Groundswell (GS) is a business to business (B2B) promotional website, featuring news, guidance, commentary, and promotional messaging. We are committed to your privacy through the safekeeping and confidentiality of the data you allow us to collect and process in pursuit of these purposes. This document explains how we collect, process, and share various types of data.
General information about access to and control over your data
GS publishes Discussions each business day, which invite expert commentary and comments from readers. Groundswell is supported by way of B2B consulting fees. GS collects personally identifiable information (PII) for our sponsors and for our own marketing and other services. PII is defined as information that could be used on its own to directly identify, contact, or precisely locate an individual. We gather PII for this purpose through the submission of various forms on Groundswell.
GS also collects and processes non PII data through the use of cookies and other site analytics such as Google Analytics, which is not specifically identifiable to any person, but is collected for the purpose of user convenience, site performance metrics, analytics, and demographics. See your browser preferences for the management of cookies.
We do not sell any data, PII or non PII, individually or as part of a list to any other 3rd party.
We do not share your PII for any purpose other than for which you submitted your PII.
We share your data with select employees of the sponsor on whose behalf we collect it, for the purpose it was collected. We share general, aggregated demographic information such as company name, job title, and company size with our sponsors and advertisers. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.
GS shares personally identifiable data with only those third-party clients and services you opt into, but will share general demographic data, like job title, company, company size, and other such non-personally-identifiable data, when doing our own prospecting and marketing.
You may withdraw your consent for any future contacts from us at any time by using the unsubscribe link provided on our newsletters and/or by contacting us at info@TheCustomer.net, using our contact form or the phone number given on our website.
By those means, you can also request to see what data we have about you, and receive it in a digitally portable spreadsheet, change/correct any data we have about you, have us delete any data we have about you, and express any concern you have about our use of your data.
Security: We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit PII via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.
Your information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for “https” at the beginning of the address of the Web page.
While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job related to the data collected are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.
Data we collect
Below is an outline of what kinds of data GS collects, how it is processed, and your rights concerning your data.
GS Newsletters form: Upon submission of information with this form, you allow GS to send you the newsletter(s) of your choice to the email address provided. This information is used to contact you about the products/services on our site in which you have expressed interest. At your option, you may also provide additional demographic profile information about yourself.
The newsletters contain news, information, and marketing from both GS and our sponsors and advertisers and you consent to receive such on a daily basis. We partner with MailChimp, an email service, for the purpose of delivering the emails to our subscriber list. We will share names or other contact information that is necessary for MailChimp to provide these services. MailChimp does not use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services. Their privacy policy is clearly linked. We do not share this PII with any other third party. We do not sell your data or any compilation of anyone’s data as a list.
We continue to send the email newsletters until you unsubscribe. Unsubscribe links are clearly provided. Upon unsubscribing, your data is erased.
GS Registration form: GS is free and open to be browsed by the general public as a community that talks about retail. However, one must register with us to comment as we do not support anonymous, unmoderated commentary. In order to comment, a user must first complete the registration form. During registration a user is required to give certain information, such as name and email address. At your option, you may also provide demographic information about yourself by completing a profile, but it is not required. Your information as a subscriber is used for allowing commentary and will be retained by us unless you request to be unregistered.
The content submitted in the comment field is moderated by designated employees of GS and retained perpetually, unless a specific request for removal is made. We encourage freely sharing the commentary content and commentator name across social media and provide a means to do so. Commenting is encouraged, but not required at the subscriber level. Not all comments are published, for various reasons.
You can register and then log into GS with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. We only collect the username and password from this registration.
The data we retain from registration is not sold, nor is it used for any marketing purposes, nor is it transferred to any other third party thereafter. We will remove your data from our database upon request.
We do reserve the right to aggregate usage data to measure the performance of our applications, but no identifiable personal information will ever be disclosed to third parties.
GS Marketing form: GS offers a variety of marketing opportunities to prospects. Here you can provide contact information to request our media kit and program details. The information submitted is as detailed as needed for the purpose of conducting this prospecting, and then further if desired, to complete a business transaction. We retain this information for further prospecting and continued contact with clients.
GS Contact form: The information collected is for the purpose of making contact and asking questions of a general nature of GS, or notifying GS of issues with site function, editorial suggestions, and business-related inquiries. We retain this information for our records and use it solely to respond to the specific contact instance.
Sponsor Landing Page form: GS collects contact information on behalf of our sponsors. When submitting a sponsor form hosted by us, you submit the information with consent to receive an offer of some kind, such as a white paper or e-book, an event registration, contest entry, or the like, and consent to the sponsor of the offer to pass the offer you’re interested in receiving on to you and then engage in follow-up marketing with you. Your data is forwarded to the sponsor and retained as a record on TheCustomer.net. The data we retain is not sold, nor is it transferred to any other third party except that specific sponsor thereafter. We will remove your data from our database upon request.
Surveys and contests: From time to time our site requests information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you may choose whether or not to participate and therefore disclose the required information. Information requested may include contact information and demographic information. Contact information will be used to notify the winners and award prizes. Survey information can be either used for third party sponsored research or for the purpose of monitoring or improving the use and satisfaction of this site.
Cookies: Groundswell uses “cookies.” A cookie is a piece of data stored on a site visitor’s hard drive to help us improve your access to our site and identify repeat visitors to our site. For instance, when we use a cookie to identify you, you would not have to log in with a password each time you visit the site, thereby saving time while on our site. Cookies can also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information on our site.
Some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies.
See your browser preferences for the management of cookies, which cookies you want to allow for GS, and for any other website.
External links: Groundswell contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information.