CHINA SOLAR LTD and its subsidiaries operate websites, provide services through mobile and other applications, and develop software. We refer to these as "our sites and services." In this privacy policy, we refer to CHINA SOLAR LTD. as "China Solar," "our," "us," or "we."
This privacy policy applies to our websites and mobile and interactive applications on which we display or post a direct link to this privacy policy. This privacy policy does not apply to those sites and services that do not display or link to this privacy policy, or that have their own privacy policies. However, we often acquire new companies to expand our business. Some acquired companies may operate under their own privacy policies until we integrate their privacy practices with ours.
This privacy policy covers what information we collect and why we collect it, how we use the information we collect, and the choices you have to access and update that information. Please familiarize yourself with our practices and let us know if you have any questions. If you do not agree to this privacy policy, please do not use our sites or services.
1.Personal Information We Collect
Personal information is information that can be used to identify, locate, or contact an individual, and includes other information that may be associated with personal information. When you interact with our sites and services, depending on the site or service, we may ask for the following personal information directly from you:
- Contact Information allows us to communicate with you and generally includes your name, addresses, email addresses, social media website user account names, and/or telephone numbers
- Payment Information needed to process payments such as your credit or debit card number, expiration date, and card verification number
- Personal Profile Information helps us with the administration and personalization of your personal profiles, such as areas of interest, information from social media interactions (such as Facebook Connect or Google+), preferences, physical characteristics (such as height, weight), photographs, biographical, health information and/or demographic information (such as gender, age, birthday)
- Transaction Information about how you interact with and use our sites and services, email, other communications, and applications; and how you interact with merchants, business partners, and service providers
- Geographic Location Information but only if your mobile or other device transmits location data and/or your IP address, and you have activated one of our mobile applications or visited one of our sites
- Job-Search-Related Information for recruitment purposes and may include educational and employment background, driver's license number and social security number
In each of the above instances, you will know what personal information we collect through our sites and services because you voluntarily and directly provide it.
2.How We Use Personal Information
We may use information collected from you in one or more of the following ways:
- to enable site features such as geographically specific pricing or logging, and retrieving and providing analysis of data you choose to enter into the site
- to send you important notices, such as communications about changes to your account, and our sites and services' terms, conditions, or policies
- to solicit input and feedback to improve our sites and services and customize your user experience
- to enable you to communicate with other website subscribers via private messaging or other site-specific communications channels
- to meet contractual obligations
- to send you reminders, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative messages service bulletins
- to inform you about new products or promotional offers, and to provide advertisements to you through our sites, email messages, text messages, applications, or other methods of communication
- to manage our sites' administration, forum management, or fulfillment
- to provide customer service and technical support
- to administer surveys, sweepstakes, giveaways, contests, or similar promotions or events sponsored by us or our partners
- to prevent fraud or potentially illegal activities, enforce our sites' terms of use or to comply with the law
- for internal purposes such as auditing, data analysis, and research to improve our products, services, and communications, and
- to allow you to apply for a job or sign up for special offers from third parties through our sites.
In addition to the uses described above, we may use personal information that we collect for other purposes that are disclosed to you at the time we collect the information, or with your consent.
3.Sharing Personal Information
We may share personal information about you with third parties in the following circumstances:
- We may engage third parties to perform services on our behalf, including maintenance services, analytics and data analysis, payment processing, assisting in marketing efforts, email and text message distribution, customer service and conducting surveys.
- Your personal information, and the contents of all of your online communications on or through our sites and services may be accessed and monitored as necessary to operate our sites and perform our services, and may be disclosed:
- to satisfy any applicable laws or regulations,
- to defend ourselves in litigation or a regulatory action,
- in order to protect the rights or property of Internet Brands and our subsidiaries, including to enforce our sites' terms of use,
- when we have a good faith belief that we are required to disclose the information in response to legal process (for example, a subpoena, court order, or search warrant),
- where we believe our sites and services are being used in the commission of a crime, including to report such criminal activity or to exchange information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and risk management, and
- when we have a good faith belief that there is an emergency that poses a threat to the health and/or safety of you, another person or the public generally.
- In the event of a merger, acquisition, debt financing, sale of Internet Brands' assets by or with another company, or a similar corporate transaction takes place, we may need to disclose and transfer all information about you, including personal information, to the successor company.
- We may share information about you with Internet Brands' subsidiaries and affiliates.
- Some of our services are co-branded by Internet Brands and other companies with which we partner. If you register to or use such a service, both our privacy policy and the partner's privacy policy may be displayed and apply. If that is the case, both Internet Brands and the partner will receive personal information you provide.
- We may share personal information about you for any other purpose(s) disclosed to you at the time we collect your information or with your consent.
4.Other Information We Automatically Collect
We may also collect certain technical information when you use our sites and services. For example, our servers receive and automatically collect information about your computer and browser, including for instance your IP address, browser type, domain name from which you accessed the site or service, and other software or hardware information. If you access our sites and services from a mobile or other device, we may collect a unique device identifier assigned to that device (UDID), type of device, general GPS location, or other transactional information for that device in order to serve content to it.
In addition, we may collect information about how you use our sites such as the date and time you visit the sites, the areas or pages of the sites that you visit, the amount of time you spend viewing the sites, the number of times you return to the sites, and other click-stream data. Some of this data may be shared with partners who referred you to our site(s) and who will use the data to optimize who else they refer to our site(s). Also, sometimes this data can be shared with partners who help us deliver ads to you on websites not controlled by us, for instance, when we put a pixel on a conversion page on our site and a marketing partner uses that to optimize what traffic they send to us, or using another example, when we create a re-targeting list through DFP Small Business by Google or placing a partners’ pixel on our sites, and then delivering targeted ads across the Internet.
We also may use cookies and other tracking technologies (including browser cookies, pixels, beacons, and Adobe Flash technology).
You can set your browser to warn you about attempts to place cookies on your computer or limit the type of cookies you allow. Adobe Flash cookies operate differently than browser cookies and cookie management tools available in a web browser may not remove flash cookies. If you disable cookies, you may lose some of the features and functionality of our sites and services. Please note that companies delivering advertisements on our sites may also use cookies or other technologies, and those practices are subject to their own policies.
In general, we use these technologies to remember you when you return to our sites, to understand and analyze trends, to monitor usage and administer the sites, to learn about user behavior on the sites and gather demographic information about our user base as a whole, to customize content or offers on our sites and through our services, and to conduct research to improve our sites, content and services.
5.User Generated Content, Online Communities and Forums, Profiles and Reviews
You may choose to publicly disclose personal information about yourself and others in the course of (i) contributing user generated content (for instance articles, blogs, reviews or podcasts), (ii) communicating with others in our online forums, communities or chat rooms, (iii) creating user profiles for public view, or (iv) posting images, photos or videos. Be aware, information that you voluntarily disclose in any of these areas of our sites is unencrypted, public information and therefore, there can be no expectation of privacy or confidentiality. Any personal information you submit in the course of interacting in these public activities can be read, collected, or used by other users. Prior to posting in these areas, we encourage you to read the specific site's terms of use, as we are not responsible for the personal information you choose to make public in any of these areas.
6.Accessing and Updating Personal Information
We encourage you to keep your personal information updated and accurate. We provide you reasonable access to your personal information and the ability to review, correct or delete it. For instance, some of our sites and services give you the ability to view and/or edit your personal information online. The methods for accessing your personal information will depend on which sites or services you use and their features. You have several choices, for instance:
- To view and change the personal information that you directly provided to us, you can return to the web page on our site where you originally submitted the data and follow the instructions on that web page.
- You may correct or update your account information at any time by logging on the site on which you are registered and navigating to your account.
- You may deactivate your profile at any time by visiting the preferences page for your profile.
- You may close your account at any time by logging on the site on which you are registered and navigating to your account.
- You can manage certain aspects of information collection and use by going to the settings of your mobile device and reviewing the permissions of each application. You may stop further use of your geo-location by visiting your device's settings for the relevant application.
- You may change your email preferences at any time by visiting your email preferences page for the relevant site.
- If you have additional questions about your options, contact us.
Protecting your privacy and security is important and we also take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access to your data.
Please be aware that certain records and information will be retained for specific purposes such as legal, payment, accounting, technical, dispute resolution, enforcement of our sites and services' terms of use, or customer service. If you have posted comments or user generated content on our site, we may not be able to delete it. Further, we take no responsibility for removing or editing any of your public activities or any submissions or content that is a result of your public activities, except as provided in this privacy policy or the sites or services' terms of use.
We may reject requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort (for example, developing a new system or fundamentally changing an existing practice), risk the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes).
We will retain your personal information for the period necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this privacy policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by applicable law.
7.Opting Out of Requested Communications
Requested communications include, for instance, email newsletters or software updates that may be expressly requested by you or which you consented to receive. After you request such communications, you may "opt out" of receiving them by using one of the following methods:
- Select the email "opt out" or "unsubscribe" link, or follow the opt-out instructions included in each email communication.
- To unsubscribe from text messages delivered to mobile devices, reply to the message with the words "STOP" or "END."
- Return to the web page(s) where you originally registered your preferences and follow the opt-out instructions.
- Contact us. Please provide your name, contact information, and specific relevant information that you no longer wish to receive.
Opting Out of General or Promotional Communications
General communications provide information about products, services, and/or support and may include special offers, new product information, or invitations to participate in market research. You may opt out of receiving these general communications by using one of the following methods:
- Select the email "opt out" or "unsubscribe" link, or follow the opt-out instructions included in each email communication.
- To unsubscribe from text messages delivered to mobile devices, reply to the message with the words "STOP" or "END."
- Contact us. Please provide your name, relevant contact information, and specific relevant information about your privacy preferences.
8.Protecting Personal Information
We have implemented reasonable and appropriate administrative, physical, technical and data security procedures and controls to safeguard your personal information against unauthorized access, disclosure, loss, misuse and alteration. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. We cannot assume responsibility or liability for unauthorized access to our servers and systems. We use third-party service providers to manage credit card and payment processing. These service providers are not permitted to store, retain, or use billing Information except for the sole purpose of credit card and payment processing on our behalf. When you enter payment information we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer (SSL) technology and do not store it on our systems.
9.Linked Websites and Services
Our sites and services may link to other sites or services operated by Internet Brands' affiliates or third parties, and may carry advertisements or offer content, functionality, newsletters, contests or sweepstakes, or applications developed and maintained by third parties. We do not exercise control over third party sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of any such third parties. Once you leave our sites or services via a link, enable a third-party service, or click an advertisement, you should check the applicable privacy policy of the third-party's site. The fact that we link to a website or present a banner ad or other type of advertisement is not an endorsement, authorization or representation of our affiliation with that third party, nor is it an endorsement of their privacy or information security policies or practices.
We may also provide social media features on our sites and services that enable you to share personal information with your social network(s) and to interact with our sites and services. Depending on the features, your use of these features may result in the collection or sharing of personal information about you. We encourage you to review the privacy policies and settings on the social media site(s) with which you interact.
9.Children's Privacy
Our sites and services are intended for general audiences and are not targeted to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13, please do not disclose or provide any information. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will take steps to promptly delete the information.
10.Contacting Us
Contacting Us
If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy policy or our practices you can contact us or write to us at China Solar Ltd. Please be sure to identify the specific website, software or service about which you have a question or concern and how we can contact you.
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