BenchSci Privacy Notice

Last Updated on Jun 11, 2024

We, Scinapsis Analytics Inc., its affiliates, subsidiaries and assigns and successors (collectively, “BenchSci”, “our”, or “us”, “we”) are strongly committed to transparency, and we want you (“you” or “your”) to understand how we collect, use, share and protect your personal information, as well as how you can manage the personal information we collect. 

This Privacy Notice applies to your interactions with us or your use of our websites (benchsci.com, app.benchsci.com), devices, applications and interfaces that we operate, pages within or associated with each website and subdomains, any equivalent, mirror, replacement, substitute or backup to such websites, subdomains, devices, applications, interfaces, products, services, tools, functions, features, offered or made available by us, whether online, in-person or offline (collectively, our “Services”). 

If you have any additional business agreements with us, to the extent there is a conflict between this Privacy Notice and such business agreement, then the terms of such business agreement will prevail over this Privacy Notice with respect to such specific Services. 

It is important you read and understand this Privacy Notice along with Terms of Service. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Notice or Terms of Use, please do not use our Services. If you do not understand, or if you have questions about, this Privacy Notice, please contact us before using, or continuing to use, our Services.

We reserve the right to change our Privacy Notice from time to time by posting the changes here. If we choose to amend this Privacy Notice, we will revise the Last Updated date at the top of this Privacy Notice when we post the updated version. We may also provide you with notice by prominently posting on our website or via email, if we make any significant changes to this Privacy Notice. We may also highlight those changes at the top of this Privacy Notice and provide a prominent link to it for a reasonable length of time following the change. Your use of our Services after we have informed you in one of these ways that we made changes to our Privacy Notice will mean that you have accepted those changes.

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1. TYPES OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT
2. HOW WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION 
3. HOW WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION 
4. WHY WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION 
5. HOW WE SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION
6. HOW WE PROTECT PERSONAL INFORMATION 
7. HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION 
8. YOUR RIGHTS
9. DATA TRANSFERS 
10. OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PRIVACY NOTICE 
11. CONTACT US 

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1. TYPES OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT. 

We collect two basic types of information from you when you provide it to us or when you use or interact with our Services: personal information and non-personal information.

Personal information includes all information that relates to you, or which are opinions about you personally and either identifies or may be used to identify you personally (collectively, “personal information”). We may collect the following types of personal information from you depending upon the device you are using and how you interact with us or use or interact with our Services, such as your:

• Account Information. If you create an account, we may store and use your name, organization (corporation/institution), email address and other personal information you may provide with your account. You can modify some of the personal information associated with your account. If you believe that someone has created an unauthorized account, you can request its removal.
• Contact Information. We may collect certain personal information, including name, mailing address, email address, phone number, and other contact information to send marketing communication regarding our Services, including news, updates and remainders. You can opt-out of receiving communications from us using “opt-out" or unsubscribe instructions provided in our marketing communications. 
• Third-Party Login. You may also access your account on our website through your third-party accounts, including a ResearchGate or Google account. If you engage with us through a third-party account, we may collect personal information made accessible to us by that third-party account provider to provide you with access to your BenchSci account. 
• Device Information. IP address, browser type and version, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, device type and device identifiers.
• Resume / Employment Information. Our website permits you to create or upload your resume or provide employment-related information that would typically be found within a resume (i.e., previous employment, education information, etc.). Some of the information contained within your resume may be considered personal information.

Non-personal information includes information that does not personally identify you or information that has been anonymized (collectively, “non-personal information”). When we combine non-personal information with personal information, we treat the combined information as personal information. If your information is aggregated, de-identified or anonymized, and it is no longer reasonably associated with you, we may use such non-personal information for any business, research or statistical purpose. 

You can always refuse to provide your personal information, but please note that some personal information is necessary to provide our Services. 

2. HOW WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION. 

We need to collect personal information from you to provide you with our Services and improve your experience. You may provide us with personal information in several ways, including, for example when you:

• Visit our website or use our Services;
• Register for an account or create a profile to access or use our Services;
• Correspond with us in any way, including through chat, complaints, feedback and surveys;
• Ask for customer service, support or other assistance;
• Interact with third party links and/or third-party services accessible via our Services; or
• Interact with us in any other way, online or offline, including through our Services, e-mail, chat, SMS/text messages, or otherwise.

3. HOW WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION.

We may use personal information to do any or all of the following:

• provide you with our Services including through the use of Large Language Models (“LLMs”) or other Artificial Intelligence models;
• measure the performance of our Services; 
• respond to your requests, communications, suggestions, comments, inquiries, and
  requests including your feedback about our Services;
• send technical notes, updates, security alters and other administrative messages;
• administer our relationship with you, including creating and managing your account;
• store your information securely in our database for your convenience;
• conduct research, develop new algorithms or any other legally permissible use cases;
• provide personalized Services, including content;
• communicate with you about jobs and opportunities that may be of interest to you;
• facilitate your participation in our surveys;
• provide you with, and improve, relevant marketing information from us or
  relevant third parties;
• respond to legally binding requests from law enforcement, regulatory authorities, or other third parties;
• defend, protect or enforce our rights or applicable terms of service or to fulfill our legal or contractual obligations;
• to prevent fraud or the recurrence of fraud;
• comply with applicable law; or
• any other purpose with your consent.

We may also combine your personal information collected through various sources, including information collected through our Services, and develop a customer profile that will be used for the purposes above.

If you are a job applicant, we will use your personal information as necessary to determine your fitness for a position, to make any relevant adjustments during the recruitment process and for equal opportunities monitoring. If you are an employee, we may process and use your personal information for legitimate business purposes related to performing the employment contract with you.

Use of Special Categories of Personal Information

You may choose to provide us with your racial or ethnic origin, which is considered a special category of personal information under certain laws. We only collect and process this information when you voluntarily provide it to us. 

4. WHY WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION.

We may use personal information for a number of reasons:

• to fulfill our contractual obligations to you, including to provide our Services to you;
• the individual has given consent for a particular purpose (for example, where an individual has given us consent to send them electronic marketing);
• when using the information is necessary for our legitimate interests or those of a third party, provided we have balanced these against the individual’s rights and interests;
• in the event that we believe it necessary or appropriate to prevent criminal or illegal activity; or
• in order to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation (for example, responding to government or law enforcement information requests).

5. HOW WE SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION. 

We may share personal information with our third-party service providers, suppliers, vendors, consultants, professional advisors and business partners, which may include IT service providers, financial institutions and payment providers, customer relationship management vendors, other cloud-based solutions providers, lawyers, accountants, auditors and other professional advisors. We contract with such vendors and advisers to ensure that they only process your personal information under our instructions and ensure the security and confidentiality of your personal information. Our third-party service providers include: 

We may share personal information with law enforcement and regulatory authorities or other third parties as required or permitted by law for the purpose of: 

• responding to a subpoena, court order, or other legal processes;
• defending, protecting, or enforcing our rights; assisting in the event of an emergency; and
• complying with applicable law.

If you are a job applicant, we may share your personal information with employment/recruitment agencies, or background screening providers as part of the recruitment process.

In accordance with applicable law, we may also transfer or assign personal information to third parties as a result of, or in connection with, a sale, merger, consolidation, change in control, transfer of assets, bankruptcy, reorganization, or liquidation. If we are involved in defending a legal claim, we may disclose personal information about you that is relevant to the claim to third parties as a result of, or in connection with, the associated legal proceedings.

We share non-personal information with third parties as reasonably necessary to meet our business needs.

6. HOW WE PROTECT PERSONAL INFORMATION.

We are dedicated to ensuring the security of your personal information. We use physical, electronic, and administrative security measures, including firewalls, SSL/TLS encryption techniques and authentication procedures, to help protect your personal information from accidental loss, theft, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction.  We aim to provide secure transmission of your personal information from your devices to our servers. We have processes to store personal information that we have collected in secure operating environments. Our security procedures mean that we may occasionally request proof of identity before we disclose your personal information to you. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. 

No transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so. If you suspect an unauthorized use or security breach of your personal information, please contact us immediately.

7. HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION. 

We will only retain your personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, administrative, security, compliance, contractual, tax, accounting, or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal information for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

Data Storage 

We may store your information (personal and non-personal), contextual information, in-progress searches and queries, and chat history in Google cloud. We may store your information in Salesforce, which integrates to our site.  

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or other requirements.

8. YOUR RIGHTS. 

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal information. Your rights may provide:

Request access to your Personal Information

This enables you to receive a copy of your personal information we hold.

Request correction of your Personal Information

This enables you to correct any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new information you provide to us.

Request erasure of your Personal Information

This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where we are no longer required to hold it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have successfully exercised your right to Object to Processing. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.

Object to processing your Personal Information

This enables you to object to processing of your personal information when it is based on our legitimate interest or that of a third party. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

Request restrictions of processing your Personal Information

This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances such as establishing the accuracy of your personal information, but you do not want to erase it, where you require us to hold the personal information to establish, exercise or defend legal claims etc.

Request for data portability of your Personal Information

This enables you to request transfer of your personal information to you or (if technically feasible) any third party in a commonly used machine-readable format. Note that these rights only apply to personal information which you initially provided us. Certain personal information will need to be retained for administrative, legal, security or other legitimate business purposes.

Right to withdraw consent

This enables you to withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal information. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain Services to you.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights or in case you should have any concerns about how we process your personal information, please contact us. 

9. DATA TRANSFERS.

We are a global business. As such, information we collect may be transferred to, stored, and processed in any country or territory where one or more of our business partners or service providers are based or have facilities which may be different to your home country. In these circumstances, the governments, courts, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies of that country may be able to obtain access to your personal information through the laws of that country. While other countries or territories may not have the same standards of data protection as those in your home country, we will continue to protect personal information that we transfer in line with this Privacy Notice by requiring that our business partners or service providers adhere to this Privacy Notice and the applicable privacy regulations in your home country.

EUROPE/UNITED KINGDOM/CANADA 

This section only applies if you are a resident of a member state of the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area (EEA), or Canada.

The personal information we collect from you may be transferred to and stored by our affiliates, or third-party service providers (as specified in How We Share Personal Information above) who operate on our behalf. We also transfer information to a number of providers of business applications, such as customer relationship management, marketing applications as well as marketing service providers. These providers are primarily located in the United States but may also be located in other jurisdictions.

In certain cases, there may not be an adequacy decision by the European Commission and/or United Kingdom authorities in respect of those countries. Adequacy of data protection is instead ensured by Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission in accordance with Article 46(2)(c) of the General Data Protection Regulation, or any equivalent clauses approved by the authorities in the United Kingdom including any additional safeguards as required by EU/ UK data protection laws that we have in place with that third party. Please contact us if you require any further information on the mechanism used by us to transfer your personal information. 

We retain your personal information for as long as necessary for the purpose(s) for which it was initially collected. The criteria we use to determine the retention period is as follows:

• whether there are contractual or legal obligations that exist which require us to retain the information for a period of time; 
• whether there is an ongoing legal claim that relates to any business (or otherwise) relationship you have with us, or that is otherwise related to your relationship with us; and
• whether any applicable law, statute, or regulation allows for a specific retention period.

You may have, in accordance with applicable data protection laws, rights (see Your Rights above) when it comes to our handling of your personal information. Please note that many of these rights are not absolute, and we may have grounds for refusing to comply with your request to exercise them (for example, where we are (a) required or permitted by law to process your personal information in a way that is incompatible with your request, or (b) able to rely on exemptions under data protection law which entitle us to process your personal information in a way that is incompatible  with your request). Where such circumstances apply, we will inform you of this at the time you make a request to exercise your rights.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (Tel: 0303 123 1113 or at www.ico.org.uk). Alternatively, you can also make a complaint to the supervisory authority in the Member State of the EU or EEA in which you are resident. We would however appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO or a supervisory authority, so please contact us in the first instance.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah or Virginia, applicable state privacy law permits you to request information regarding the disclosure of your personal information to third parties for business purposes. Please see sections pertaining to Types of Personal Information Collected, How We Collect Personal Information, How We Use Personal Information, Why We Use Personal Information, How Long We Keep Your Personal Information, Your Rights and Other Important Information About This Privacy Notice, about your information rights under applicable state privacy laws. 

In the twelve months prior to the effective date of this Privacy Notice, BenchSci has not sold any personal information of users. BenchSci does not use or disclose any sensitive personal information for any purpose not expressly permitted by the California Privacy Rights Act. BenchSci does not engage in profiling in furtherance of automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects, as defined under the Colorado Privacy Act. To make any request pursuant to applicable state privacy law, please contact us.

10. OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PRIVACY NOTICE. 

Children’s Privacy 

Our Services are not for children or those under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children or other persons who are under 18 years of age. Individuals who are children or those under the age of 18 should not attempt to provide us with any personal information. If you think we have received personal information from children or those under the age of 18, please contact us immediately. 

Direct Marketing Email /SMS Messages

You may have the opportunity to receive certain communications from us related to our Services. If you provide us with your email address or mobile phone number to receive communications or to communicate with us for sales, marketing, recruitment and/or employment purposes. You can opt-out of marketing messages or other communications at any time by following the instructions at the bottom of our emails or SMS messages and adjusting your preferences. Please note that certain emails or SMS messages may be necessary for the operation of our Services. You will continue to receive these necessary emails, if lawful and appropriate, even if you unsubscribe from our optional marketing communications.

Cookies

Like many websites and apps, we use “cookies” or “beacons”, which are small text files that are stored on your device when you visit certain online pages that record your preferences and actions, including how you use the website. We use this information for analytics purposes which allows us to improve your browsing experience. The information we collect through these technologies will also be used to manage your session. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as "necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. These necessary cookies cannot be disabled.

Cookie Opt-out. You can manage your cookies through the pop up on our website and icon of a cookie on our main page or you can set your browser or device to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. If you delete your cookies, if you opt-out from cookies, or if you set your browser or device to decline these technologies, some Services may not function properly. Our Services do not respond to Do Not Track or similar signals if received. 

Online Analytics

We also use various types of online analytics on our website. These online analytics use cookies or other tracking technologies to help us analyze how users interact with and use the website, compile reports on the related activities, and provide other services related to website and app activity and usage. The technologies used by such online analytics may collect information such as your IP address, time of visit, whether you are a return visitor, and any referring website or app. The information generated by any such online analytics will be transmitted to and stored by such platforms and will be subject to their privacy policies. 

Offline Interactions and Other Sources

We also may collect personal information from other sources, such as our partners or third-party service providers, or from our offline interactions with you for the purposes listed in the How We Use Personal Information section below, including to enable us to verify or update information contained in our records and to better customize the Services for you. For example, if you apply for a position with us, we may collect information from former employers, recruiting agencies, credit reference agencies, or other background check agencies.

Social Media Integration

Our Services may sometimes contain links to and from social media platforms. You may choose to connect to us through a social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or X/Twitter, and when you do, we may collect additional information from you, including the information listed in the Types of Information We Collect section above. Please be advised that social media platforms may also collect information from you. When you click on a social plug-in, such as Facebook’s “Like” button or Twitter’s “Tweet” button, that particular social network’s plugin will be activated, and your browser will directly connect to that provider’s servers. We encourage you to review the social media platforms’ usage and disclosure policies and practices, including the data security practices, before using them.

Surveys

Sometimes, and subject to your consent where required by applicable local law, we may give you the opportunity to participate in surveys, some of which might be sponsored or conducted by a third party. 

Participation in these surveys is completely voluntary. If you choose to participate, we will request certain personal information from you. If there is a third-party sponsor involved in the survey, we may provide certain personal information to the third-party sponsor. Please make sure to review the sponsor’s privacy policy and be aware that any surveys offered by us may be governed by specific rules and terms and conditions that are separate from and in addition to this Privacy Notice. By participating in any such surveys, you will become subject to those rules, including but not limited to receiving emails containing survey communications.

Third Party Websites and Apps 

Our website and Services may contain links to other websites or apps operated by third parties. Please be advised that the practices described in this Privacy Notice do not apply to information gathered through these third-party websites and apps. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the actions and privacy policies of third parties and other websites and apps.

11. CONTACT US. 

If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or our privacy practices including any request to exercise your rights available under law, please contact us by:

Email: privacy@benchsci.com

Mail: “BenchSci”, Attention: Privacy Department, 559 College St. Suite 201, Toronto ON, M6G 1A9