PRIVACY POLICY
Effective from 19 November 2020
1. WHO ARE WE?
1.1 Welcome! This website, https://skillsmatter.com, is owned and operated by Quad4 Group Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under registration number 12371678, and trading under the name Skills Matter. Our registered office is 31 High Street, Haverhill, Suffolk, England, CB9 8AD, United Kingdom. Our VAT number is GB 341 7815 01. Additionally, our USA registered company details are, Quad4 Group, Inc. trading as Skills Matter. Company address 1675 S State St Ste B, Dover, Delaware, DE 19901, USA. Our EIN number is 84-4050733.
2. WHAT THIS PRIVACY POLICY IS FOR
2.1 Quad4 Group Limited (from now on, "Quad4 Group", “Quad4”, “we”, “our” and “us”) has developed this Privacy Policy for our customers, account registrants, members, browsers and other users of our Site (from now on, “You” or “Your”). The Privacy Policy is an important and legally binding document so You should read it carefully.
2.2 This Privacy Policy gives You information about:
• why we collect, store, share and use personal data (such as information that identifies, relates to or describes You, or which is capable of being associated with You);
• what personal data we collect
• the choices we offer, including how to access and update Your personal data; and
• our use of cookies and how You may disable such cookies.
2.3 Quad4 Group is committed to ensuring that Your privacy is protected and to processing Your personal data in accordance with the applicable data protection laws (including, but not limited to, the EU General Data Protection Regulation).
2.4 This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to the practices of companies that Quad4 Group does not own or control (even if those companies use our website) and You are subject to the terms and conditions of use and privacy policies of those other websites or companies when You are using them.
2.5 Our Privacy Policy only applies to You when You use our website, https://skillsmatter.com (“Site”) or our services or You attend our meetups, talks, conferences, Skillscasts and workshops courses and events, Hackathons and other types of events, and any methods by which we provide You with SkillsCast recordings, articles or online content on or through our Site (including when we collect personal data from any general enquiry received via an associated/partner websites), all of which features and activities, together, are including in the definition of the “Site”
2.6 Quad4 Group may change this Privacy Policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that You are happy with any changes. Updates and changes to this Privacy Policy will be legally binding upon You when we post them (superseding any prior policy that may apply with respect to the website and our services), whether or not we provide You any other notice of such changes. We will indicate the effective date of the currently applicable Privacy Policy at the beginning of it.
2.7 You should read this Privacy Policy together with our Website Terms as these are incorporated into this Privacy Policy. If You choose to use our services (such as courses and events), the additional terms and conditions that relate to our services are contained in our General Terms and Conditions of Supply.
2.8 If You are a person under the age of 18 (or the age of majority in Your particular jurisdiction), You must not submit personal data to this Site unless You have obtained the consent of and supervision of Your parent or guardian beforehand.
2.9 By continuing to use this Site, You confirm that You have read, understood and agree with our entire Privacy Policy as it is in effect at the time of Your use. If You do not agree, then You must not use or continue to use this Site or our services.
We have tried to use terms in this Privacy Policy that are clear and straightforward, but we also use certain defined terms and they mean the following things. In particular,
• “personal data”, “process”, “data controller” and “data processor” each have the meaning set out in the applicable data protection laws, which include the Data Protection Act 1998 and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. and
• “Your Content” means all of the information and content provided, generated, transmitted or displayed via the Site by You.
3. WHAT PERSONAL DATA DO WE COLLECT FROM YOU?
3.1 We will collect several different types of personal information from You.
3.2 We can only provide our services to You if You provide us with certain of Your personal data. This data is required so that we may enter into a contractual relationship with You. This may include, for instance, Your name, email address, and (where payment is required) payment details.
3.3 When You use this Site, including by uploading content in any form or medium (“Content”) by making submissions/posts in user forums or by undertaking transactions on or via this Site, by accessing or browsing it, by communicating with us via email or signing up for newsletters, other communications, completing an online form, making a telephone or email enquiry including via one of our partner websites), we may collect all or some of the following personal data from or about You:
(a) Your name and job title;
(b) Your company name or affiliation;
(c) Your contact information including phone/mobile number/fax and email address;
(d) other demographic information including Your home or other addresses and postcode if You choose to provide us with such;
(e) Your communication and purchase preferences and interests including about Your topics and tags of interest;
(f) other information relevant to customer surveys and/or offers which we may make available to You;
(g) Your browsing, online activities and transactions, and generally, how You interact with or view the Site;
(h) where You have submitted/posted Your Content, Your submissions and posts;
(i) where You have registered with us, Your user name and password; and
(j) where You have undertaken a transaction through this Site, Your billing and delivery postal addresses.
3.4 Quad4 Group Limited does not store credit card details nor do we share financial details with any 3rd parties, but our payment providers and other payment service providers do store such information.
3.5 We may also collect some or all of the above types of information from information that is available to the public such as on third party websites, from our business partners or third parties who have Your consent to pass on that information to us or who may be authorised by You to authenticate or identify You to us or to sign in to our Site using credentials from that business partner or third party.
3.6 When You submit/post Your Content which is personal data on or via the Site in user forums on or pages accessed via this Site, You agree that any such personal data may be viewed by others.
3.7 We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 18 unless we have the consent to do so of the parent or guardian.
3.8 We collect certain information in a passive manner, by use of browser cookies and similar technologies – for instance, we may use cookies to “remember” who You are and what pages You have viewed. We describe these technologies in Section 6. We describe how You may “opt out” of certain marketing uses of these technologies Section 7.4. We may also collect Your Personal Data for quality assurance, compliance and training purposes by monitoring and recording email or other communications with You or between You and third parties using our systems or our agents.
4. WHAT WE DO WITH YOUR PERSONAL DATA
4.1 We (and third party data processors, vendors and hosting partners who may be acting on our behalf) may collect, store and process Your Personal Data for several reasons
(a) to make this Site available or to customise it according to interests, to provide our Content and Your Content tailored to individual requirements; to develop, improve and understand how You use our Site and its features; and to enable others to view Your Content, submissions and posts;
(b) for purposes related to providing our goods and services to You, including verifying and authenticating Your identity, processing Your payments and payment system or card details in order to complete transactions with us or our business partners made through this Site;
(c) to maintain any registered accounts that You may hold with us and to provide You with updates or notifications of changes to Your account and our policies and terms;
(d) for our internal record keeping requirements including collection of anonymised details about visitors to our Site to compile aggregate statistics or produce internal reports;
(e) to contact or market to You about our or our business partners’ events, services or promotions, or other information which we think You may find interesting, offers, or
(f) to communicate with You about the services; provide You with surveys; or for customer satisfaction purposes (including contact by email, phone, fax, mail).
(g) for market research, analysis, testing, monitoring, risk management and administrative purposes (including diagnosing technology problems which may be reported to us) or to make You aware of any new Content, including free and paid for events, articles and SkillsCasts which we reasonably believe that You are interested in them; and
(g) for any purposes related to the above or where we have a legal right or duty to use or disclose Your Personal Data (including for abuse, crime and fraud prevention and related purposes).
4.2 In terms of sharing, disclosing or transferring Your Personal Data to third parties (together, “Disclose” or “Disclosing”), except as set out in this Privacy Policy, we will not Disclose Your Personal Data unless we have Your permission or unless we are required to do so to:
(a) comply with applicable law or an order of a governmental or law enforcement body; or
(b) investigate, prevent or take action against suspected illegal activities (including fraud or where the personal safety of another person may be threatened) or breaches of our Website Terms; or
(c) establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims. When Disclosing Your Personal Data, we may use email, or other methods.
4.3 Where is data held outside EEA or the UK: some 3rd party services we use are situated in the USA, and Australia. Transfers to the USA or Australia will be protected by appropriate safeguards, namely the use of standard data protection clauses adopted or approved by the European Commission, a copy of which can be obtained by emailing us at privacy@skillsmatter.com.
4.4 If we become aware that we have collected or been sent Personal Data from a person under the age of 18 without the consent of the parent or guardian, we will deactivate the relevant account as soon as is reasonably practicable.
4.5 In the event that a third party proposes to acquire all or some of our business and/or assets, we may disclose Your Personal Data to that third party in connection with their proposed or actual acquisition.
4.6 We require to retain Your Personal Data, any other information which we have collected and any of Your Content that You have submitted for operational purposes. We also may retain this for the period of time needed for Quad4 Group to pursue our legitimate business interests, improve our products and services and comply with our legal obligations.
4.7 We will process information necessary to enter into a contract with You, to comply with legal obligations and for legitimate interests. Legitimate interests include to provide You with information on Community interests and forthcoming events.
4.8 Not all events hosted on skillsmatter.com are organised by Quad4 Group Limited. Some events (such as Community Meetups or Partner Conferences) are coordinated by external Organisers (individuals or organisations, who while part of our community, are not employees of Quad4 Group Limited).
4.9 When You register for an event, sign up for communications, enter a contest, or otherwise input Your Personal Data (such as through a web form) to communicate with an Organiser or participate in an Organiser event, that Organiser will receive that information. For instance, if You input Your name and email address into a web form for an Organiser offer, activity or event, the Organiser will receive that information. The Organiser may then send You marketing or other communications, which may be subject to its own, separate privacy policy. Likewise, if You provide Your mobile phone number, You may receive information messages related to the service, event, activity or information in which You’ve expressed interest.
5. SECURITY
5.1 We are committed to ensuring that Your Personal Data is secure.
5.2 In order to minimise the risk that there is unauthorised access to or Disclosure of Your Personal Data, we have put in place, where practicable, appropriate physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure it.
5.3 Although we take measures intended to safeguard the personal data that You provide to us, no transmission over the internet is guaranteed to be secure. For Your security, You should:
(a) if using a computer in a public location, always log out and close the website browser when You complete Your online session;
(b) keep Your account details and passwords private;
(c) use complex passwords, and frequently change them;
(d) avoid using the same password for multiple online accounts.
6. HOW WE USE COOKIES
6.1 This Site uses cookies for various reasons.
6.2 A cookie is a small data file placed on Your computer’s hard drive or other mobile or handheld device as You browse this Site or advertisements, videos or other types of Content and which ‘remembers’ that Your computer or device accesses this Site.
6.3 Cookies are added to a computer’s hard drive or other mobile or handheld device. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies but You may modify Your browser settings to decline cookies (or certain types of cookies) or to be notified of cookies being placed.
6.4 We (or service providers and partners we work with) may use cookies to do the following:
(a) enable us to “remember” You and Your account information, including how You have engaged or interacted with us in the past;
(b) respond to You as an individual and to tailor our operations to Your needs by gathering and remembering Personal Data about Your preferences;
(b) assist the effective operation of this Site, such as by causing content, information and tools to render and work;
(c) enable traffic to the Site and pages to be logged to identify pages used and browsing and purchasing behaviour of users of our Site for statistical purposes and to monitor and analyze which pages users find useful or not; or
(d) assist with account or user security (such as by obliging You to reset passwords if the password has lapsed).
(e) market or retarget, on our or others’ behalf. To opt out of our marketing (whether online or offline), see the choices we provide in Section 9.
6.5 Rejecting cookies used by this Site (or in general) may prevent You from taking full advantage of the Site and may stop this Site from operating properly when You use it. You may be unable to complete a transaction with us on this Site.
6.6 If You do not consent to use of the cookies (in places where we provide You an additional way to consent to or reject cookies), You must disable the cookies by deleting them or amending Your cookie settings on Your computer or You must stop using this Site.
6.7. Please see Section 11 for a list of partners and service providers we work with, who place cookies from our websites. For each, You may review how to opt-out based on the “opt out” measures we have linked to.
7. REMARKETING
7.1 We use Remarketing (sometimes called “retargeting”) to advertise Quad4 Group and Skills Matter across the Internet, using Google Display Network, Facebook Ads and other third party services and websites.
7.2 Remarketing displays ads to You based on what parts of the Quad4 Group websites You have viewed and interacted with. To achieve this third parties such as Google or Facebook may use cookies, web beacons, and other storage technologies to collect and analyse information about Your use of Quad4 Group websites and elsewhere on the internet. They may use that information to provide measurement services and targeted advertising. Sometimes, in order to remarket to you, we may work with a service provider that “hashes” your personal data (by creating a mathematical “hashed” value” from the clear text), in order to retarget you across other web or connected properties in a more privacy protected fashion.
7.3 Remarketing such as Google AdWords Remarketing allows us to tailor our marketing to better suit Your needs and display ads that are relevant to You, which may be on behalf of us or on behalf of clients that use our services (such as to host events or promotions).
7.4 How to Opt-Out: If You do not wish to see remarketing ads from Quad4 Group You can opt out in several ways:
7.4.1 Opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting Google’s Ads Settings.
7.4.2 Opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page or the industry opt-out pages operated by the Digital Advertising Alliance at http://www.aboutads.info/choices and http://www.Youronlinechoices.eu/.
7.5 Customer Match. Personal information You provide to us when using our service, such as an email provided when making a transaction, may be used to help serve relevant advertising to You across the internet. This technology is typically referred to as “Customer Match”. Your privacy is important, so only anonymised data is stored with any third party ad providers we use. You can find out more about how third party providers such as Google use this data at https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6334160?hl=en-GB.
8. LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES AND THEIR PRIVACY POLICIES
8.1 Our Site may contain links to other websites of interest. Your use of other websites which are owned and operated by third parties and are accessed by links from this Site is not governed by this Privacy Policy and we do not control any of those other websites. We recommend You review those third parties’ privacy policies for information about their data collection and usage.
8.2 Once You use the links from this Site to access those other websites, we are not responsible for the protection and privacy of any information that You provide while using them.
8.3 You should exercise caution and review the privacy policies applicable to those other websites and ask any questions or raise any concerns about their collection or use of Your Personal Data with that website operator.
9. THE GDPR AND YOUR CONTROL OVER AND ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL DATA
An important European privacy law, the General Data Privacy Regulation (the “GDPR”) provides You with certain rights, and places certain obligations on us, regarding how Your “personal data” (as the GDPR uses that term) is used. We describe those rights and obligations below.
9.1 Legal Basis. The GDPR requires us to tell You about the legal ground we're relying on to process any “personal data” (as the GDPR uses that term) about You. The legal grounds for us processing Your personal data for the purposes set out in Section 4 above will typically be because:
• You provided Your consent;
• it is necessary for our contractual relationship, e.g., in order to provide You services or features You’ve requested and we’ve promised;
• the processing is necessary for us to comply with our legal or regulatory obligations; and/or
• the processing is in our legitimate interest as an event hosting and content distribution platform (for example, to protect the security and integrity of our systems and to provide You with customer service, etc.).
9.2 The right to notice. You have the right to notice – i.e., to be informed -- about how we protect Your data and respect Your privacy. We provide that notice by posting this Privacy Policy.
9.3 Your rights to access, correct, delete or withdraw consent. right to request access to a copy of Your personal data, or request that we correct or “rectify,” restrict or delete Your personal data, You may exercise some of these rights by logging in to Your account: for instance, You may correct Your personal and account information through those account settings, and
9.4 You can exercise other rights, such as Your account deletion or “access” rights, by contacting us using the contact information set out in Section 9.9, below. Please note that when we delete Your information, we may retain it for certain important internal purposes such as legal, accounting or auditing purposes. Likewise, when You request access to Your information, we are required to verify Your identity in a legally sufficient manner: if we cannot do so, we will not be able to satisfy Your access request.
9.5 You may object to profiling by online advertising platforms (who are generally separate third party “controllers” of Your data). You may visit industry websites provided at [https://optout.aboutads.info]9https://optout.aboutads.info) (by the Digital Advertising Alliance) and https://optout.networkadvertising.org/ (by the Network Advertising Alliance) or https://www.Youronlinechoices.eu/ (the European Digital Advertising Alliance) to do so.
9.6. You may also unsubscribe from marketing and other communications that we may send (on behalf of ourselves or others) by clicking on “communication settings” in Your account profile. (Your account profile is located by clicking on Your account icon on the upper right hand corner of Your screen.)
9.7 The right to withdraw consent. Where we rely on Your consent as the lawful basis for processing Your data, You can later change Your mind and we will stop processing Your data (to the extent that we relied on Your consent to do so). This will not make unlawful our processing of Your data with Your consent up to that point.
9.8 To withdraw Your consent or to exercise or inquiry about any other rights described above (in addition to the above tools), You may write to us at: Skills Matter c/o Quad4 Group Limited. 31 High Street, Haverhill, Suffolk, England, CB9 8AD, United Kingdom or email privacy@skillsmatter.com.
If You have a complaint about how we handle Your Personal Data, please get in touch with us as at the above contact addresses, and we will seek to address any concerns You may have. If You are not happy with how we have attempted to resolve Your complaint, You may contact the relevant data protection authority.
10. QUAD4 AS A DATA CONTROLLER AND A DATA PROCESSOR
EU data protection law makes a distinction between organisations that process personal data for their own purposes (known as "data controllers") and organisations that process personal data on behalf of other organisations (known as "data processors"). If You have a question or complaint about how Your personal data is handled, those should always be directed to the relevant data controller as they are the ones with primary responsibility (legally and organizationally) for Your personal data.
In this regard, Quad4 may act as either a data controller or a data processor with respect to Your personal data, depending on the specific circumstances. In general, when You engage with Content on our Site, Quad4 acts as the data controller of the personal data that You submit. However, there may be circumstances when Quad4 holds personal data solely as a processor of a customer, such as where a customer provides us with personal data (e.g., its own customer data) that is independent of personal data we have collected on our own behalf.
11. THIRD PARTY COOKIES WE USE
We list below third party cookies that may be deployed on the Site, along with the party that deploys those cookies (which will often be the Controller of the personal data collected) along with information about those Controllers and how to opt-out of those cookies. Note that if You “opt out,” this generally will cause an “opt out cookie” to be placed on Your browser. Thus, if You delete all cookies, You will also delete that “opt out cookie” and will need to opt out again. Likewise, if You use a different browser (or a different machine), You will need to opt out separately from the relevant browser.
Cookies:
Google (marketing, advertising and analytics): See Google’s Ads Settings;
New Relic (performance instrumentation): See New Relic's privacy policy;
HubSpot (our 'Contact Us' chat bot): See HubSpot's privacy policy;
Twitter: See Twitter's privacy policy.
You also may opt out of many third-party vendors’ use and/or collection of information through cookies (including many vendors with whom we do not work) by visiting the industry websites provided at the Digital Advertising Alliance (by ) and the Network Advertising Alliance (by ) or the European Digital Advertising Alliance.