Better Decisions Through Data.
Updated: May 24, 2018
GDPR Disclosures
EU Residents seeking our GDPR Disclosure can find it near the end of this Privacy Policy.
What information do we collect?
We collect information from you when you subscribe to our newsletter, fill out a form, or take certain other actions.
When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your: name, e-mail address or Acculation, Inc. You may, however, visit our site anonymously (unless messages from the site or specific pages indicate otherwise).
What do we use your information for?
Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:
- To improve our website
(we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you)
- To improve customer service
(your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs)
- To send periodic emails
The email address you provide (for order processing, registration, or otherwise) may be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order, in addition to receiving occasional company news, updates, related product or service information, etc.
Note: If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, we include detailed unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of each email.
Do we use cookies?
Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information
We use cookies to compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.
Limitations on Liability and FTC Disclosure
While all attempts have been made to verify the information provided on this website, neither Acculation, Inc. nor any of its employees assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein. The views expressed are those of Acculation, Inc., alone, and should not be taken as expert instructions or commands. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions.
Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, including international, federal, state, and local laws is the sole responsibility of the reader. Neither Acculation, Inc. nor any of its employees assumes any responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of the reader of this website. Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional.
Acculation, Inc. and/or it authors sometimes use affiliate links in the content on this website. This means that if you decide to make a purchase, Acculation, Inc. might get a sales commission. But that doesn’t mean our opinion is for sale. Every affiliate link manually placed on this site is to products that we have found useful and generally use ourselves. (We reserve the right in the future to use systems which may automatically place affiliate links. These should be visually distinct from manually placed links.) Please do your own research before making any purchase online.
Do we disclose any information to outside parties?
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information acquired through our website. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.
Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance
We are in compliance with the requirements of COPPA (Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act), we do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our website, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older. Use of our website by anyone under 13 years of age violates our Terms of Service (TOS).
Google Analytics, Facebook, and Twitter Privacy
We may use Google AdWords remarketing, Google Analytics remarketing, Facebook remarketing, Twitter remarketing, and/or other 3rd remarketing tools to advertise Acculation, Inc. across the Internet, in particular on the Google Display Network, Facebook Network, Twitter Network, and elsewhere.
Google AdWords remarketing, Facebook remarketing, Twitter remarketing, and/or other 3rd party remarketing vendors may display ads to you based on what parts of the Acculation website you have viewed by placing a cookie on your web browser. This cookie does not in any way identify you or give access to your computer or mobile device. The cookie is used to indicate to other websites that “This person visited a particular page, so show them ads relating to that page.”
Google AdWords Remarketing and other 3rd party remarketing vendors allows us to tailor our marketing to better suit your needs and only display ads that are relevant to you.
If you do not wish to see ads from Acculation on other networks you can opt out in several ways:
1. Opt out of Google’s use of remarketing cookies by visiting Google’s Ads Settings.
2. Opt out of Twitter’s use of remarketing cookies by following Twitter’s instructions.
3. Opt of Facebook’s use of remarketing cookies by following Facebook’s instructions.
4. Opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.
Online Privacy Policy Only
This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.
Your Consent
By using our site, you consent to our websites privacy policy.
Changes to our Privacy Policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.
GDPR Disclosures for EU Residents
We are based in the USA and currently have no physical presence in the EU. Out of an abundance of caution, the following disclosure is intended to help EU Residents seeking out a GDPR-style privacy disclosure.
Name and contact details of the controller and their representative (eg. the data protection officer).
Legal requests to the Acculation Data Protection Officer (the GDPR Data Controller), may be
emailed for faster service to:
[email protected]
Please also mail a physical copy to:
Data Protection Officer Acculation, Inc. 5482 Wilshire Blvd., #342 Los Angeles, CA 90036 USA
The purpose of the processing your information and the legal basis for it
We require your IP address in order to respond to requests from your computer, and to fight Internet fraud. We require your email address on newsletter subscriptions in order to have some place to send the newsletter you requested. We use tracking cookies to fight fraud, personalize our services (including personalized ads in some or all regions) to improve your browsing experience, and provide you with service.
(We do not require your physical address to merely surf our website, or subscribe to our email newsletter, so the rest of this section may not apply to the vast majority of the users of this website.)
To provide consulting services to you, we generally require your physical address to process your payment, fight fraud, and help reasonably ascertain your identity. As discussed in your Consulting Terms of Service, we reserve the right to verify your identity in order to provide you with consulting services. US, most EU, and/or International laws and/or regulations generally prohibit us from providing consulting services to certain prohibited nationals or individuals acting as agents of certain prohibited nationals, as discussed in our Consulting Terms of Service. Moreover, the types of consulting services we are legally or customarily allowed to provide to clients, and the legal disclosures we customarily make, may vary based on your physical location; we believe we need to know your legal jurisdiction in order to provide you with either consulting services or the appropriate legal disclosures around consulting services. In certain rare cases, certain types of consulting services purchased above de minimis amounts may require additional regulatory filings that may require us to disclose those clients’ identities to governments; we will generally first inform clients when this is necessary, but for this reason do need to know who are clients for compliance reasons. Also, our insurance carrier requires us to make efforts to reasonably ascertain the identity of our consulting clients. Furthermore, in our understanding certain US and/or EU laws and/or regulations may require us to keep statistics on the amount of business we do with foreign nationals, their nationality or country of residence, the physical, IP, and/or email addresses of our consulting clients and/or prospects. It is our understanding that there can be substantial regulatory lookback periods on such requests. Furthermore, it is surprisingly common to receive requests for data science consulting services from individuals seeking anonymity or attempting to operating under assumed names who are no position to afford our services or legally use our services, and we have, in the past, received requests from individuals who appeared to be acting as agents of others. In order to comply with applicable law, fight fraud, avoid considerable expense to our business, and avoid wasting the time of our valued prospects, we may take steps to be reasonably assured of the identity and/or physical address of our valued consulting prospects and/or clients.
Any legitimate interests for processing
Please see above regarding our legitimate interest to fight fraud and comply with national and international regulations and laws in serving our consulting clients and prospects. In addition, we use CloudFlare and/or Amazon AWS proxy services to help speed the site, fight fraud, help secure your information, and help protect it from attacks. It is possible your information may be visible to CloudFlare and/or Amazon AWS as it passes through their proxy, anti-fraud, and/or anti-attack services.
With regards to personalization (including personalized ads), if relevant to your region or country, we will note the vast majority of Internet traffic at times are malicious bots, sometimes pretending to be human, which can degrade our website; a key differentiating factor between humans and increasingly sophisticated fraudulent bots is that humans appreciate personalization whereas fraudulent bots do not. In other words, we use personalization to combat fraud, and if regulators have questions about the details of this (as well as references to the literature on the prevalence of fraud on the Internet), we would welcome the opportunity to provide information & help shape further policy. It is unfortunate that personalization has been severely abused by other firms per recent media reports. At time of writing (May 2018) we are not fully personalizing in all regions.
The categories of personal information processed
We may process your name, address, email address, phone number, IP address, your password for this site, the amount and/or dates of any purchases of services made through us, text of product reviews and/or blog comments, and/or optionally any social media profile and/or site URLS when provided by the user. In the future, when appropriate, we may store VAT numbers that EU residents provide us and/or our payment processor. Generally, with the exception of IP address or similar information provided by your web browser, this is information you would first need to disclose to us on the site or through a provider such as PayPal. We do not ourselves process credit card information; this is handled by 3rd parties such as PayPal.
Any organisations the personal information is shared with
Your IP address and similar information provided automatically by your web browser may be shared with CloudFlare, various Google services (including but not limited to Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google YouTube, and Google Adwords), Amazon Ads, Amazon AWS Services, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Shapeways, Outbrain, BotLibre.com, PayPal, MailChimp, anti-fraud vendor ClickCease, and/or anti-fraud vendor IThemes. as well as with anti-fraud providers such as ClickCease. Your username, IP address, email address, physical address, and/or phone number, if you provide it to us or one of our vendors, may also be shared with us or our vendors in order to fight fraud and provide you with service. Certain actions and statistics about your actions taken on our website may also be shared with some or all of vendors in order to fight fraud and provide you with service.
We do not currently collect VAT numbers from EU residents because we only provide consulting services from consultants physically working outside the EU, but if you provide us or our payment processor with your VAT number in the future a VAT verification processor and/or the EU government may be provided with your VAT number and/or other identifying information in order to fight fraud by verifying your VAT number. Your email address, name, and/or any opt-in IP address may be shared with our mailing list processor MailChimp. If you purchase our services, your payment details, including address, may be shared with PayPal as our payment processing and/or anti-fraud vendor.
If we or our software suspects you of attempting to defraud us (including but not limited to engaging in click fraud, various attacks on our website, comment spam, attempting to purchase our services under a false name, various types of payment-related fraud, violating our IP and Terms of Service by automatically downloading our copyright content to a competitive intelligence site or bootleg site, and/or attempting to surf the website as a non-human for competitive or malicious reasons), we may automatically and/or manually report your IP address and/or other relevant details to governments, government agencies, anti-fraud vendors and/or previously described vendors, including but not limited to the US Department of Homeland Security, US CERT, the CERT in your home county,law enforcement in US and/or your home country, your ISP, search engines such as Google, anti-fraud vendors and/or other vendors including, but not limited to, those already described. In our experience, fraud attempts are very common on the Internet, and legitimate attempts to protect against fraud enjoy less regulation.
Details of transfers of personal information outside the EEA
We may store your details in a cloud hosting provider based in the USA which is PrivacyShield Certified, such as Amazon AWS, the Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and/or other Amazon, Google, and/or Microsoft services.
How long the personal information is kept for
As noted above, our understanding is that the lookback periods on governmental requests for address and certain IP information potentially required by US, EU and International regulators in connection with our consulting services can be as long as ten years. Currently, we plan to keep most or all the data for at least ten years based on our current interpretation of US, EU, and/or international laws and/or regulations, but reserve the right in the future to adopt a shorter, company-wide information retention period for some or all information if we determine we can do so in accordance with US, EU, and international regulations. As noted below, you may be able to opt-out or request a shorter retention period with us or our partners for some of the data.
Information on all an individual’s rights, including your right to request erasure of the data
Users with a login account on this site (such as paying consulting clients) can email us for an archive of the personal data associated with their account on this site. Users with a login account on this site can also request that the data associated with their login be erased on this site, and we will evaluate your request consistent with our understand of applicable law.
If you do not have an account you are understood to be an anonymous user and there is no data archive associated with a site username to erase or download from us. Either way, if you have concerns about your information, you may still wish to contact us and/or our vendors listed herein to see if they have information related to your IP address, email address, phone, physical address, and/or username.
Most or all of our providers are GDPR-complaint, so EEA residents may be able request your IP and/or cookie and/or email address and/or similar information to be deleted from various Google products (including but not limited to Google Analytics), Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Ads, various Google products, LinkedIn, Outbrain, PayPal, Mailchimp, anti-fraud provider ClickCease, anti-fraud provider Ithemes, our mail subscription processor BotLibre.com etc, and these service providers will evaluate your request based on their understanding of relevant laws and regulations. You can also contact us directly to request to have your IP information deleted if you are an EEA resident, and we will evaluate your request based on our understanding of the relevant law.
Information on an individual’s right to withdraw consent to processing.
As noted immediately above, EU residents can request IP and similar information to be deleted from us and/or most of our partners, and thereby withdraw consent from further processing, when consistent relevant laws and regulations.
For users seeking to browse the site without cookie traffic, there are long-standing widgets on a number of pages by Pinterest, Twitter, Shapeways, and Google YouTube, among others, that are integral to the content experience on these pages. These firms have sent out notices saying they now comply with the GDPR, and we have no reason to doubt that they do (and lack the resources to investigate further). Prior to GDPR coming into force in May 2018, it seems that some of these firms used tracking cookies. We lack the resources to determine if these widgets still use tracking cookies, and, if they do, whether such tracking cookies comply with GDPR or not as our partners’ claim they do (one use of tracking cookies is to help reduce fraud, which is allowed under GDPR). We are not aware of any mechanism for our site visitors to globally opt-out of such tracking cookies, short of existing technical solutions such as disabling cookies within the user’s browser, the pre-GDPR opt-out mechanisms described above for these vendors, and IAB Consent framework that some of these sites have established for opting-out of personalization. These widgets are an integral part of some web articles’ journalistic content, and, as predominantly US firm, it is unrealistic for us to change the content and meaning of past journalistic reporting for EU users on the off-chance that are partner firms might be ruled out-of-GDPR compliance in the future. (We could perhaps block EU users from accessing our site altogether. We already block and degrade some countries due to high incidence of fraud from those countries, and lack of tracking information is a fraud indicator.)
In terms of browsing the website without any tracking cookies, the pre-GDPR technical workarounds, such as browsing with Google Analytics opted-out, opting out from various ad providers via the instructions above in this privacy statement, should still work. In addition, Google Adsense has recently announced that it will implement the IAB Consent framework, so opting-out through the IAB framework may be another option. However, lack of personalization may degrade you experience. As noted above, the majority of traffic to Internet sites in general appears to be bots at time of writing, and the majority of such bots are fraudulent and/or malicious. One of the ways humans are different from bots is that bots do not appreciate personalization, whereas in our experience human visitors do appreciate personalization. Furthermore, we are in a consulting business where we are required by contract and/or regulations to know the identity of our clients. Therefore, web visitors who behave increasingly like bots that have opted-out of all personalization features may appear to our systems as less than fully-valued traffic unlikely to ever convert to paying consulting clients. (It is unfortunate that other firms are abusing personalization, per May 2018 media accounts.) At the time of this writing (May 2018), we do not block bots generally, so it is still possible to view the site while appearing to be a bot, and thus potentially avoid tracking cookies. We believe it is possible to currently browse the website with all cookies disabled (although such traffic is more likely to be flagged as fraudulent in the future by an anti-fraud vendor, and your website experience may be degraded).
Despite the above technical discussion on cookie tracking workarounds, our official policy is that our Terms of Service requires cookie consent to use this website in order to mitigate fraud, although we try to serve notice of our cookie tracking to our EU users where technically feasible. Fraudulent traffic is unfortunately common on the Internet with severe economic costs, lack of cookie tracking is a fraud indicator as already noted, and cookie tracking to mitigate fraud is allowed under the GDPR. By using our website, you agree to our Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy, which requires you to agree to tracking cookies and ad personalization where allowed by law, for the reasons described above.
Information on an individual’s right to complain to the regulator.
It is not clear if we are in the scope of the EU GDPR as we are a USA-based firm both legally and physically with no current physical presence in the EU. We are supplying this GDPR disclosure out of an abundance of caution. EU residents may contact their local national regulator and make further inquiries if they are considering filing a complaint.
Where the individual’s personal information came from
Acculation itself currently receives very little or no personally identifying information from third party cookies. All or nearly all individual personally identifying information would need to be supplied either to us by users themselves directly on the site, or in connection with using the site such as through a payment processor like PayPal, email processor like MailChimp, or login authenticator such as Facebook.
Almost all 3rd party cookie information is anonymized or aggregated by providers such as Google Analytics or, if you clicked on an ad to reach our site, the advertising provider such as Google Adwords. Any such aggregated and anonymized 3rd party cookie information would primarily come through Google Analytics or an advertising provider such as Google Adwords, from which users have the right to request their information be deleted as noted above, or opt-out of tracking as described above in the non-GDPR section of this notice (or in the Privacy section of the Google Analytics, or the privacy section of the advertising provider such as the Google Adwords website). If you are on our newsletter subscription email list, an exception might actions taken within our newsletter, in which case MailChimp or another newsletter processing vendor might provide us with information about you.
If you make a purchase on our website, our payment processor (currently PayPal) may provide certain information, such as your name, email address, phone number, IP address, and physical address back to us to facilitate processing of your order. If you subscribe to our email newsletter on MailChimp or another site, MailChimp will provide us with your email information. If you chose to optionally log-in through Facebook (as opposed to establishing a separate account on this site), Facebook will supply us with your email information.
Nearly all other information would need to be supplied voluntarily directly by the individual user on our website, or, in the case of IP addresses and similar information, is necessarily provided in the course of processing your web traffic through standard web protocols.
Whether the individual has to provide the personal information as a matter of law
It is our good-faith belief that US and/or International regulations and/or laws require us to reasonably acertain the identity, physical address, and/or some additional information such as IP addresses, email address, and/or VAT numbers of our paying EU customers and/or prospects, for the reasons previously discussed. As noted above, it is our understanding that US and/or the laws of other nations may require disclosures of client identifying information to regulators in some circumstances and/or certain areas of consulting practice, and that we need to collect and have this information on file. As noted above we may also need the physical address of paying clients or consulting prospects in order to provide them with the most relevant legal disclosures as well process their payments and provide them with service. Furthermore, our current insurance contract expressly requires us to reasonably ascertain the identity of our paying consulting clients. Our past experience in this industry, sound anti-fraud practices, and such other considerations, also lead us to believe we require this information from some individuals to do business with them in a compliant and reasonable fashion.
Finally, it is our understanding that the GDPR itself and/or other EU laws would require us to track and retain information such as, but not necessarily limited to, opt-in IP addresses, other types of addresses, country of residence information, and/or other similar information from EU residents for certain actions on our website, if our corporation were found to be within the scope of the GDPR.
Details on any automatic decision making carried out using the personal information
Acculation itself does not currently carry out any automatic decision making using personal information, with the exception of Acculation or its anti-fraud vendors automatically blocking and/or reporting certain IP addresses and/or browsers if they behave suspiciously, appear to be engaging in fraud, appear to attack our site, or come from regions of the world or IP blocks with poor reputations. Our payment processors or other anti-fraud vendors, such as PayPal, CloudFlare, Amazon AWS, IThemes, Google, and/or ClickCease, may automatically analyze your IP address, browser details, supplied credit card and/or other payment details you supply to them for evidence of fraud, and/or analyze your past account history with the payment processor for indications of fraud, and may report a high-level opinion back to us. Although we will generally communicate with clients around such opinions, and such anti-fraud declines are usually easily remedied by providing additional information or alternate payment details to the payment processor PayPal and/or other vendors, we reserve the right to decline or block further service based on this information in order to fight fraud.
This policy was last modified on May 25, 2018
Contacting Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy you may contact us using the information below.
www.acculation.com [email protected] Acculation, Inc. 5482 Wilshire Blvd., #342 Los Angeles, CA 90036 USA