Data Product Privacy Notice

1. Scope of This Privacy Notice

This privacy notice covers those activities provided by Merkle Inc located at 7001 Columbia Gateway Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (“Merkle”, “we”, “us” or “our”).

It covers our data products, including DataSource, Identity and M1.

DataSource: This product covers most of the adult US population and is built by combining data supplied to Merkle by other companies that collect data from you.

Identity: Our Identity product is a set of processes that manage and associate information across a number of sources to create an identity map across those identifiers and tie them to an individual.

M1: M1 is a platform we offer our clients to allow them to understand their consumers, plan their marketing campaigns, activate those campaigns and understand the effectiveness of those advertising campaigns. When these campaigns are activated, we work with publishing networks (including social media and online display advertising) to display our client’s advertising to you.

This Privacy Notice explains in detail the types of personal information we may collect or receive about you in connection with our data products, and how we use, process, and share that personal information.

This privacy notice does not cover:

• Our website activities, please see here for our Website Privacy Notice
• The data activities of our affiliates
• • Data processing carried out by Merkle in connection with employment by, or the supply of contracted services to, Merkle or its subsidiaries. Please contact your local Human Resources Office or the Data Protection Office (if no longer in employment with Merkle) using the contact details below for assistance in these matters.
• The data practices of our clients

2. Sources of Information

We receive personal information from third party sources like advertisers, brands, data brokers, non-profit organizations, public records, government entities, our clients (who may already do business with you), our partner publishers and partner service providers. We may also receive personal information from other sources such as public registers. We put information together so that we can check your personal information is correct and up to date, and then we keep the collection of information about you in our data store (see How We Use Your Personal Information).

We also receive information from websites provided by our clients and business partners that use our tracking technology.

We update data in our systems at least every thirty days. As indicated in Your Rights section below, you can request that we delete personal information we have associated with you, however we may continue to receive personal information about you after we have processed your deletion request.

3. Types of Personal Information We Process

From our sources (see Sources of Information), we get and store various types of information about people and households. These may include the following::

• Contact information , such as your name, address, phone number and email address.
• Demographic information , such as general descriptive data associated with the individual (such as gender, age, occupation, education, languages spoken) and household (such as number of adults/children, multi-generational household, etc.). We do not knowingly collect information from individuals under 18, but we may receive information about how many children are in your household and their year of birth or age range. We use reasonable efforts to remove individuals under 18 from our data store.
• Commercial Information, we collect information about personal property, as well as products or services purchased, obtained, or considered, and other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies. This can include a number of sub-categories of information such as:
  • Home and Real Estate information – Details about residential properties, such as property type, building construction, land size, date purchased, and property value
  • Geographic information - Descriptive data associated with residential address, such as urban/rural, time zone, census tract/block
  • Automotive information – Details about vehicles such as make/model, owned/leased, duration held, and vehicle value
  • How you like to use your electronic devices, including mobile phone, TV provider, internet access at home or at work. This may include whether you use social media, play games, download music or watch TV online, take or share photos or videos, research holidays, gamble, use mobile banking apps or online banking, etc.
  • Lifestyle, Interests, and Life Events – Expressed or inferred interest in activities and hobbies, such as camping, crafting, electronics, exercise, investing, outdoors, reading, real estate, and recent milestone events (e.g., birth of child, marriage, etc.)
  • Purchase and Purchase Intent – Noted or inferred purchase behavior, such as in-store/catalog/online purchasing, in-market for automobile, category shopper (e.g., crafts, gadgets, clothing, etc.)
  • Financial – Indicators of income and wealth, such as individual and household annual income ranges, likelihood of savings and investments, and presence of credit accounts
  • Events and Locations – Venue and event purchases, locations of shopping.

• Internet and Network Activity Information , including internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet, mobile device IDs, websites that you visit and how you interact with those websites and any apps you may use. We may also receive information about your browsing habits across multiple websites and over time. We may also receive information about your interaction with emails or other electronic messages we send you, such as when you open or click on an email.
• Location Information. We may infer a location based on your IP address and collect from third parties other geolocation information.
• Education Information, like your level of education and what institutions you may have attended.
• Professional and Employment Related Information, we may also collect information about your employment such as job and title, as well as your income level.
• We collect and develop Inferences by using the other pieces of personal information collected about you. We may draw inferences about you, reflecting what we believe to be your preferences, characteristics, predispositions, and attitudes as well as attributes connected to your IP address

We also process other types of information, not classified as personal information, which we may link to your personal information. This may include business information for the purposes of identifying segments of individuals who live near certain businesses, or aggregated credit card spend data for the purpose of modelling likely behaviour.<

4. How We Use Your Personal Information

We use your personal information for our commercial and business purposes, including to provide services to our clients. For example, we collect, process, keep and use the personal information in the data store to help our clients to deliver relevant advertising or marketing and find new customers.

We use personal information to help our clients create advertising "segments", for instance: "men living in a particular postcode area who are aged between 20 and 30".

We combine or match personal information in our data store to select the most appropriate group of people for our clients’ advertising or marketing campaigns. We also use matched or combined information to check that your information is up-to-date and accurate, confirm which devices are used by which people and conduct data analytics to assist targeting – this includes predictive data concerning people's purchasing behavior, likelihood of response to marketing or purchase of a product, brand loyalty, product and brand affinities and preferences. This may include models predicting your likely spend on various products and services e.g. monthly spend on vehicle fuel.

We use your information to assess the effectiveness of client advertising and marketing campaigns.

We use information to analyze and improve our products and services. For example, may use your information to make our websites, apps, services, and products better. We might use your information to customize your experience to conduct research and analysis.

We use information to administer our services and products, and for internal operations. For example, we use personal information for troubleshooting, data analysis, and testing.

We use information for security purposes. For example, we may use personal information to protect our company, our customers, and our business partners. We also may use personal information to protect our websites or our services, as well as to detect and investigate activities that may be illegal or prohibited (such as cyber attacks or fraudulent transactions).

We use information to respond to your requests or questions. We use information to contact you in response to your feedback or other matters related to our relationship with you (such as about this Privacy Notice). If your inquiries or feedback relate to your leases, purchases, or an account, we may also use your information to address the matter.

We use information for verification purposes. For example, we will use certain pieces of personal information to verify your identity if you make requests pursuant to this Privacy Policy. The verification steps and the pieces of personal information that we request may vary depending on the sensitivity and nature of your request.

We use information as otherwise disclosed or permitted by law, or as we may notify you. We may use personal information to create deidentified or aggregated data which does not identify you or any other individual. We may use and disclose this anonymous or aggregated data as we choose.

4.1 Services We Provide to Clients

When a client uses Merkle to run an advertising or marketing campaign, for the personal information used for that campaign that is provided by the client to Merkle, Merkle is what's known as a “service provider" for the client provided data. As a service provider, we use that personal information for the client's advertising or marketing campaign and act on the client's instructions.

5. Sharing Personal Information with Others

We share your personal information with parties including our service providers and third parties.

We share your personal information with vendors and service providers who perform services on our behalf. We may share personal information with vendors who assist us with the uses of personal information described in this Privacy Policy. This may include vendors who send emails for us, help us manage and operate our websites and apps, provide advertising or marketing services, provide analytics and search engine support, track advertising impressions, investigate and prevent data incidents, provide physical and digital security services, audit our business and financial statements, provide legal advice, and place our advertisements on other platforms. We may share your information with organisations involved with the provision, management or otherwise direct engagement of events, webinars or other such Merkle hosted functions which you have registered for or have expressed an interest in. Personal information received by vendors may also be subject to their privacy policies.

We share your personal information with our clients and entities authorized by our clients. We may share personal information from its data store with clients and their agencies and other entities authorized by them for their analytics, profiling, and/or marketing purposes including email and postal mail fulfillment providers. We will provide our clients with information so that they can send marketing or show ads to consumers.

We share your personal information with social media platforms and publishers. We may share your personal information with social media platforms and publishers who allow us to buy advertising space for our clients. This may mean that you receive our clients’ marketing messaging when you use those social media platforms and other digital properties.

We will share your personal information if we think we have to in order to comply with the law or to protect ourselves, our customers and others. We may share any or all categories of personal information to respond to a court order or subpoena. We may also share this personal information if a government agency or investigatory body requests it. We might share your personal information in order to enforce our agreements and to protect our rights and/or the rights of others. We might share your personal information when we are investigating potential fraud.

We may share your personal information as part of a transaction, financing, with a successor to all or part of our business, or for other business needs.  For example, if Merkle sells or merges any of its businesses (including any of our affiliates, divisions, and business units) or assets, we may disclose your personal information as a part of that transaction, including to the prospective buyer or partner, lender or bank, as the case may be. We may also share your personal information if there is a similar change to our corporate structure. We may also share your information with others as part of certain due diligence processes. We also share information for the purpose of management and administration of Merkle’s business.

We may share personal information for other reasons we may describe to you from time to time or as permitted by law. 

6. Your Rights Over Your Personal Information

This section explains the choices you may exercise over the use of your personal information.

6.1 Opting Out of Certain Tracking and Interest Based Advertising

Merkle enables users to opt-out from certain uses of information in a digital environment. If you want to opt-out from our solutions from the browser you are currently using, click here and our systems will attempt to place an opt-out cookie on your computer.

Merkle and other third party companies collect and receive information from across a variety of websites and mobile applications you visit or use over time in order infer your interests ad deliver relevant advertising to the browsers and devices you may use, including across associated devices. This type of advertising is known as interest-based advertising. You may visit http://www.aboutads.info/choices/ to learn more about this activity and opt out of Merkle’s and many of Merkle’s partners collection and use of data for that purpose. Some mobile operating systems have their own opt-out mechanisms that apply to IBA in mobile app environments. To exercise this opt-out, please visit the privacy settings of your Android or iOS device. We adhere to the Digital Advertising Alliance’s Self-Regulatory Principles.

Please note that if you clear cookies from your browser or reset your device identifier, you may need to renew your opt-out choice. You will also continue to receive advertising after an opt-out, but those advertisements may be less relevant to your interests. If you use multiple browsers or devices you will need to exercise your choices on those browsers or devices as well.

While Merkle does not currently respond to Do Not Track signals, when our systems detect the presence of our opt-out cookie or a mobile o/s opt-out indicator, our solutions will stop engaging in IBA for the opted out browser or device. And if we have linked two or more browsers or devices as described above, our systems will attempt to sever the link for the opted out browser or device.

6.2 Exercising Your Privacy Rights

You can make the following more specific requests with respect to your personal information:

• Right to Know – You can request that we disclose to you the categories of personal information we collected about you, the categories of sources from which we collected the personal information, the categories of personal information we sold or disclosed, our business or commercial purpose for collecting and selling the personal information, the categories of third parties with whom we shared the personal information, over the past 12 months
• Right to Access – You can request that we provide you with a copy of the specific pieces of personal information we collected about you over the past 12 months.
• Right of Deletion – You can request that we delete your personal information that we maintain about you, subject to certain exceptions.
• Do Not Sell My Info – You can request that we not sell your personal information by clicking Do Not Sell My Info. For purposes of this Privacy Policy, “sell” means the sale of your personal information to an outside party for monetary or other valuable consideration, subject to certain exceptions set forth in applicable California law.  Any opt-out of cookie-based tracking for advertising purposes is specific to the device, website, and browser you are using, and is deleted whenever you clear your browser’s cache. 

Merkle will not discriminate against you because you made any of these requests.  

You can make these requests online by clicking here, by emailing us at [email protected] or by calling us at (+1) (833) 457-0192 (toll-free in the US) or +1.443.542.4000 (international). We may deny certain requests, or fulfill a request only in part, based on our legal rights and obligations. For example, we may retain personal information as permitted by law, such as for tax or other record keeping purposes, to maintain an active account, and to process transactions and facilitate customer requests. Note that for purposes of these requests under this Privacy Notice, personal information does not include information about job applicants, employees and other of our personnel; information about employees and other representatives of third-party entities we may interact with; or information we have collected as a service provider to our clients. 

We will take reasonable steps to verify your identity prior to responding to your requests.  The verification steps will vary depending on the sensitivity of the personal information and whether you have an account with us.

You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on their behalf.  When submitting the request, please ensure the authorized agent is identified as an authorized agent.

For purposes of making these requests, please also note the following regarding how we collect and use your personal information as described in this policy, including in the previous 12 months:

• We may collect, and use for our business and commercial purposes, the following categories of personal information as set forth in applicable California law: Identifiers; payment and customer records information; characteristics of protected classifications under California or federal law (which include demographic information such as age and gender); commercial information; professional or employment information; internet or other electronic network activity information; geolocation data; audio, electronic or visual information; education information; and inferences.  We collect this personal information from the sources described above (see Sources of Information) .
• We may disclose each of the foregoing categories of personal information for the business purposes described in this Privacy Notice to the extent permitted by applicable law.
• We may sell the foregoing categories of personal information to our clients and other business partners.

Data Subject Rights Requests Metrics - California Consumer Privacy Act

• Click here to view our most recent reporting metrics

If you reside in California, you have the right to ask us one time each year if we have shared personal information with third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make a request, please send us an email, or write to us at the address listed below. Indicate in your letter that you are a California resident making a “Shine the Light” inquiry.

7. Where and When We Send Personal Information Abroad

Merkle's data store containing your personal information is kept in the US, and backed up in the US. As Merkle is a global organization, we may transfer your personal information outside of the US. By using our websites and solutions or providing any personal information to us, you consent to the transfer, processing, and storage of such information outside of your country of residence where data protection standards may be different.

8. How We Protect Your Personal Information

Merkle has reasonable security measures in place to help protect personal information from loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

Merkle has implemented reasonable, industry-standard security policies, standards and practices designed to protect information from internal and external threats. The degree of protection for each piece of information is based on the risk and consequences associated with having that information compromised. While no security measures will provide for absolute security, all Merkle employees responsible for the management of information have the responsibility to adhere to Merkle’s documented security controls, which are developed commensurate with the understood risk

Our Responsibility For Data Suppliers, Clients, and Third Parties

This Privacy Notice is limited to the personal information received and used by Merkle in connection with its DataSource product and does not apply to personal information collected through one of our websites. We may obtain information through various sources (see Sources of Information) and are not responsible for the privacy practices of such sources. We also may share information with our clients and other third parties and are not responsible for the privacy practices of such clients and third parties.

Children Under 16

We do not actively seek to collect personal information about children aged 16 or under. If you have any concerns about your child’s privacy in relation to our services, or if you believe that your child under the age of 16 may have entered personal information onto our website, please contact us at [email protected] We will delete such personal information from our records or seek verifiable parental or legal guardian consent to retain such information within a reasonable time.

9. Contact Us – Data Protection Officer

If you have any questions about this Notice or would like to exercise any of the rights mentioned above, you can contact our Data Protection Officer in any of the following ways:

Address: Data Protection Officer
Merkle Inc.
7001 Columbia Gateway Drive
Columbia, MD 21046

Telephone: 

(+1) (833) 457-0192 (US, toll-free)

+1.443.542.4000 (International)

Or by email at: [email protected]

10. Updates to the Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice may be updated from time to time. When we do, we will update this page. The date of the most recent revision will appear below. You should review this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes that have been made. If you do not agree to the changes, please do not continue to use our services and please refrain from sharing your personal information with us.

This policy is effective from February 12, 2021