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.
Consumer Brands Association’s full privacy policy is accessible here. This policy below 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 if they interact with our Food Processing Facts.
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. 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 completes the Contact Us form or signs up to receive information. 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 and contact information. 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.
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 “Food Processing Facts” 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 Food Processing Facts Website Uses Personal Data
The Consumer Brands Association primarily uses personal information to communicate with people who volunteer their information to learn more or have questions.
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 Food Processing Facts Website 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.
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 delete@consumerbrandsassociation.org 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 time (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.
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 spapadopoulos@consumerbrandsassociation.org.
1 All references to the Consumer Brands Association in this Privacy Policy include our affiliated organization, the Consumer Brands Science and Education Foundation (SEF).