I. Introduction

The Consumer Brands Association¹ – a not-for-profit trade association representing the consumer packaged goods industry — is deeply committed to personal privacy and the security of the personal information of everyone who interacts with our organization online. We value the trust of people who visit our website and engage with us digitally.

This policy describes how the Consumer Brands Association collects, uses, and stores personal information, how we keep personal information secure, and the choices people have about what we do with their personal information.

The Consumer Brands Association strives to make all reasonable, good-faith efforts to ensure the privacy of those who visit our website and engage with us digitally, in person, and by hardcopy. We collect only the personal information we need to provide our services. All personal information is utilized appropriately for our legitimate and necessary business purposes, such as providing information about our organization, our events, and our services. And we believe all of our uses of personal information are within the reasonable expectations of anyone who shares their personal information with us.

II. How the Consumer Brands Association Collects Personal Data

By personal information, the Consumer Brands Association means information that identifies (or allows one to contact) a person, and information reasonably capable of being associated with an identifiable person. The Consumer Brands Association collects a variety of personal information either online, in person, in many different places. Such collections include when someone creates a Consumer Brands Association user account, registers for a conference or training event, joins a committee or working group, or submits a resume for employment consideration. This information is usually shared with us voluntarily and is limited to information relevant to your interaction with the Consumer Brands Association, and typically includes name, title, place of employment, employer address, and contact information. Other examples of information that we collect and consider personal information include online bookstore purchase histories and biographical information for conference speakers. When you provide this information to us, you are consenting to our collection and use of it as explained herein. You have the choice not to provide us with this information, but if you do the Consumer Brands Association’s ability to provide our services to you or your organization would be impaired.

Occasionally, the Consumer Brands Association receives personal information from other sources, such as a partner organization that is assisting us with marketing one of our events. However, regardless of how we receive personal information, we remain respectful of everyone’s privacy and limit our collection and use of personal information to that which is both reasonable, reasonably expected, and for a legitimate business purpose (see Section III).

The Consumer Brands Association’s website also uses cookies and allows 3rd party analytics companies to place cookies. Cookies are text files saved to your local computer to track your previous visits. Use of cookies will often make repeated visits more efficient by filling in previously entered non-sensitive information. Please note that cookies can be blocked by selecting the appropriate settings on your web browser.

III. How the Consumer Brands Association Uses Personal Data

The Consumer Brands Association primarily uses personal information to communicate with and provide services to people who work for our member companies regarding industry updates and our offerings (member services, working group calls, meetings, conferences, webinars, training, publications, etc.). We also communicate with representatives of non-member companies regarding offerings available to non-member participants.

The Consumer Brands Association makes all reasonable efforts to limit such communications to that which is reasonably necessary for our legitimate business interests. For example, we do not market our events everyone in our database, but instead select individuals with employee titles such as “counsel” and “attorney” to craft a targeted list of contacts most likely to be interested in a particular event.

Other uses of personal information include providing conference attendee lists (which are published via conference websites and apps), communicating with speakers and presenters for our events, and processing financial transactions.

The Consumer Brands Association engages various other entities for functions that it does not have the capacity to conduct with our own staff, which often necessitates sharing personal information with those entities. Such functions include marketing the Consumer Brands Association events (via Meetings & Incentives Worldwide), coordinating with speakers and presenters for our events (via Cadmium CD), and creating conference apps (via Touchpoint). These entities will only use this personal information to provide us the services for which it was shared, and not for their own purposes.

Please note that the Consumer Brands Association does not sell anyone’s personal information to third parties for their own marketing purposes. And while we track responses to marketing emails, this tracking does not include personal information (only raw data such as the number of “clicks” on a particular email).

While highly unlikely, exceptional circumstances may require the Consumer Brands Association to use personal information in other manners or share it with outside parties, such as compliance with a court order or if we become aware of a matter that is an immediate threat to public safety.

IV. How the Consumer Brands Association Stores Personal Data

Most personal information collected by the Consumer Brands Association is stored in our database maintained via our association management system (Impexium). To see the privacy policy for Billhighway (which administers Impexium), please click here.

Personal information is also stored on our website and the websites for our conferences and other events. The Consumer Brands Association conference and other event websites typically include attendee lists (name, title, and company) and more detailed information for conference speakers (including contact information).

The Consumer Brands Association does not store financial information (such as credit card numbers) used for purchases. We do not have access to any financial information for online transactions, which are processed through PayPal. For paper or telephone purchases, all financial information is destroyed after the transaction has been processed.

V. Your Access to Your Personal Information

The Consumer Brands Association respects everyone’s privacy and right to reasonably control the use of their personal information. Therefore, you may send an email to [email protected] and we will purge your personal information from our records, except for those that we have a legal or other legitimate need to retain for a period of time² (though we may first require additional information to verify your identity).

VI. How the Consumer Brands Association Secures Personal Data

The Consumer Brands Association’s Impexium database are hosted by WordPress, which provides all technical security measures. For more information on AWS cloud security, please click here.

Additionally, both the Consumer Brands Association website and our database are protected by a secure socket layer (SSL), which is the industry standard security protocol. SSL encrypts web traffic between a user and the website or database, rendering any stolen or intercepted data useless unless it can be decrypted. Such decryption is virtually impossible even with access to state-of-the-art resources and technology.

Should the Consumer Brands Association be the victim of a data breach, the association will provide notice to all potentially impacted contacts.

VII. Additional Information

The Consumer Brands Association reserves the right to alter or amend its privacy policy at any time, and all changes will go into effect upon posting them on our website. If we make any change to the policy that allows more permissive use of your personal information than when it was collected, we will use reasonable efforts to notify you within 30 days of such change.

Any comments or questions about our privacy policy and/or our use of personal data should be directed to [email protected].

¹ All references to the Consumer Brands Association in this Privacy Policy include our affiliated organization, the Consumer Brands Association Science and Education Foundation (SEF).

² For example, we would retain transaction information such as conference attendance and bookstore purchases for a reasonable time.