Brooks Privacy Policy

Introduction

Protecting your privacy is important to us. We hope the following statement will help you understand how Brooks Internet Software, Inc. collects, uses, and safeguards the personal information you provide to us.

Please note policy changes from 20 October 2015 are in the Changes section, and GDPR changes are in the GDPR section.

Information we collect online

As a commercial enterprise, we have interest in two broad categories of information:

1. How you came to our site

Examples include:

  • Web search, which keywords were used
  • Link from a partner site
  • Link from an online directory
  • URL included in an advertisement

This information is used offline for analysis. We do not rank or grade visitors or prevent access based on the way they come to our site.

2. If you download a trial version of products

We would like to contact you for a follow-up. The information we collect is limited to whatever you enter in the form on the download page.

Site Features

The following are some common site features that we do not provide:

  • We do not currently offer a chat area or bulletin board; we may in the future for technical support

We do not collect information that you do not voluntarily provide. Furthermore, while we are interested in general information such as web searches, we do not associate them with a user or IP address.

Cookie usage

We use cookies in our online shopping area to locate your unique shopping cart on our system. No personal information is ever stored in a cookie. When you close all open browser windows, the cookie will be removed from your computer. The next time you visit our online shopping area a new unique cookie will be assigned to you. As part of our online processing, we check cookies regularly to ensure that a cookie cannot be used by anyone else. Inactive shopping carts are removed from our system.

User login

We offer a "login" facility in our online shopping area so users can enter their contact, shipping, and billing information once. This login is protected by a username and password. If the user provides an email address, our site will email the username and password to that email address. Once the user has "logged in," he or she can download products without filling in the form, view the status on recent online orders, and place online orders without re-entering billing and shipping information.

We do not use this information for our own marketing purposes. It is only provided as a convenience to the online shopper. Credit card data is not stored with the login account information.

Data encryption

All data associated with a credit card transaction is encrypted and sent via a secure transaction to our credit card processor. Credit card data is never saved or stored with session data and is not stored on any machine in our network.

In those instances where the credit card number is retained as part of the order record, only the first and last four digits are preserved in plain text form; these documents are encrypted and secured. There is no access to the original credit card information after the transaction.

Data Security

In order to prevent unauthorized access and inappropriate use both inside and outside the company, we protect all data (including but not limited to credit card data) by physical and electronic methods and managerial procedures.

How information is used or shared

As stated in the section "Information we collect online," we collect data you provide at the time of download, either on our site or a partner site.

How is the information used?

Download information (if any) is stored in our Customer Relation Management system (CRM) for follow-up.

How is the information shared?

Download information is selectively shared in some instances. The criteria we use to determine whether to forward this information to a partner are as follows:

  1. In certain countries such as Brazil, a government agency will not do business outside the country. We forward these to a trusted reseller in that country.
  2. In certain instances, we have been advised that a reseller's customer is going to download from our site, and when that happens, we forward the information to the reseller as a courtesy.

Please note that we do not sell leads and that we only provide leads to those who can service the customer more effectively than we can.

Your information and marketing

  1. Since we don't sell or market your information, no choices in that regard are necessary.
  2. We would like to contact you regarding the software you downloaded. You may choose not to provide information we can use for follow up; in that case, you won't hear from us and we won't forward the information to a partner (if applicable).
  3. If you ask us not to contact you in the future, we won't.
  4. If we contact you and you don't reply after several attempts, we will not persist.

Questions about your information

You may direct any inquiries regarding the information we have collected, including changes or a request to be removed, to the sales representative who contacted you after you downloaded, or via email to Sales.

We do not have a guaranteed completion time for information requests. Please allow one complete business day before you contact us for confirmation if you have not heard from us.

How your information is protected

The computers or servers on which download information are stored are kept in a secure environment.

Updates to this privacy statement

This privacy statement and future revisions to the statement are the results of discussions and consensus among Brooks Internet Software's management and other interested parties in the company.

Changes will appear in a new version of the document, posted online and available through links on our website.

Recent changes to the privacy statement (20-Oct-2015)

  • clarified that we might be interested in a URL from any advertisement, not print only
  • when you download a trial of our software, “we would like” to contact you; less strong than “want”
  • Verisign is no longer our credit card processor, and we felt no need to identify the current
  • we no longer store “origin information” in a database of IP addresses; we were doing this only to help us understand where some sales came from but we abandoned that in 2010. All references to “origin information” were removed.
  • changed the reasons given for why we might share a download record; the new rules are more restrictive
  • references to “electronic vault” were removed as we no longer do this
  • clarified that we no longer store credit card information on our network, and we no longer have access to credit card information beyond the transaction

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) changes

  • We continue to use cookies in the manner described above, that is, we don't use them unless you are in the store
  • The "privacy statement" was re-titled to "Privacy Policy" and a menu item was added
  • We continue to manually monitor the apache weblogs from time to time, primarily to look at page activity and searches; we continue to ignore IP addresses and do not have the means to collect personal data
  • We are using a version of our CMS which advertises it has been modified to not collect personal data, including in the contact form
  • If you have created a login account on this site, go to the "My account" link which you'll find just above the "Log out" link
    • to see all your account data, click "All your data"
    • to remove your account, click "Edit", then scroll to the bottom and use the button labeled "Cancel account". Or you can contact our support personnel for assistance using the contact form, or call us, and be sure to provide the username for your account
  • This company has fewer than 250 employees the processing it carries out likely will not result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is only occasional and the processing does not includes special categories of data (Article 30/5) and as such my organisation is not required to create records of processing activities