that SMSB undergoes a business transition, such as a merger, consolidation, asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy, we may transfer all of your information, including personal information, to the successor in such transition.
Information Security and Accuracy
We intend to protect your personal information and to maintain its accuracy. SMSB implements commercially reasonable physical, administrative and technical safeguards to help us protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure. We also require that our suppliers protect such information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.
Cookies, Web Beacons and Other Technologies
As mentioned above, we collect information from your visits to our Web site and your use of our SaaS offerings to help us gather statistics about usage and effectiveness, personalize your experience, and tailor our interactions with you. We do so through the use of various technologies, including one called “cookies”. A cookie is a piece of data that a Web site can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your computer as a tag that identifies your computer. While cookies are often only used to measure Web site usage (such as number of visitors and duration of visit) and effectiveness (such as topics visitors are most interested in) and to allow for ease of navigation or use and, as such, are not associated with any personal information, they are also used at times to personalize a known visitor’s experience to a Web site by being associated with profile information or user preferences. Over time this information provides valuable insight to help improve the user experience.
Cookies are typically categorized as “session” cookies or “persistent” cookies. Session cookies help you navigate through the Web site efficiently, keeping track of your progression from page to page so that you are not asked for information you have already provided during the current visit. Session cookies are stored in temporary memory and erased when the web browser is closed. Persistent cookies, on the other hand, store user preferences for current and successive visits. They are written on your device’s hard disk, and are still valid when you restart your browser.
Most browsers, by default, automatically permit cookies, but also give you the ability to control the majority of cookies, including whether or not to accept them and how to remove them. Look under the heading “Tools” (or similar heading) in your particular browser for information about controlling cookies. You can set your browser in most instances to notify you before you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether to accept it or not. You can also generally set your browser to turn off cookies. Since cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our Web site’s features or features of our SaaS offerings, we recommend that you leave them turned on. If you block, turn off or otherwise reject our cookies, some Web pages may not display properly or you will not be able to use certain Web site services that require them. Our Web site and SaaS offerings may also use Web beacon or other technologies to better tailor those sites to provide better customer service. These technologies may be in use on a number of pages across our Web sites. When a visitor accesses these pages, a non-identifiable notice of that visit is generated which may be processed by us. These Web beacons usually work in conjunction with cookies. If you don’t want your cookie information to be associated with your visits to these pages or use of these products, you can set your browser to turn off cookies or turn off cookies in the product itself, respectively. If you turn off cookies, Web beacon and other technologies will still detect visits to these pages; however, they will not be associated with information otherwise stored in cookies.
For more information about the technologies employed by our SaaS offerings, including how to turn them off, please consult the user guide for the particular SaaS offering you are using.
We may also include Web beacons in marketing e-mail messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and links contained within clicked on.
In addition, third-party social media buttons may log certain information such as your IP address, browser type and language, access time, and referring Web site addresses, and, if you are logged in to those social media sites, they may also link such collected information with your profile information on that site. We do not control these third party tracking technologies.
Online Advertising
SMSB does not deliver third party online advertisements on our Web site but we may advertise our products and services on others’ Web sites. Please familiarize yourself with those Web site operators’ or network advertisers’ privacy policies to understand their practices relating to advertising, including what type of information they may collect about your Internet usage. SMSB does not provide any information relating to your usage of our Web site to Web site operators or network advertisers.
Links to Non-SMSB Web Sites and Third Party Applications
We may provide you with general links to non-SMSB Web sites. Your use of these links and applications is subject to the third parties’ privacy policies, and you should become familiar with the third party sites’ privacy policies before using the links or applications. SMSB is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those other Web sites.
Notification
In the unlikely event that we believe that the security of your personal information in our possession or control may have been compromised, we may seek to notify you of that development. If a notification is appropriate, we would endeavor to do so as promptly as commercially reasonably possible under the circumstances, and, to the extent we have your e-mail address, we may notify you by e-mail. You consent to our use of e-mail as a means of such notification. If you prefer for us to use another method to notify you in this situation, please e-mail us at mchristo@smsb.com with the alternative contact information you wish to be used.
Privacy Questions and Access
If you have a question about this Statement or SMSB’s handling of your information, wish to obtain a copy of particular information you provided to SMSB, or if you become aware the information is incorrect and you would like us to correct it, you can send an email to the SMSB Web site coordinator at mchristo@smsb.com.
Before SMSB is able to provide you with any information or correct any inaccuracies, however, we may ask you to verify your identity and to provide other details to help us to respond to your request.
If you no longer wish to receive marketing e-mails from SMSB, please send an e-mail to the SMSB Web site coordinator at mchristo@smsb.com or follow the unsubscribe instructions included in each marketing email.