B2B Privacy Policy

by Romper Staff

We are BDG Media Inc. (BDG, we, us and our) and we operate the following websites (the Sites):

  1. BDG
  2. Bustle
  3. The Dad
  4. Elite Daily
  5. Fatherly
  6. Flavorwire
  7. Gawker
  8. Input
  9. Inverse
  10. Mic
  11. Nylon
  12. The Outline
  13. Romper
  14. Scary Mommy
  15. W Magazine
  16. The Zoe Report

What Does This Privacy Policy Cover?

We are committed to protecting the privacy of our business partners. In this Privacy Policy for services relating to our Sites, including sponsored or otherwise monetised content (collectively with the Sites, the Services). We explain who we are, why and how we collect, store, share and use (together, "process") your personal data (Personal Information), your rights and how to contact us.

Please read this policy carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal information and how we will treat it. By contracting with us and/or otherwise engaging with our Services, you acknowledge you have read and understood this privacy policy.

We are the data controller of the Personal Information processed in relation to this policy, except where this policy explains otherwise. This means we are responsible for treating your Personal Information safely, in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws. If you have any questions about how we protect your Personal Information, please contact us.

This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of any Personal Information that our business partners share with us or that we share with our business partners. For information about how we treat Personal Information when individuals use our Sites, please see our separate business to consumer Privacy Policy accessible here.

What Information Do We Collect?

We may process information about you that we have either obtained from you, or obtained from somewhere else.

We process information about you:

  • if you or the company you work for are a customer or a supplier of ours
  • if you or the company you work for use our Services generally
  • you are someone, or you work for someone, to whom we want to advertise or market our Services

Personal information which is collected directly from you may be collected:

  • if you contact through our advertising enquiry form online, or
  • if you contact us through another online platform, like LinkedIn.
  • if you email us, or otherwise directly get in touch with us.

Personal information which is not collected directly from you may be collected:

  • from your employer in connection with your role and its relation to our provisions of the Services
  • from third parties we work closely with (including, for example, from business partners, and introductions from other individuals or companies). We will notify you when we receive information about you from them and the purposes for which we intend to use that information.

YOU PROVIDE US WITH

When you or the company you work for interact with us (for example, when providing technical services to us), we collect the following types of Personal Information:

  • Contact information: you provide us with your email address, phone number and any other information you choose to provide, relating to your work or to you personally , depending on the nature of our relationship with you or the company that you work for (for example, your name, job title or other information in your email signature).
  • Information relating to our dealings with you or the person you work for: including but not limited to administrating your company account, verifying financial transactions in relation to payments, using details of goods or services that we have exchanged with you, information about events to which you are invited and preferences related to managing those events (for example dietary information) and information that you give us or we otherwise obtain when you visit us.
  • Other information: information about you that you give us by communicating with us by phone, e-mail, via our website, via social media or otherwise. It includes information you give us or that we obtain when you use our Services, or subscribe to communications from our Services, enter a competition, promotion or contact us to report a problem, or do any of these things on behalf of the person you work for.

OTHER BUSINESS PARTNERS MAY PROVIDE US WITH

  • We may sometimes receive your contact information from another party, for example through an introduction.
  • We do not otherwise get any information about you from any third parties.

Our promotional updates and communications

With your prior consent and subject to our legitimate interests, we will use your personal information to send you promotional update communications by email, for marketing analysis and website pop-ups about our services.

You can opt-out of further marketing at any time by selecting the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email, or by sending us an email at legal@bustle.com.

How Is My Information Used?

We've set out how we use each category of personal information, and what legal basis (or bases) allows us to undertake the processing. We explain more about what each legal basis means below.

We may process your personal data based on one or more than one legal basis, depending on the specific purpose(s) for which we are using your personal information. Please contact us if you would like further details about the specific legal basis we are relying on to process your personal data.

TYPE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • Contract information

HOW WE USE THIS PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • To perform or enter into any contract we have with you

OUR LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING

  • Contract

TYPE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • Information relating to payments and/or billing

HOW WE USE THIS PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • To administrate yours or your company's accounts with us.
  • To make and verify payments and bills.

OUR LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING

  • Consent
  • Our legitimate interests

TYPE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • Information relating to transactions

HOW WE USE THIS PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, disclose your data to a prospective seller or buyer, or in the event we are the subject of acquisition by a third party.

OUR LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING

  • Contract
  • Legal obligation
  • Our legitimate interests

TYPE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • Information relating to transactions

HOW WE USE THIS PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, disclose your data to a prospective seller or buyer, or in the event we are the subject of acquisition by a third party.

OUR LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING

  • Contract
  • Legal obligation
  • Our legitimate interests

TYPE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • Contact information

HOW WE USE THIS PERSONAL INFORMATION

  • To answer any queries you send us
  • To comply with any rights requests you make
  • To send you promotional or marketing updates (you are free to opt-out of specified or all updates at any time).

OUR LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING

  • Consent
  • Legal obligation
  • Our legitimate interests

Change of purpose

We will only use your Personal Information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you would like an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us at legal@bustle.com. If we process your Personal Information for any new purpose, we will notify you (via updating this Privacy Policy, and letting you know we have updated it) and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Who is my information shared with?

Information Shared with Our Sub-contractors:

We employ and contract with people and other entities that perform certain tasks on our behalf (our “sub-contractors”).

We may share Personal Information with our sub-contractors in order to provide our Services to you. Unless we tell you otherwise, our sub-contractors may only use Personal Information we share with them in in accordance with our instructions.

Our sub-contractors include:

  • Ad Exchanges
  • Demand Side Platforms
  • Supply Side Platforms
  • Retargeters
  • Ad Servers
  • Data Aggregators/Suppliers
  • Ad Networks
  • Marketing Solutions Providers
  • Analytics Providers
  • Social Media Platforms
  • Ad Verification services
  • Website Optimisation services
  • Data Management Platforms
  • Optimizers
  • Creative / Ad Format Tech services
  • Corporate support services
  • Cloud storage hosting and providers
  • Our auditors, legal advisors and other professional advisors or service providers
  • Payment processing providers who provide secure payment processing services (note your payment card details are not shared with us by the provider)
  • Credit reference agencies for the purpose of assessing your credit score where this is in the context of us entering into a contract with you or the person that you work for.

Aggregate Information

Aggregate information does not include any personal information which you can be identified from. We share aggregate information with other partners, service providers and persons with whom we conduct business. We share this type of statistical data so that other partners can understand how and how often people use our Services and their services or websites, which facilitates improving both their services and how our Services interface with them.

In addition, these third parties may share with us anonymised, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information about you that they have independently developed or acquired.

Other Disclosures We May Make

We will disclose your personal information to third parties if we buy or sell part of our (or another) business, or if we are required to do so in order to comply with a legal obligation.

Information Disclosed Pursuant to Business Transfers

In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if we, or substantially all of our assets, were acquired, or if we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of us or our assets may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.

Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others

We also reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary to (i) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (ii) enforce the Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect our rights, property or safety, our users and the public. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and to prevent cybercrime, including spam/malware prevention.

Information We Share With Your Consent

Except as set forth above, you will be notified when your Personal Information may be shared with third parties.

Legal bases explained

Consent: We will only process your personal information for promotional or marketing purposes where you have given us your express consent for us to do this, where required by law. For more information, please refer to Our Promotional Updates and Communication section.

You can opt out from further marketing at any time by sending an email to info@bustle.com.

Contract: We collect, store and process your personal information where it is necessary for performing a contract you have with us, or where you have asked us to take specific steps before entering into that contract. If you enter any of our sweepstakes, you will be provided with the full terms and conditions prior to entering – please ensure you read these carefully.

Legal Obligation: we may need to process our personal information to comply with our legal obligations, including under applicable local and EU law, and any court orders. When processing your personal information in order to manage our relationship with you, including complying with any rights requests, we ensure that we comply with the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) and the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications 2002/58/EC, and applicable local laws which implements these rules.

Legitimate interests: processing your data is necessary for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, provided those interests are not outweighed by your rights and interests.

Our legitimate interests are:

  • delivering, developing and improving our Platform and Services, including using data
  • enabling us to enhance, customise or modify our Platform, Services and communications
  • growing our business and informing our marketing strategy
  • improving our Platform and data security
  • product development
  • providing you with our promotional updates and communications as explained in our 'How is my information used?' section, only where you have opted-in (and have not opted-out since) (you are free to opt-out at any time!).
  • promoting BDG’s commercial purposes through promotional updates and communications, including B2B newsletters

In each case, these legitimate interests are only valid if they are not outweighed by your rights and interests. If you would like further information about how we assess our legitimate interests, please contact us at legal@bustle.com.

Information You Elect to Share

You may access other Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on links to those Third Party Services from within the Site. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and/or practices of these Third Party Services, and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services’ privacy policies. This Privacy Policy only governs information collected as part of our Services.

How your data is kept secure

We store all of our information, including your IP address information, using industry-standard techniques.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. We do our best to protect your personal information, but we cannot guarantee or warrant that such techniques will prevent unauthorized access to information about you that we store, Personal Information or otherwise; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

Where do you store my information?

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA) that may not be subject to equivalent Data Protection Law.

Where your information is transferred outside the EEA, we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is subject to appropriate safeguards, such as relying on a recognised legal adequacy mechanism, and that it is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.

We may transfer your personal information to the following countries and entities outside the EEA:

  • in order to store it.
  • in order to enable us to provide goods or services and fulfil our contract with you or the company you work for. This includes order fulfilment, processing of payment details, and the provision of support services.
  • where we are legally required to do so.
  • as part of normal application operation and processing.
  • in order to facilitate the operation of our group of businesses, where it is in our legitimate interests and we have concluded these are not overridden by your rights.

BDG in the USA - Standard Contractual Clauses

Zendesk, Inc - Privacy Shield

AWS - Privacy Shield

Datto, Inc (Backupify) - Privacy Shield

How long we keep your information

We retain personal information for as long as you have a contract or agreement with us in order to meet our contractual obligations to you and for six years after that to identify any issues and resolve any legal proceedings.

We may also retain aggregate information beyond this time for research purposes and to help us develop and improve our services. You cannot be identified from aggregate information retained or used for these purposes.

What Choices Do I Have Regarding My Information?

Your rights

  • You may have the right, under certain circumstances:
  • to be provided with a copy of your Personal Information held by us;
  • to request the correction or deletion of your Personal Information held by us;
  • to request that we restrict the processing of your Personal Information (while we verify or investigate your concerns with this information, for example);
  • to object to the further processing of your Personal Information, including the right to object to marketing (as mentioned in Our promotional updates and communications section)
  • to request that your provided Personal Information be moved to a third party.

Your right to withdraw consent:

Where the processing of your personal information by us is based on consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent without detriment at any time by contacting us at legal@bustle.com. You can also change your marketing preferences at any time as described in Our promotional updates and communications' section;

You can also exercise the rights listed above at any time by contacting us at legal@bustle.com.

If your request or concern is not satisfactorily resolved by us, you may approach your local data protection authority, (see http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.html).

The Information Commissioner is the supervisory authority in the UK and can provide further information about your rights and our obligations in relation to your Personal Information, as well as deal with any complaints that you have about our processing of your Personal Information.

California Privacy Rights: Under California Civil Code sections 1798.83-1798.84, California residents are entitled to ask us for a notice identifying the categories of personal customer information which we share with our affiliates and/or third parties for marketing purposes, and providing contact information for such affiliates and/or third parties. If you are a California resident and would like a copy of this notice, please submit a written request to the following address: 315 Park Ave S, 11th Floor New York, NY 10010, USA.

What Happens When There Are Changes to this Privacy Policy?

This policy was last updated on 11 Jan 2022.

Any changes we make to this policy in future will be posted on this page. If we make any substantive changes, we will notify you by e-mail or through a pop-up within our Sites.

What If I Have Questions or Concerns?

If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, please send us a detailed message to legal@bustle.com. We will make every effort to resolve your concerns.