Privacy
Policy

Silicon Valley/Santa Clara DMO, Inc. Privacy Policy

The purpose of this statement is to describe our policy with regard to the collection and use of personally identifiable information (“PII”); (i.e., any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual who is the subject of the information) when you use our web site at www.discoversantaclara.org.

This Privacy Policy also describes certain of your and our legal rights and responsibilities with respect to information which we collect from or about you.  Your use of our website or any of our services constitutes your agreement to follow and be bound by this Privacy Policy.  If you do not agree to be subject to and bound by this Privacy Policy, you must not use our website or any of our services.

This Privacy Policy also applies to any of our targeted content, including online offers and email marketing and advertisements for services which you may see on third party websites, platforms and applications (“Offer Sites”) based on your online activity. These Offer Sites may have their own privacy policies and terms and conditions. We encourage you to read them before using those Offer Sites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information from or about you collected by third parties and not shared with us, such as our service providers and social media pages. The collection and use of your information by such third parties is governed by the relevant third party’s privacy policies, statements, and practices, and under no circumstances are we responsible or liable for any third party’s compliance with those privacy policies, statements, and practices.

This Privacy Policy does not apply to websites that link to our website or websites that may be accessed through our services. We may provide links to other websites that contain information that we believe may be useful to you or that you will find valuable, including links to any third-party event services. However, we have not investigated the security of those linked websites and you should not assume those sites have a privacy policy equivalent to ours. If you access such a third-party website through a link we provide, you will be subject to the privacy policy of the new site. We are not responsible for the contents of any linked web pages referenced from our website. If you have any questions regarding the privacy, security, or content of those sites, you should contact the appropriate contact(s) at those websites directly.

Information We Collect:

In common with other websites, log files are stored on our web server, saving details such as your IP address, browser type, referring page, and time of visit. Cookies, pixel tags, and other technologies to automatically collect information about you may be used to remember your preferences when interacting with the website. We also collect information that you provide directly to us. For example, where registration is required, your email and a username will be stored on the server.  We also may collect information when you communicate with us via third party social media sites such as Facebook or Instagram (e.g. to create an account) or when you use sites and services that allow you to share information (e.g., via plugins, widgets or other tools), but always in accordance with the authorization procedures and privacy settings you establish with such services.

How the Information We Collect is Used:

In general, the information is used to improve Discover Santa Clara’s® website and enhance the visitor’s experience when using the website to display personalized content and possible advertising. E-mail addresses or other PII will not be sold, rented or leased to 3rd parties except as described below under “How We Share Your Information” and “Location of PII/Your Consent.” E-mail may be sent to inform you of news of our services or offers by us or our affiliates or business partners.

In addition, we may use your PII to provide products and services and to support our business functions. For example, we may use this information for the following purposes:

Provide, Improve, and Develop the Our Website

  • Provide services to you.
  • Provide customer service.
  • Operate, protect, improve, and optimize our website and the user experience, such as by performing analytics and conducting research
  • Communicate with you and to send you information by email, postal mail, telephone, text message, or other means about our products, services, contests, support messages, updates, security alerts, and account notifications
  • Address problems with and improve our services and technologies, as well as to develop new products and services
  • Allow you to use our online technologies
  • Provide consistent, personalized services, including to personalize our advertising, marketing communications, and promotional offers
  • Facilitate your ability to share information to social media
  • Fulfill a contract we have with you
  • Operate, protect, improve, and optimize our website experience, and personalize and customize your experience (such as automatically entering your saved information), we conduct profiling based on your interactions with our website, your search and booking history, your profile information and preferences, and other content you submit to us by using our website.

We process this information given our legitimate interest in improving our website and our user’s experience with it, and where it is necessary for the adequate performance of any contract we might have with you.

Create and Maintain a Trusted and Safer Environment

  • Prevent, detect, mitigate and investigate fraud, security breaches and activities that are or potentially may be prohibited or illegal.
  • Conduct security investigations and risk assessments
  • Verify or authenticate information
  • As we believe to be required or appropriate to protect the rights, property, safety and security of our company, and our employees, customers and others
  • As we believe to be required or appropriate under applicable law, to respond to requests from government authorities and to comply with legal process, investigations, regulatory or governmental enquiries or for other legal or regulatory purposes
  • Comply with our legal obligations
  • Resolve any disputes with any of our users and enforce our agreements with third parties
  • Enforce our other policies

We process this information given our legitimate interest in protecting our website, to measure the adequate performance of any contract we may with you, and to comply with applicable laws.

Provide, Personalize, Measure, and Improve our Advertising and Marketing

  • Send you promotional messages we believe may be of interest to you, marketing, advertising, and other information that may be of interest to you based on your preferences (including information about us or our affiliates or partner campaigns and services) and social media advertising through social media platforms such as Facebook or Google).
  • Personalize, measure, and improve our advertising.
  • Conduct profiling on your characteristics and preferences (based on the information you provide to us, your interactions with our website and other services, information obtained from third parties, and your search and booking history) to send you promotional messages, marketing, advertising and other information that we think may be of interest to you.

We will process your PII for the purposes listed in this section given our legitimate interest in undertaking marketing activities to offer you products or services that may be of interest to you. You can opt-out of receiving marketing communications from us by following the unsubscribe instructions included in our marketing communications or changing your notification settings within your account on our website.

Other Purposes

  • When you consent to it
  • When it is necessary to protect your vital interests or that of another person
  • When it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest
  • When it is in our legitimate interests.

Legitimate interests are our business or commercial reasons for using your data, such as (i) keeping our records up to date (ii) providing services to you; (iii) maintaining or administering any services to you(iv) performing business analyses or for other internal purposes to improve the quality of our business and the services we offer; (v) prevention of fraud and financial crime to protect the public; (vi) communicating with you concerning programs or services consistent with our obligations to provide those services or otherwise; and (vii) participating in litigation, investigations, regulatory or governmental enquiries or for other legal or regulatory purposes involving our customers who use or have used our services or other third parties. We will not unfairly place our legitimate interests above what is best for you.

How We Share Your Information

We share your PII with, or obtain data from, third parties in the following ways:

  • By You. You may disclose PII when you post, link or tag digital content to our website, third party websites, or other public forums, such as our social media pages, blogs, and online product reviews. Any information that you disclose through these services will become public.
  • Third Party Service Providers. We share your information with third party service providers who we work with or who manage our customer information and perform services on our behalf, such as hosting our e-commerce platform, providing and maintaining website features, and sending communications and services to our users or customers. Our third party service providers are only authorized to collect, use, and disclose your information to the extent necessary to allow the third party service providers to perform the services they provide to us. Certain third-party service providers have their own terms of use and privacy policies with respect to the information we are required to share with them in order to provide us with their services. For these third party service providers, we recommend that you read their privacy policies so you can understand the manner in which your personal information will be handled by these providers.
  • Social Sharing. Your PII may be disclosed in connection with your social sharing activity, such as if you log into your customer account from your social media account. By connecting your customer account and your social media account, you authorize us to share information with your social media account provider, and you understand that the use of the information we share will be governed by the social media site’s privacy policy.
  • Legal Requirements. We may share information about you if necessary or appropriate to comply with laws or regulations or in response to a valid subpoena, court order, legal processes, or government request, or to protect the operations, privacy, safety, property or rights of Discover Santa Clara or others, or when we believe it is necessary to share such information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, or as otherwise required by law or to protect the public.

Other Disclosures

We may share your PII with our legal, regulatory, audit, and other professional advisors. Those companies may use your PII to assist us in our operations consistent with our legitimate business interests. We also may share information about you as described at the point of collection or otherwise pursuant to your consent or where we have a legitimate interest in doing so.

Your Options:

If you have subscribed to one of our services, you may unsubscribe by following the instructions which are included in e-mails that you receive. You also may be able to block cookies via your browser settings as further explained below.

Cookies:

Some Discover Santa Clara® applications use “cookies.” A cookie is a small data file that certain web-sites write to your hard drive when you visit them. A cookie file can contain information such as a user id that the site uses to track the pages you have visited; however, the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie is only a text file and cannot read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Cookies and similar technologies within a web browser can track user traffic patterns, recognize your computer’s browser when you return, and provide personalized content without requiring sign-in.

Most web browsers are set up to accept cookies. You can adjust your browser settings to refuse all cookies or to inform you when a cookie is being placed on your hard drive. However, certain features of our website may not work properly and you may be required to re-enter certain information each time you use our website

Google Analytics Cookie Tracking:

Some Discover Santa Clara® applications may use Google Analytics cookies to log user sessions and help us understand traffic and behavior. This helps us analyze data about web-page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to visitor needs. We only use this information for statistical analysis purposes.  Where we use Google Analytics, we have set up the service to anonymize your IP address as soon as data is received by the Analytics Collection Network, before any storage or processing takes place.

To provide website visitors the ability to prevent their data from being used by Google Analytics, Google has developed the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on for the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, dc.js). This add-on instructs the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) running on websites to prohibit sending information to Google Analytics. However, the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on does not prevent data from being sent to us.

Visit https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/ for more info on how to opt out.

Age of Consent:

By accessing our web site, you represent that you are at least the age of majority in your state or province of residence, or that you are the age of majority in your state or province of residence and you have given us your consent to allow any of your minor dependents to use our web site.

We do not knowingly contact or collect information from persons under the age of majority in your state or province of residence. Our web site and services are not intended to solicit information of any kind from persons under the age of majority in your state or province of residence.

Security of Transmission of PII

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the Internet or e-mail is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect PII that you submit to us, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use commercially reasonable procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorized access.

How We Keep Your Information

We will store your PII for as long as may be reasonably necessary to achieve the purposes for which it was collected, whether that is to provide services to you, for our own legitimate interests (described above), or so that we can comply with the law. We reserve the right to retain it to the full extent not prohibited by law. We may delete PII in our discretion, so you should retain your own records, and not rely upon our storage of any PII, content, or other data.

We will review the information we hold and when there no longer is a user, legal, or business need for us to hold it, we will either delete it securely or in some cases anonymize it. When we delete any information, it will be deleted from our active databases but may remain in our archives.

Location of Your PII / Your Consent

You are giving us the following specific express, voluntary, and informed consent to a few activities relating to your PII that is disclosed in providing services to you, or for a purpose directly related to such purpose:

Consent to International Transfer and Disclosure of Personal Information: We are located in the United States of America (“USA”) and we are subject to the applicable laws of the USA (where data privacy laws are less stringent than in the European Union and certain other jurisdictions). We will store and process information we receive about you, as described in this Privacy Policy, in the USA.

You agree that we, and those with whom we share your PII (“Recipients”) may disclose, transfer, process, and store your PII outside of your country of origin to our affiliates, sponsors and partners, and any other third party service providers for our business purposes.

Some of the Recipients of PII may be located in countries that do not provide a level of data protection equivalent to that set forth by the European Union and some other jurisdictions. If you submit any PII or choose to access or use our services, such as our website, you consent to such disclosure, transfer, process, and storage of information in accordance with this Privacy Notice and subject to such applicable laws which may include access by law enforcement and other government entities including courts and tribunals.

Consent to Electronic Notice If There is a Security Breach: We will take reasonable measures to safeguard your PII and prevent such information from unauthorized access, disclosure, or use. However, there can never be a guarantee of data security. If we or a Recipient is required to provide notice of unauthorized access to or other invasion of certain security systems, you agree that we (or they) may do so when required (or voluntarily) by posting notice on our website or sending notice to any email address we have for you, in our (or their) good faith discretion. You agree that notice to you will count as notice to others for whom you are acting, and agree to pass the notice on to them.

Your Rights Over Your PII

EU Privacy Rights

If you are a European Union resident, in accordance with our policies and procedures you have the right to review, verify, correct, and request erasure of the PII that we hold about you under certain circumstances. You also have the right to limit, restrict, or object to the processing of your PII under certain circumstances. You may also have the right to request that we transfer your PII to another party to the extent provided for under applicable data privacy laws. For more information on your rights, please see https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens_en.

If you want to review, verify, correct, or request erasure of your PII; limit, restrict, or object to the processing of your PII; or request a transfer of your PII to another party, please contact us at dscadmin@discoversantaclara.org or write to us at

Silicon Valley/Santa Clara DMO, Inc.
ATTN:  Administration Team
5001 Great America Pkwy
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1119 US

To protect your privacy and security, we also will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access, making corrections, or following such a request to correct or delete your data.

When you contact us, we will respond as soon as possible and where possible within one month. If your request is more complicated, it may take longer to respond to you, but we will respond within three months of your request. There is no charge for most requests, but if you ask us to provide a significant amount of data, for example, we may ask you to pay a reasonable administrative fee. We also may ask you to verify your identity before we provide any information to you.

California Privacy Rights

As of January 1, 2020, the CCPA (California Civil Code Section 1798.100 et seq.) provided California consumers with additional rights regarding PII that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly with a particular consumer or household.  The CCPA does not currently apply to us.

How to Contact Us:

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please send us an email at: dscadmin@discoversantaclara.org.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect our current practices. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will be posted on our website and will be effective when posted unless another date is referenced in the notice. We recommend you check the Privacy Policy on a regular basis so that you know the current terms and conditions that apply to you. If you use our website after any changes are effective, you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by them.

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