Privacy

Animated Favicon
Animated Favicon

This Privacy Policy is effective as of March 2023.

At Smart Associates, we’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others, and how we keep it secure. This Policy also explains how we use cookies and similar technology on our website.

We may change this Policy from time to time so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes. By using our website, you’re agreeing to be bound by this Policy.

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 process an order, to register for a service, to provide you with a subscription, or to do business with us if you are a supplier or a business partner. You may also share a description of your education and work experience in connection with a job opening at Smart Associates 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 sites and service offerings through the use of various technologies. For example, when you visit our Web sites or access our service 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 sites 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 sites, our software products and our service offerings, personalise 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 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 Smart Associates may use your personal information.

Fulfilling your Transaction Request
If you request something from Smart Associates, for example, a product or service, a callback, or specific marketing materials, we will use the information you provide to fulfil your request. To help us do this, we may share information with others, for instance, Smart Associates’ business partners, financial institutions, shipping companies, or postal or government authorities, such as Customs authorities, involved in fulfilment. In connection with a transaction, we may also contact you as part of our customer satisfaction surveys or for market research purposes.

Personalising your Experience on our Web Sites
We may use information we collect about you to provide you with a personalised experience on our Web sites, such as providing you with content in which you may be interested and making navigation on our sites 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 may also provide “Live Chat” sessions on our Web sites to assist you while you’re navigating through our sites; we will use personal information you provide via these sessions in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

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 organisation’s employees, customers, partners, or suppliers. This Privacy Policy 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 of Use or other agreements between you and Smart Associates.

Marketing
The information you provide to Smart Associates, as well as the information we have collected about you indirectly, may be used by Smart Associates for marketing purposes. Before we do so, however, we will offer you the opportunity to choose whether or not to have your information used in this way. 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. Some of our offerings may be co-branded, that is sponsored by both Smart Associates 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 familiarise 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 a Smart Associates Web site or otherwise, you may provide us with information about yourself, such as a resume. We may use this information throughout Smart Associates 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 transactions may involve you calling us or us calling you. They may also involve online chats. Please be aware that it is Smart Associates’ 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.

Use of Information in the Social Computing Environment
Smart Associates provides social computing tools on some of its Web sites to enable online sharing and collaboration among members who have registered to use them. These include forums, wikis, blogs and other social media platforms.

When registering to use these social computing tools, you may be asked to provide certain personal information. Registration information will be subject to and protected in accordance with this Privacy Policy, except for the information that is automatically made available to other participants as part of your profile. These tools may also include supplemental privacy statements with specific information about collection and handling practices. Read those supplemental statements to understand what the tools and applications may do.

Any other content you post, such as pictures, information, opinions, or any other type of personal information that you make available to other participants on these social platforms or applications, is not subject to this Privacy Policy. Rather, such content is subject to the Terms of Use of those applications or platforms, and any additional guidelines and privacy information provided in relation to their use, as well as the process by which you can remove your content from such tools or get help to do so. Please refer to them to better understand yours, Smart Associates’, and other parties' rights and obligations with regard to such content. You should be aware that the content you post on any such social computing platforms may be made broadly available to others inside and outside Smart Associates. ** Protecting the Rights and Property of Smart Associates and Others**
We may also use or share your information to protect the rights or property of Smart Associates, 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 served on our Web sites.

Sharing of Personal Information and International Transfers Smart Associates is a global organisation with business processes, management structures and technical systems that cross borders. As such, we may share information about you within Smart Associates and transfer it to countries in the world where we do business in connection with the uses identified above and in accordance with this Privacy Policy. Our Privacy Policy and our practices are designed to provide a globally consistent level of protection for personal information all over the world. This means that even in countries whose laws provide for less protection for your information, Smart Associates will still handle your information in the manner described here.

In some cases, Smart Associates uses suppliers located in various countries to collect, use, analyse, and otherwise process information on its behalf. It is Smart Associates’ practice to require such suppliers to handle information in a manner consistent with Smart Associates’ policies.

From time to time, we may disclose information that identifies you at an individual level and which we collected on our Web sites to other non-Smart Associates entities that are not acting as our suppliers, such as our business partners. Except as described in this Privacy Policy, we will only do so with your prior consent. We do not sell or lease such information.

Circumstances may arise where, whether for strategic or other business reasons, Smart Associates decides to sell, buy, merge or otherwise reorganise businesses in some countries. Such a transaction may involve the disclosure of personal information to prospective or actual purchasers, or the receipt of such information from sellers. It is Smart Associates’ practice to seek appropriate protection for information in these types of transactions.

Please be aware that in certain circumstances, personal information may be subject to disclosure to government agencies pursuant to judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process. We may also share your information to protect the rights or property of Smart Associates, our business partners, suppliers or clients, and others when we have reasonable grounds to believe that such rights or property have been or could be affected.

Information Security and Accuracy
We intend to protect your personal information and to maintain its accuracy. Smart Associates implements reasonable physical, administrative and technical safeguards to help us protect your personal information from unauthorised access, use and disclosure. We also require that our suppliers protect such information from unauthorised access, use and disclosure.

Retention We will retain your registration information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. If you wish to request that we no longer use your registration information to provide you services contact us here. We will retain and use your registration information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

Cookies, Web Beacons and Other Technologies
As mentioned above, we collect information from your visits to our Web sites and your use of our service offerings and our software products to help us gather statistics about usage and effectiveness, personalise 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 personalise 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 categorised 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. Cookies in our software products can be turned off in the product itself. Since cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our Web sites' features or features of our software products and service 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, for instance, to use any Web site services that require you to sign in. Some Smart Associates Web sites, service offerings and software products 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 Smart Associates’ Web sites. When a visitor accesses these pages, a non-identifiable notice of that visit is generated which may be processed by us or by our suppliers. 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.

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.

Some of our business partners set Web beacons and cookies on our site. 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
Smart Associates does not provide any information relating to your usage of Smart Associates Web sites to Web site operators or network advertisers. We have also engaged with certain third parties to manage some of our advertising on other sites. These third parties may use cookies and Web beacons to collect information (such as your IP address) about your activities on Smart Associates’ and others' Web sites to provide you targeted Smart Associates advertisements based upon your interests.

Links to Non-Smart Associates Web Sites and Third-Party Applications
To allow you to interact with other Web sites on which you may have accounts (such as Facebook and other social media sites) or join communities on such sites, we may provide links or embed third-party applications that allow you to login, post content or join communities from our Web sites. We may also provide you with general links to non-Smart Associates 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.

Smart Associates is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those other Web sites.

Privacy Questions and Access
If you have a question about this Privacy Policy or Smart Associates’ handling of your information, you can contact us here.