Introduction
This Privacy Notice covers the handling of personal data by Advantage Group International Inc and its affiliated entities, collectively known as “Advantage” (also “we”, “our” and “us” in this document).
We understand that you care about the privacy of your Information, and we take that seriously. This Privacy Notice describes our policies and practices regarding collecting and using your personal data and setting forth your privacy rights.
Contact Details
Advantage Group International Inc
Address: 101-320 Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4A6, Canada
Email address: info@advantagegroup.com
ICO registration: ZB414373 – The Advantage Group International, Inc
Changes to this Privacy Notice
We keep our privacy policy under regular review.
We recognize that information privacy is an ongoing responsibility. Advantage reserves the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to reflect changes in legal or regulatory obligations or changes in the manner in which we deal with personal information.
If we make any material changes, we will notify you by posting the revised notice on our websites. Your continued use of the websites, and continued provision of personal data to us will be subject to the terms of the current Privacy Notice.
This version was last updated on 6th of March 2023. Historic versions can be obtained by contacting us.
Who are we?
Established in 1988, Advantage Group International, Inc. (Advantage) is a dynamic, growing market research firm that helps clients build successful relationships with their business customers. Advantage programs have become the industry standard for measuring business relationships and performance in fast-moving consumer goods, healthcare, pharmacy, and foodservice channels in the global market. We provide valuable insights to over 500 clients worldwide.
What do we do?
Advantage conducts market research in numerous countries around the world using online, Excel-based and paper surveys. Advantage’s cohesive service portfolio was designed with one goal in mind – to help clients understand and strengthen their business relationships. The company’s products include Advantage Report™, which provides suppliers with feedback on their performance from their key retail customers and Advantage Report Retailer, in which suppliers are in turn asked to rate the effectiveness and performance of the retailers they do business with.
How we collect and use (process) personal data
- Visitors to our website
- Clients and business contacts
- Research participants
- Marketing
- Recruitment
1. Visitors to our website
When you visit our website, we use third-party services to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to various parts of the website. When you complete a contact form on our website or use the email for enquiries, we will use the information given by you to provide you with an appropriate response.
1.1 Social Media Features
Our websites may include Social Media Features, such as the LinkedIn or YouTube button and Widgets, or any interactive mini-programs that run on our sites. These features may collect your I.P. address, the page you are visiting on our sites, and set a cookie to enable the feature to function correctly. Social Media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our websites. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy and other policies of the companies providing them.
1.2 External Websites
Our websites may provide links to third party websites. We do not control and are not responsible for the content or practices of these other websites. Our provision of such links does not constitute our endorsement of these other websites, their content, their owners, or their practices. This Privacy Notice does not apply to these other websites. Those websites are subject to any privacy and other policies they may have.
2. Clients and Business Contacts
Our clients signify businesses and their representatives who commission us to provide our services
2.1 What Information do we hold about our clients/ suppliers?
We may hold the following information about our clients/ suppliers:
- Contact details- name, job title, business address, business email address, business phone numbers, including mobile numbers
- Usernames and login information to our platforms
- Usage reports from these platforms
- Transaction data including details about services you have purchased from us/ provided to us
- Financial data such as bank details
- Photograph, professional profile, areas of expertise for any client profiles
- Your videos and photographs that were taken at any of our events attended by you
- Your testimonials for our services
We may receive personal data from our clients about other individuals, e.g. their colleagues while providing our services. Any such information is used solely for such purposes and is handled strictly as per client instructions.
This data is collected and processed to fulfil our contract with you, provide you with our services. We also use your data to contact you for our research analytics.
3. Research participants
We conduct research and analytics to provide a range of services and solutions. For this purpose, we undertake research that may take the form of online surveys, telephone interviews, or focus groups.
If you are an employee/owner of an organization that we believe may have an interest in our services or those of our clients, then we may hold personal information on you such as your name, job title, work telephone number and email address. We capture this data from the public domain, from speaking to someone at your company or directly communicating with you.
3.1 What Information do we collect about our research subjects?
We may collect and hold the following information about you:
- Contact details: name, job title, employer name, contact email, phone number, region and country of residence
- Specific attributes to aid our research and reporting of results – such as confirmation about purchasing and using a particular product or service.
- Call records and survey responses. Your responses and call records are only processed in a way that does not identify any individual.
3.2 How do we collect your data?
We may obtain information about research subjects via the following sources:
- Our database of customers and previous research subjects
- Publicly available information about people of interest (e.g., from Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, news articles)
- Provided by our clients who have asked us to conduct such research
- Sourced by our approved vendors. They are required to obtain and provide us with an audit trail of your consent to share your Personal Data with us.
Your email address or phone number will be used to contact you regarding your participation in our survey. If you take a survey or provide us with personally identifiable information within the survey, the following will be retained by us in case we need to contact you for a follow-up: your first name, last name, job title, email address and company name.
This information will be used solely by Advantage and will not be distributed to any 3rd party.
The responses you provide in a survey, or through a follow-up interview with an identified Advantage Interviewer, will be used in aggregate form to provide valuable information to our clients. You will not be personally identified by your survey ratings, nor through comments obtained in any follow-up interview.
Your participation in our online surveys is always voluntary and with your consent. You can choose to remove your e-mail address from our mailing list at any time. Once it has been removed, you will no longer receive survey invitations or communications from us for that survey. To unsubscribe, please reply to your email invitation, expressing your wish to opt-out.
4. Marketing data
We hold contact details of individuals who have expressed interest in hearing from us or have engaged with us for our past services. All direct marketing activities to such individuals shall comply with relevant privacy and regulatory requirements.
4.1 How is your personal data collected?
You may give us your personal data by
- Completing any form on Advantage’s website or subscribing to newsletters/ e-bulletins
- Completing a form attached to corporate communications, direct marketing campaigns, whitepaper
- Registering to our webinar/ virtual events/ in-person events
- Taking part in an event sponsored by Advantage/Advantage’s client
- Joining any of our forums, client and leadership groups
- Procuring any products or services from Advantage
- Signing up to blog or submit a comment
- Interacting with our Accounts Managers/Sales/Business development team
- Participating in research interviews
- Data may also be gathered from the public domain, e.g. LinkedIn, Google, your website.
4.2 How we use your data?
We may use your data to form a view on what we think you may want or need or what may be of interest to you. We only use the data you provide to us directly for this purpose, along with the aggregated data provided to us by our analytics partners.
We strive to provide you with choices regarding specific personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising.
We send electronic marketing – such as email marketing – to people who have previously bought or expressed interest in our services. We carry out this marketing activity based on our legitimate interests.
We will always offer a way out of receiving this marketing when you first purchase our services/products and in every marketing communication afterwards. We may, on occasion, send out postal marketing for growing our sales which is in our legitimate interests. You can update your marketing preferences if you do not wish to receive these communications
You may also receive marketing and events information on the email address you have made publicly available, e.g., on LinkedIn and other such platforms, if we believe this will be useful. You can unsubscribe from such emails if you don’t wish to receive them in the future.
5. Recruitment
All of the information you provide during the application process will only be used to process your application and also to meet legal or regulatory requirements if necessary. We will not share any of the information you provide during the recruitment process with any third parties for marketing purposes or store any of your Information outside of Advantage controlled systems.
The Information you provide will be held by us securely. We will use the contact details you provide to us to contact you to progress your application. We will use the other information you provide to assess your suitability for the role you have applied for. We do not collect more information than we need to fulfil our stated purposes and will not retain it for longer than is necessary.
5.1 Application stage
All applications are submitted via our website, through recruiters or directly. We ask you for:
- Contact details- name, address, phone number and email address.
- Your previous experience- details of your education, work history, your interests, qualifications and experience.
This information will only be visible to those within Advantage who require it for the purpose. You can withdraw your application or change details by informing us in writing.
5.2 Selection stage
We will shortlist applications for interview. Information will be generated by you and by us. For example, you might complete a written test, or we might take interview notes. We hold this information to assess your suitability for the role. We will also conduct an I.D. verification and check your right to work as per local regulations before any offer letters are issued.
5.3 How long is the information retained?
If you are unsuccessful at any stage of the process, the information you have provided until that point will be archived from the date an email notification is sent to you. The information generated throughout the assessment process, for example, interview notes, is retained by us for six months following the closure of the position. If you are successful in your application, we will retain your information per our Privacy Notice for Employees and Contractors.
Use of cookies
When you visit our website, we may use ‘cookies’ to track the patterns of behaviour of the visitors to our website. We place a text file (a cookie) in the browser directory of an individual computer’s hard drive. A cookie is a small piece of information which stores basic information you enter into the website on your web browser. The cookie cannot be read by any website other than the one that sets up the cookie. Some browsers can be set to reject all cookies.
6. When and how do we share your Personal Data?
We may share your personal data with:
- Our marketing team and research team, where we have either obtained consent or assessed that it can be processed under the legitimate interest basis.
- Our I.T. service providers and cloud service providers who provide data storage, processing, backup, and retrieval services
- Any third parties (e.g., digital marketing providers, sponsors of our events and webinars) with whom you permit us to share your contact information
International transfer of data
Your personal information may be collected, transferred to, and stored by us, in Canada and by our offices or affiliates in other countries where we operate.
Please refer to our region-specific data processing guidelines below.
Automated decision-making
We do not use automated decision-making concerning your personal data.
7. Security of your Personal Information
Advantage has in place strict measures to ensure every aspect of your personal information is protected. Access to all personally identifiable information is restricted and limited to few key, identifiable personnel. Our website and survey security is reviewed regularly.
Advantage will never ask you for private information such as your credit card, or driver’s license as a part of our research. We use secure servers and firewalls when collecting information and protecting respondent privacy. Your profile information is highly confidential and will be used only by Advantage to email you concerning our surveys or as otherwise provided for in this Privacy Policy.
To help protect the privacy of data and personally identifiable information you provide, we maintain physical, technical and administrative safeguards. We update and test our security technology and controls on an ongoing basis. We restrict access to your personal data to those employees who need to know that information to provide benefits or services to you. In addition, we train our employees about the importance of confidentiality and maintaining the privacy and security of your Information. We commit to taking appropriate disciplinary measures to enforce our employees’ privacy responsibilities.
We have information security policies and procedures to protect Personal Information from unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure or destruction and have several layers of security measures appropriate for the type and sensitivity of the data.
8. Data storage and retention
Your personal data is stored by us on our servers in Canada, Australia, Belgium and UK and on the servers of the cloud-based services and I.T. service providers we engage, as well as in physical forms in our office and at backup and archival facilities. We retain data as per our data retention policy and regulatory data retention requirements.
For more information on where and how long your personal data is stored, and for more information on your rights of erasure and portability, please contact us at info@advantagegroup.com.
9. Your Rights and How to access and manage your personal Information
EU GDPR, UK GDPR and U.K. Data Protection Act
For the individuals based in the E.U., EEA and the U.K. we confirm that Advantage complies fully with the above regulations. If you wish to confirm that Advantage is processing your personal data or for accessing the personal data we may have about you, please contact us at info@advantagegroup.com.
You have a right to request correction of inaccurate information, deletion of Information, and to instruct us to stop processing your Information. If you’d like more information or would like to make such a request, please contact us at info@advantagegroup.com.
We verify that any data transfer outside of EEA or UK is subject to E.U. or UK adequacy requirements, Standard Contractual Clauses, or UK International Data Transfer Agreements. We may transfer data necessary for the performance of a contract between us. In situations where data needs to be transferred to a country or a region where these measures do not apply, we will seek explicit consent from you before making such a transfer.
Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (‘PIPEDA’)
For individuals based in Canada we confirm that Advantage complies fully with PIPEDA and all other Canadian data protection regulations, such as PIPA BC, PIPA Alberta and the Quebec Privacy Act.
Please contact us at info@advantagegroup.com if you wish to:
- Confirm that Advantage is processing your personal data or for accessing the personal data we may have about you,
- Request correction of inaccurate information, deletion of Information, and to withdraw your consent, which you have a right to do at any time.
- You would like more information, ask any questions about how we process personal data, this privacy policy or wish to make a complaint
- You should be aware that e-mail is not a 100% secure medium, and you should be aware of this when providing us with personal information.
If you are not happy with our response you have the right to complain to the supervisory authority. For individuals based in Canada please contact:
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
30, Victoria Street
Gatineau, Quebec
K1A 1H3
For individuals based in the UK please contact:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Other territories
For individuals based in other territories we comply with applicable data protection regulations. Please contact us for further information.