Welcome to Mergen Advisory.com (“Mergen Advisory”), Mergen Advisory is an independent business information and market analysis company that assists companies in various sectors through independent fact-based insight, ensuring their business success today and tomorrow.
Mergen Advisory and its employees take your privacy very seriously. To make it easier for you to read and understand our privacy policy, we’ve written it in plain language and tried to keep it to a reasonably short length.
The key points of our privacy policy are:
- We give you choices about the personally identifiable information you share with Mergen Advisory and other Mergen Advisory users.
- You can end your membership at any time.
- We only disclose information from which you may be personally identifiable to selected third parties in accordance with this privacy policy.
- Mergen Advisory does not spam.
- By participating in the Mergen Advisory community, you agree to this privacy policy.
Information Collected On the Mergen Advisory Service:
We collect the following types of information about you when you use the Mergen Advisory Service:
- Information provided by you. We collect personally identifiable information, such as your name and email address, when you register to become a Mergen Advisory member. This information is needed to set up your personal profile. As part of your personal profile, you may choose to submit or incorporate additional information, such as your age, your hobbies and interests, as well as other content, such as photos, music and videos.
- Information collected automatically. Mergen Advisory receives and stores information which is transmitted automatically from your computer when you use the Mergen Advisory Service. This information includes information from cookies (which are described below), your IP address and browser type. Your IP address is the unique address of your computer which is automatically provided to other computers when your web browser or email application requests a web page or email from those computers on the Internet. We also collect information about how you use the Mergen Advisory Service, including information about the features you use and where you go on the Service.
- Information about you as a Mergen Advisory member may be supplemented with additional information, including publicly-available information and information from other companies.
Use and Disclosure of Information
We use this information in order to operate the Mergen Advisory Service and improve your experience:
- We will display your personally identifiable information on your profile according to the preferences you set. We will use your name so that you are recognizable on our database and so that we can personalize your experience. We will use your email address to contact you from time to time and may also use it for security reasons to confirm that you are who you say you are. You can control the types and frequencies of certain emails you receive in your email preferences.
- We may use the information collected automatically, such as your IP address, information stored via cookies, and information about how you use the Mergen Advisory Service to develop statistics and aggregate information about the number of people who visit the Mergen Advisory Service and to customise Mergen Advisory’s content, layout and services. We may share this information with third parties to help us improve the Mergen Advisory Service and better serve our users.
- Advertisements that appear on the Mergen Advisory Service are delivered to you by Mergen Advisory’s advertising affiliates, partners and service providers. Mergen Advisory may transfer information about you and your use of Mergen Advisory, such as your IP address, information stored via cookies, and other demographic information about you, to our advertising affiliates, partners and other third parties. This information may be used to provide advertising, promotions and other products and services that may be of particular interest to you. It may also be used to provide you with a tailored choice of content and media products. Please refer to the Cookies section below to find out about the choices that Mergen Advisory offers in connection with advertising targeting.
- Our advertising and promotions partners have no access to your name or personal contact information stored by Mergen Advisory unless you choose to share it with them. Mergen Advisory does not provide your name or personal contact information to an advertising partner when you interact with or view a targeted advertisement.
- We may provide your personally identifiable information and the data generated by cookies and the aggregate information to the vendors and service agencies that we may engage to assist us in providing our services to you. Such third party entities will be obligated to use your personally identifiable information solely to provide the services to us.
- Personally identifiable information about you as a Mergen Advisory user, including the contents of your online communications, may be accessed or disclosed in response to legal process (for example, a court order, search warrant or subpoena); in other circumstances in which Mergen Advisory believes the Mergen Advisory service is being used in the commission of a crime; when we have a good faith belief that there is an emergency that poses a threat to the safety of you or another person; or when necessary either to protect the rights or property or personal safety of Mergen Advisory directors, manages, employees and its affiliates, or for us to render the service you have requested.
- We reserve the right to transfer your personally identifiable information in the event of a transfer of ownership of Mergen Advisory.com, such as acquisition by or merger with another company. If an acquiring company should plan to materially change this privacy policy, we will notify you beforehand.
Invite Friends
If you choose to use our referral service to invite friends to Mergen Advisory, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend an email inviting him or her to visit and join Mergen Advisory. Mergen Advisory stores and only uses this information for the sole purpose of sending this emails and tracking the success of our referral program.
Collection of Information On Other Sites
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by Mergen Advisory.
Mergen Advisory contains links to other sites and services that are not owned or controlled by Mergen Advisory, including Mergen Advisory affiliates. Please be aware that these sites have their own privacy policies and that Mergen Advisory is not responsible for their privacy practices. We therefore encourage you to read the privacy statements of each and every site that collects personally identifiable information.
“Masking” is a function of using programming techniques such that the displayed URL does not match the actual pages being viewed (e.g. user is on www.xyz.com, but the URL displayed is www.abc.com). In certain circumstances, Mergen Advisory may use Masking and, although it will appear that you are still on Mergen Advisory, you may be on a different site. For example, when you upload a video, you may be transferred to a third party’s site and the privacy policy of the applicable third party site applies.
Testimonials
We post customer testimonials on Mergen Advisory which may contain personally identifiable information such as your name. We may obtain your prior consent to post your name along with your testimonial.
Cookies
Cookies are a common internet technology. Many web sites use cookies to provide useful features for their users. Cookies are small files that are written or downloaded to your computer’s hard drive when you access a site. They allow Mergen Advisory to store and quickly retrieve login information on your computer and provide data that we can use to improve the quality of our service. Most internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Safari) are initially set up to accept cookies. If you prefer, you can set your browser to refuse cookies, although you may not be able to take full advantage of Mergen Advisory Service if you do so. You can disable cookies by going to Options menu of your internet browser.
Mergen Advisory may link information stored in cookies such as your age, gender and country with your personally identifiable information and we may use such information to gather statistics about the number of people who visit Mergen Advisory and to customize Mergen Advisory’s content, layout and services for delivery to you.
Mergen Advisory and its advertisers may set and access cookies or use other technologies such as web beacons (which are electronic files that allow a web site to count users who have visited that page or to access certain cookies) in order to present advertisements on Mergen Advisory. Mergen Advisory and its advertisers may also use third party ad networks to help present and manage advertisements. These ad networks use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies on your computer to help present, better target, and measure the effectiveness of their advertisements, using data gathered over time and across their networks of Web pages to determine or predict the characteristics and preferences of their audience. Mergen Advisory may share certain non-personally identifiable information about you (such as user age and zip code) with ad network providers, to help them deliver more relevant advertisements through their ad networks. Please visit the Network Advertising Initiative website for additional information about opting out of targeted advertising delivered by NAI member ad networks.
You control who sees your profile information on Mergen Advisory Your profile information on the Mergen Advisory Service will be shared with other Members on Mergen Advisory. You can limit who can view certain personal information using your Profile Privacy options under your account Settings. Please bear in mind that if you choose to share your personal information (including any comments, photos or any other information) to other people on Mergen Advisory, you do so at your own risk. Mergen Advisory recommends that you don’t share your personal contact information. You can choose to make your profile visible to non-members of Mergen Advisory by editing your profile Settings.
Internet awareness
Whenever you voluntarily post personal information in public areas, like journals, weblogs, message boards and forums, this information can be accessed by the public and can in turn be used by others to send you unsolicited communications. Mergen Advisory recommends that you exercise discretion in deciding what information you disclose on the Internet.
Children
Children under the age of [18] are not eligible to use Mergen Advisory and must not attempt to register with Mergen Advisory and/or submit any personal information to us. Mergen Advisory does not knowingly collect personal information from any person who is under the age of [18] or allow them to register. If it comes to our attention that we have collected personal data from a person under the age of [18], we will delete this information as quickly as possible. If you have reason to believe that this has occurred, please contact us via the Contact Us page, and we will delete any such information. We recommend that children below the age of 18 should not send any information about themselves to anyone over the internet without asking their parents or legal guardians for permission beforehand.
Security and confidentiality
Mergen Advisory uses a variety of safeguards to help protect your personal information, including technical, administrative and physical controls. Please bear in mind though, that it is impossible for Mergen Advisory to guarantee that impenetrable security measures are in place. For example, we cannot control any illegal and/or unforeseen activity of other users that may allow them to get around the privacy or security settings on Mergen Advisory. Consequently, you acknowledge that there are circumstances in which your personal information may be accessed by unauthorised persons. The security of your personal information depends in part on your protection of your account password. Please do not disclose your account password to unauthorized people. We limit access to your personal information only to employees that we authorize to access that information in order to do their jobs in connection with the Mergen Advisory service. If you become aware of any breach of data security or have any other questions about the security of our website, please contact us via the Contact Us page.
Changes in Privacy Policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the home page, or 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. If we make material changes to this policy, we may notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.
IF ANY MODIFICATION IS UNACCEPTABLE TO YOU, YOU SHALL STOP USING THE MERGEN ADVISORY SERVICE. YOUR CONTINUED USE OF THE MERGEN ADVISORY SERVICE FOLLOWING OUR POSTING OF A CHANGE TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY WILL CONSTITUTE YOUR BINDING ACCEPTANCE OF THE CHANGE.
Deactivating membership
You always have the option to deactivate your membership at any time. If you are a member and no longer wish to participate in Mergen Advisory you can sign in to the site and click on the Setting tab and visit the Deactivate my account option at the top of the page.
Co-Branding
Mergen Advisory may be co-branded with our affiliates & partners.
Contact
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact us through email at info@mergenadvisory.com.