The Index Standard® is produced via The Index Standard, Inc. and is an independent resource for index ratings, forecasts and guides in a variety of forms. All our content is proudly created and independent from external influence. This policy explains how we treat your personal information and how we protect your privacy on a best efforts basis when you use the Services. You agree to the use of your data in accordance with our Privacy Notice and Policy. We reserve the right to update or change this Privacy Notice and Policy or any part of it from time to time without prior notice. If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Notice and Policy, please feel to contact us by going to the Contact section of our website. This policy covers how The Index Standard® treats personal information that we collect and receive, including information related to your use of our products and services. Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable such as your name, title, company, status, address, email address, or phone number, and that is not otherwise publicly available.

Information Usage

The Index Standard® may use your information in the following manner:

  • managing our relationships with our clients and prospects, including:
    • providing our products and services to our clients, prospects and others;
    • using information you submit to us online for purposes of creating leads and generating sales;
    • correlating data in our systems about our clients’ and prospects’ personnel with website data, including product and client support site login data, for purposes of creating leads and generating sales, which we may perform through the use of cookies that enable us to monitor and analyze website login data, usage and trends;
    • responding to your inquiries and requests, including:
      • responding to your questions about our products and services, or research;
      • adding you to our email lists (subject to your consent, where required by applicable law);
      • resolving your product or other support related issues (which in some cases may involve our use of your administrative login credentials for client support and quality cases);
      • processing, evaluating and completing transactions and requests involving the website and content available through the website, and more generally transactions involving our products and services, research; and
      • providing you with other information and content you have requested.
  • organizing, hosting and managing any future events and using photos / videos taken at the event on our website and other marketing materials in relation to the event;
  • operating, maintaining, developing, improving and customizing our website, including:
    • the content and features accessible on our website;
    • enabling your access to and use of restricted portions of our website;
    • logging, understanding and analyzing your use of our website, for the purpose of improving our website (and content and features on our website) and your experience on our website, which we may perform through the use of cookies that enable us to monitor and analyze website login data, usage and trends.
  • developing, producing, operating, and maintaining our products and services;
  • improving our products and services, including through the use of client satisfaction surveys and aggregated product usage data, and using such data for research and analysis;
  • managing our relationships with our vendors;
  • managing our relationships with our external advisors, and in the future our board members, etc.;
  • protecting the security, confidentiality and integrity of our website, IT systems, hardware and networks, and information;
  • complying with applicable laws, rules and regulations, and in furtherance of our related internal policies, including compliance policies and records retention requirements;
  • collecting information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of the products and services that we offer. The Index Standard® automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, The Index Standard® tracks cookie information, and the pages you request;
  • responding to your inquiries and requests that are based on legal rights that you may have (e.g., data access rights);
  • managing, protecting against and investigating fraud, risk exposure, claims and other liabilities, including but not limited to violations of our contract terms or laws or regulations; and
  • any other commercially reasonable manner not contemplated above.

If you do not provide us with your personal information, or refuse to provide or withdraw consent (where applicable), we may not be able to perform some or all of the above-described actions.

Information Sharing & Disclosure

The Index Standard® will only grant access to personal data on a need-to-know basis, and such access will be limited to the personal data that is necessary to perform the business function for which such access is granted. No authorization will be extended to access personal data on a personal basis at all.

The Index Standard® may occasionally sell or share personal information to very highly trusted partners who work on behalf of The Index Standard® under very strict confidentiality agreements to provide services in support of the site. These companies may use your personal information to help The Index Standard® communicate with you about offers from The Index Standard®. We may sometimes share aggregate non-personal information with third parties about how our users utilize the site and services. This aggregate information is typically in the form of statistics, such as numbers of The Index Standard® users who live in a particular location or fall within a particular group. Such aggregate information is gathered from individual The Index Standard® users’ information but is not traceable to any specific identifiable The Index Standard® user. The Index Standard® may share personal information with third parties to the extent required to respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims. The Index Standard® may also share personal information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of The Index Standard® Terms of Service, or as otherwise required or permitted by law.

If The Index Standard® is ever acquired by or merged with or into another company, you should expect that information may be transferred and become subject to a different privacy policy.

Use of Personal Information with Marketing Partners and Co-Registration

In instances where The Index Standard® and a marketing partner are offering a special value (i.e., a free offering) to our users, we may share your personal information with such partners. By signing up to receive items through these promotions, you are expressly consenting to The Index Standard® sharing your personal information (“co-registration”) with such partners and you will become subject to their privacy policies, which may vary from those of The Index Standard®. In the event that you would like to opt-out of receiving offers from these partners, you must do so directly with them. If you have any problems contacting one of our partners, contact us by going to the contact section of our website and we will help you resolve the situation as best can and as quickly as we can.

In addition, you are expressly consenting to The Index Standard® that the use of certain personally identifiable user data may be processed and shared between applicable third-party social network and/or identity providers. Accounts with such third-party providers shall be subject to such third-party providers’ then-current terms of use and privacy policies and The Index Standard® shall not be responsible for any violation of their policies in anyway. You are allowing The Index Standard® to user and store certain of this user data for its own business purposes.

We may from time to time send emails from selected partners to email addresses collected on this site. By providing your email address to sign up for a newsletter or other service offered on our site, you consent to allow The Index Standard® to send you emails on behalf of third parties who will hopefully compensate us to do so. Emails sent to you by we will include an option to unsubscribe from future emails. If you do not wish to receive emails from us, including emails sent to you on behalf of our partners, you may opt out by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link in an email or by contacting us by going to the contact section of our website.

Personal information collected on The Index Standard® may be used for marketing or business purposes. You agree to grant The Index Standard® the right to retain personal information indefinitely, and the right to sell or otherwise transmit that information to other entities.

The Index Standard® reserves the right to disclose personal data in special cases, when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact, or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) our rights or property, other The Index Standard®, users, or anyone else who could be harmed by such activities. We may also disclose personal data without notice to you in response to a subpoena, or when requested from a governmental, regulatory body or law enforcement agency or any other forum of competent jurisdiction when we believe in good faith that such disclosure is required, or to respond to any emergency situation.

Newsletters and Alerts

If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter and/or alert system, we will use your name and email address to send the newsletter or alert to you. Out of respect for your privacy, we provide you a way to unsubscribe. If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter, alerts and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each communication or by contacting us via the contact section of our website.

Marketing Emails

We send our marketing emails within the US on an opt-out basis and outside of the US if we expand which we intent to, we rely on opt-in consent. We offer multiple ways to manage your email subscriptions, including an unsubscribe mechanisms, and direct contact for support.

Use of Personal Information Posted on Forums and Comments

If you use a forum or post a comment on this website, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums.

Cookies

The Index Standard® like many websites uses cookies. This cookie notice describes how The Index Standard® uses cookies on our website. We use cookies to automatically collect information about you when you visit and take action on our website, which may in some cases constitute personal information under applicable data protection law, including but not limited to:

  • your domain;
  • your IP addresses;
  • your date, time and duration of your visit;
  • your browser type;
  • your operating system;
  • your page visits;
  • information from third parties;
  • other information about your computer or device; and
  • internet traffic.

Cookies are small text files that a website saves on a computer or mobile device when a person visits a website. Cookies are sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognizes that cookie, in order to develop a record of the user’s online activity. Cookies may be delivered by the website a user visits, or by third parties.

We use cookies to monitor and analyze website login data, usage and trends for the purposes of:

  • operating, maintaining, developing, improving and customizing our website;
  • knowing when a user visits / returns to our website, which pages a user is looking at, and how often and how long a user looks at a web page;
  • creating aggregate and anonymous usage statistics to monitor and improve website traffic, performance, features, functionality and security; and
  • correlating data in our CRM systems about our clients’ and prospects’ personnel with website visitation and navigation data, including product site login data, for purposes of creating leads and generating sales.

We do use cookies to track users’ behavior across the internet; engage in email retargeting, profiling or scoring for purposes of risk assessment or behavioral advertising based on internet use; or, place ads on third party sites based on users’ behavior on our Websites.

We use the following types of cookies:

  • Strictly necessary cookies enable you to move around our website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas. Without these cookies, services you’ve asked for (such as access to secure areas) cannot be provided.
  • Functionality cookies allow us to remember choices you make (such as your username, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, we may be able to provide you with local content by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. Functionality cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customize. The information these cookies collect may be anonymized and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.
  • Performance cookies collect information about how you use our website, for example which pages you go to most often, and if you get error messages from certain pages. Without these cookies, we cannot learn how our website is performing and make relevant improvements.
  • Analytics cookies collect anonymous information about how visitors use our website. We use a variety of web agents for this purpose. Our web agent’s cookie collects only non-personal information, and give us aggregate, non-identifiable insights into how our website is being used.
  • Marketing cookies let us to know when you interact with our marketing communications. In addition, if you submit an online form to us (e.g., email subscribe, Contact Us, etc.), we use these cookies to identify your website visits and to track your navigation activities on our website.
  • We may use web beacons which may allow us to receive confirmation when you open an email from us, or if you interact with a link, we issue to you, if your device supports this type of program.

Policies for Children

The Index Standard® does not intentionally collect or use any personal data from users under 18 years of age. No data should be submitted by users under 18 years of age.

Third-Party Adverts

For the user's and subscriber's convenience, The Index Standard® may provide links to other external websites. The listing of a link by The Index Standard® should not be construed as a sponsorship, endorsement or approval of such websites, their content, or as an indication of the value of any claims, recommendations or other information contained therein. The Index Standard® users should be aware that The Index Standard® has no control over any linked website and is not responsible for the contents or privacy practices of any linked website or any link on a linked website. The Index Standard® strongly urges our users to be aware of when they exit The Index Standard® and to carefully read the privacy statements of each website that collects personal data. This Privacy Notice and Policy is applicable only to data collected by our website.

We may send advertisements to you when you use our network of websites. However, we may also allow other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to serve advertisements within our website. Because your device must request these advertising banners from the ad network website, these companies can send their own cookies to your cookie file, just as if you had requested a website from the site. Please note that if an advertiser asks us to show an advertisement to a certain audience or audience segment and you respond to that ad, the advertiser or ad-server may conclude that you fit the description of the audience it is trying to reach. Remember, we only authorize our third-party ad servers to employ anonymous cookies for ad delivery and anonymous targeting.

We also use third-party ad servers to serve ads on our behalf across the internet. They may collect anonymous information about your visits to The Index Standard®, and your interaction with our products and services. They may also use information about your visits to this and other websites to target advertisements for goods and services. This anonymous information is collected through the use of a web beacon or pixel tag, an industry-standard technology used by most major websites.

Opting Out of Third-Party Ad Servers

If you want to prevent a third-party ad server from sending and reading cookies on your computer, we suggest you visit each ad network’s website individually and opt out.

Editing and/or Deleting Account Information and Preferences

The Index Standard® will retain your personal data for as long as your account, membership, customer relationship or any other business relationship with The Index Standard® as applicable, is active and as needed to provide you with products or services. In addition, personal data may be retained for such additional time as may be required under applicable law. If you wish to cancel your account or request that we no longer use your personal data to provide you with products or services, contact us by going to the contact section of our website

Confidentiality and Security

The Index Standard® tries to exercise reasonable precautions to safeguard and secure personal data. The Index Standard® has some security protections in place that help to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the data under our control. We take a best effort basis to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures of data, no assurances can be provided that personal data that we collect will never be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this policy.

We limit access to personal information about you to our employees who we believe reasonably such information to provide products or services to you or in order to do their jobs. In addition, The Index Standard® tries to maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to protect personal information about you.

Although The Index Standard® takes your very privacy seriously and will take a best efforts basis and use best efforts measures to protect it, we cannot guarantee that there will be no unauthorized use of your personal information.

If you register for the site and services and create an account, you will be provided a username and password for such account. You acknowledge that you are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of the password as well as any and all activity that occur under your account and password. You agree that at the end of each session using the website you will exit your account. In the event of any unauthorized use of your password and/or account, you agree that you will immediately notify The Index Standard® by sending an email by going to the contact section of our website.

As we are a startup, please understand that The Index Standard® cannot and will not be liable for any and all losses or damages at all arising from your failure to comply with any notice on this website.

Others

The Index Standard® is very strongly opposed to slavery and human trafficking and will not knowingly support or conduct business with any organization involved in such activities.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may be changed from time to time. We will really try to notify you about significant changes by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your account or may place a notice on our site.

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently and often as you see fit.