Privacy

Last Updated on June 20, 2018.

1. About this Policy
2. About Richard Carlton Consulting, Inc.
3. What You Should Know Before Using the Richard Carlton Consulting Site
4. Sources and Types of Personal Data We Collect from You
5. How We Use Your Information
6. About Your Reviews and Content Published on the G2 Crowd Site
7. How We Share Your Information
8. Your European Privacy Rights
9. Your California Privacy Rights
10. Retention Periods and Deletion
11. How We Protect Your Information
12. Children's Privacy
13. Information about International Transfers
14. Changes to this Privacy Policy
15. How You Can Contact Us
16. Archive

1. About this Policy

By accessing and using our Site, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy and are also agreeing to comply with our Terms of Use. Capitalized terms used in this Privacy Policy but not defined here have the meanings ascribed to them in the Terms of Use.

Before submitting your personal information to our Site, please read this Privacy Policy carefully. This Privacy Policy is designed to assist you in understanding how we collect, use, and disclose personal information that we obtain through your use of our Site.

2. About Richard Carlton Consulting, Inc.

We are Richard Carlton Consulting Inc, DBA FMStartingPoint.com, DBA LearningFileMaker.com and we are based in 20 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 1800, Chicago, IL 60606, USA.

Our Site allows you to search for and access information about technology products, services, and vendors, as well as request delivery of services and software products. You can also connect with software providers and request demos of their products.

When you visit our Site, some information will be automatically collected using cookies and similar technologies, but we ask your consent when required. For additional information see our Cookie Policy.

3. What You Should Know Before Using the a Richard Carlton Consulting Site

Before using our Site, you should understand the different options you have and their meaning.

  • To search for information and to read some content, you don't need to enter personal information such as your name, or email address, or submit reviews, but if you want to see full content of reviews or use the full features of our site you may be asked to create a user account with us.
  • You should read and agree with our Terms of Use and our Community Guidelines.
  • You have different choices for the use of cookies on our site, see our Cookie Policy.
  • Before publishing a review, understand your options and decide what information you want to be shared. You can always publish reviews anonymously.
  • If you are in the European Economic Area, UK, or Switzerland, your information will be transferred to G2 Crowd in the United States. To protect your information, we will self-certify under the EU-US Privacy Shield and under the Swiss-US Privacy Shield.
  • If you have questions you can always contact us at privacy@g2crowd.com.

4. Sources and Types of Personal Data We Collect from You

We receive and store any information you enter on our Site or give us in any other way, this may include information that can identify you ("personally identifiable information"). Additionally, if you connect to our Site through LinkedIn, we will receive information from your LinkedIn account. We may also request information about your preferences and usage of technology products and services. We also collect certain information automatically when you use or visit our Site.

You can choose not to provide information to us, but, in general, some information about you is required in order for you to enjoy the benefits of being a registered user of our Site.

Information we collect from:

a) Visitors of our Site
When you visit our Site, some information will be collected automatically using cookies and similar technologies, but we provide you with different choices including the opportunity to opt-out. Note that not all these cookies collect personally identifiable information and some of them are necessary to use different functionalities of our Site. For additional information, see our Cookie Policy.

b) Registered Users of our Site
To use some of the features of our Site, certain information may be required. For example, your business email address, industry and company information is necessary if you want access to registered user-only content. Other additional information is voluntary, for example writing reviews, creating your profile (including your headshot), or participating in surveys and promotions.

Signing in with your LinkedIn account or sharing content through social media services is optional. If you connect to our Site through your LinkedIn account, we will receive your LinkedIn Profile information (your company name, industry, company size, job title, summary, end date, and skills from your LinkedIn profile) and LinkedIn connections (we will use this information to show you reviews written by your connections, however, we will not access your connections' contact information nor send messages to your connections).

Once you are logged in to our Site with your LinkedIn account, you can change some information on your profile for our Site, but you cannot change your company information or email address.

Note that information shared with LinkedIn or other social media sites will be governed by their privacy policies.

c) Other Sources
We also may periodically obtain both personal and non-personal information about you from affiliated entities, business partners, and other independent third-party sources and add it to other information about you.

For example, if you visit our Site by "clicking-through" from a site operated by one of our business partners and you have registered with that partner, then information about you that you have provided to that partner may be shared with us, such as contact information and demographic information.

As another example, if you access third-party services, such as LinkedIn, through our Site or before coming to our Site, we may collect information such as your user name, and other information made available to us through those services in order to improve and personalize your use of our Site.

5. How We Use Your Information

G2 Crowd uses the information we collect about you for registration and to manage your account, to communicate with you, and to connect you with the providers of software products and services listed on our Site or with other users of the Site. We also use your information for analytics, for marketing and advertising, and for legal reasons.

We use your information when you authorize us to use it and when it is necessary to enforce this Privacy Policy, our Terms of Use and our Community Guidelines, including:

  • for registration and to manage your account, including to facilitate your access to and use of our Site;
  • to communicate with you and respond to your questions and comments;
  • to enable us to publish and share your reviews, forum posts, and other content to the G2 Crowd community, providers of the software products and services listed on our Site, affiliated websites outside our Site, and to the public in general according to our Terms of Use;
  • to resolve disputes or troubleshoot problems;
  • to prevent prohibited or illegal activities;
  • to enforce our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines;
  • to share your information with the providers of listed products or services when you request additional information about a certain listed product or service

When it is necessary to fulfill our legitimate interests:

  • to solicit information from you, including through surveys;
  • to share aggregated information with providers of listed products or services and other licensees of our research and report offerings;
  • to measure interest in and improve our offerings and Site; including to provide information about G2 Crowd and invitations from the G2 Crowd community;
  • to notify you about special offers available from us or our partners, or from the providers of products and services listed on our Site, that may be of interest to you;
  • to otherwise customize your experience with G2 Crowd

When it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation:

  • in response to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process; to establish or exercise our legal rights; to defend against legal claims; or as otherwise required by law (In such cases, we reserve the right to raise or waive any legal objection or right available to us);
  • when we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal or suspected illegal activities; to protect and defend the rights, property, or safety of G2 Crowd, our Site visitors or registered users, our licensees, or others;
  • in connection with a corporate transaction, such as a divestiture, investment, merger, consolidation, or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy

6. About Your Reviews and Content Published on the G2 Crowd Site

You decide if you want to submit reviews or comments under your name or anonymously. If you submit content on our Site you understand that it will be publicly available inside and outside our Site.

Before publishing a review, understand your options and decide what information you want to be shared:

  • Submitting reviews and comments is voluntary.
  • Reviews and comments are publicly available to everyone, even outside of our Site, and can be shared through social media sites.
  • By submitting reviews and comments, you grant G2 an authorization to publicly share them and sub-license the content according to our Terms of Use. This means that we can authorize: (a) the providers of software products and services to share this content through their websites, social media sites, or other marketing materials, such as slide decks or case studies, and/or the operators of other publicly-available websites, social media sites, platforms, or mobile apps to republish this content.
  • You can always choose to post reviews and comments anonymously, so that no one, except us, will know you posted the review or comment.
  • If you posted an attributed review under your name, you can change your mind later, and we will anonymize or delete it. However, please understand that we cannot guarantee others did not store the information prior to the change, by printing or downloading the original post. See Retention Periods and Deletion.
  • If you connect to our Site through LinkedIn, information from your LinkedIn account will be shared with us and other users of the Site

7. How We Share Your Information

G2 Crowd may share some of your information with providers of products and services listed on our Site, third-party vendors who provide services or functions on our behalf, business partners, social media networks and the public in general.

This is how we share your information with the following entities:

a) We share your contact information and company name with providers of software products and services listed on our Site when you expressly request to connect by requesting more information or a demo of their product.

b) We share your reviews and comments (attributed or not) publicly with users inside and outside of our Site, including social media sites, third-party software marketplaces, the providers of software products and services listed on our Site, and the operators of other publicly-available websites, platforms, or mobile apps that we have authorized to share this content through their websites, social media sites, platforms, mobile apps, or other marketing materials, such as slide decks or case studies.

c) We share aggregated data and high-level information in a way that does not identify individuals with companies and organizations, such as software providers from different business sectors, to show them trends in technology products and services or rankings amongst providers. We also share aggregated data with our business partners for analytics and advertising purposes according to our Cookie Policy.

d) Your information is also accessible to our third-party vendors who provide services/functions on our behalf, such as business analytics, customer service, marketing, distribution of surveys or promotion programs, payment processing, and fraud prevention. These third-party vendors collect and use your information on behalf of G2 Crowd, for specific purposes, and are not permitted to share or use the information for any other purpose.

e) Business partners with whom we may offer products or services in conjunction. Using these types of products or services is optional. You can tell when a business partner is involved in a product or service, because their name will appear either with ours or separately. If you choose to access these optional services, your information will be shared with the relevant business partner.

f) When you sign into our Site or share content through your LinkedIn account or other social media sites, your Information will be shared with those social media sites according to their privacy policies.

8. Your European Privacy Rights

If you reside or otherwise find yourself in the territory of Europe, we are committed to facilitate the exercise of your rights granted by the European Data Protection law. Otherwise you can contact us at any time to discuss your privacy concerns.

Privacy rights under the European Data Protection law include:

Transparency and the right to information. Through this policy we explain how we use and share your information. However, if you have questions or concerns you can contact us any time.

Right of access, objection, restriction of processing, erasure, and portability. You also have the right to withdraw your consent at any time when we process your personal data based on your consent. To exercise these rights, please contact us.

Right to opt-out to direct marketing. You have the right to opt-out at any time to receiving marketing materials from us by following the opt-out instructions in our commercial emails, by contacting us, or by adjusting your preferences under your Profile Details on the Site.

Please note that we reserve the right to send you other communications, including service announcements and administrative messages relating to your G2 Crowd account, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.

Right not to be subject to an automated decision, including profiling. We do not make automated decisions using your personal data that may negatively impact you. We use cookies and similar technologies on our Site to personalize your experience on the Site and recommending software products and services that may be of interest to you. For additional information or to opt-out see our Cookie Policy.

Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. If you consider that the processing of your personal data infringes your privacy rights according to the European Data Protection law, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in the member state of your habitual residence, place of work, or place of the alleged infringement.

9. Your California Privacy Rights

California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits California residents to request certain information regarding our disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, please email privacy@g2crowd.com.

10. Retention Periods and Deletion

G2 Crowd retains your personal information to the extent necessary to reasonably serve customer relations, to meet our compliance and legal obligations, to enhance security and fraud prevention, and for audit purposes.

We will keep your profile information and content published until you decide to delete it or if it is not according to our Community Guidelines or Terms of Use.

When you decide to delete reviews, or change them to anonymous or not attributed reviews, we will fulfill your request and automatically update this information on our platform. We will also notify third parties that we authorized to use and share that content of your request. However, you should note that once information has been publicly shared on the Internet or through marketing materials, it is difficult to permanently and completely remove it, and we cannot guarantee that others have not stored it by printing or downloading the original publication.

See our Cookie Policy for additional information on retention periods of cookies and other technologies used on our Site.

11. How We Protect Your Information

We want you to feel confident about using our Site, and we are committed to protecting the information we collect. While no website can guarantee security, we have implemented appropriate administrative, technical, and physical security procedures to help protect the personal information you provide to us.

For example, only authorized employees are permitted to access personal information that you do not publish on the Site, and they only may do so for permitted business functions. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary, and only authorized personnel have access to personal information that you have not published on the Site. In addition, we use encryption when transmitting your personal information between your system and ours, and we, together with our partners, employ firewalls and intrusion detection systems to help prevent unauthorized persons from gaining access to your non-public information.

You should bear in mind that submission of information over the Internet is never entirely secure. We cannot guarantee the security of information you submit via our Site while it is in transit over the Internet, and any such submission is at your own risk.

12. Children's Privacy

The Site is a general audience site and does not offer services directed to individuals under 18 years of age.

No one under the age of 18 may provide any information to or on the Site. We do not knowingly collect personal information from individuals under 18.

If you are under 18, do not use or provide any information on this Site or on or through any of its features, do not register on this Site, use any of the interactive or comment features of this Site, or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, email address, or any screen name or user name you may use. Should an individual whom we know to be under the age of 18 send personal information to us, we will delete or destroy such information as soon as reasonably possible. If you believe we might have this type of information, contact us.

13. Information about International Transfers

If you are visiting our Site from outside the United States, please be aware that your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States where our servers are located and our central database is operated. The data protection and other laws of the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive as those in your country, but please be assured that G2 Crowd does take steps pursuant to laws in the United States to ensure that your privacy is protected. To protect your personal data when it is transferred to the United States, we will self-certify under the EU-US Privacy Shield and under the Swiss-US Privacy Shield. By visiting our Site or using our services, you understand that your information will be transferred to our facilities and those third parties with whom we share it as described in this Privacy Policy.

14. Changes to this Privacy Policy

G2 Crowd may update this Privacy Policy in the future. We will notify you about material changes to this Privacy Policy by either sending a notice to the email address you provided to us and/or by placing a prominent notice on the Site.

15. How You Can Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@g2crowd.com

Or

G2 Crowd, Inc. 20 N. Wacker Dr., Suite 1800 Chicago, IL 60606 USA

If you want to communicate with our Data Protection Officer, please email privacy@g2crowd.com

Please provide your identification and contact details, including your email address used to register with this Site, and a complete explanation of your concern.

16. Archive

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