Effective as of October 1, 2009.
BusinessElite, Inc. wants you to fully understand our privacy policy.
Thank you for visiting BusinessElite, Inc.'s ("BusinessElite") Internet web site ("Site") located at the URL: www.businesselite.com. This Privacy Policy covers the Site, and details certain policies implemented throughout BusinessElite governing BusinessElite's use of personally identifiable information about users of our Site and users of our services on this Site.
BusinessElite.com is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent organization whose mission is to build user's trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. Because BusinessElite wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, we have agreed to disclose our information practices and have our privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe. If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact us at privacy@businesselite.com. If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should contact TRUSTe at http://watchdog.truste.com/pvr.php?page=complaint. TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with us to resolve your concerns.
Due to the Internet's rapidly evolving nature, BusinessElite may need to update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If so, we will post the updated Privacy Policy on our Site on this page and post notice of the change so it is visible when users log-on for the first time after the change is posted so that you are always aware of what personal information we may collect and how we may use this information. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page. BusinessElite encourages you to review this Privacy Policy regularly for any changes. Your continued use of this Site and/or continued provision of personally identifiable information to us will be subject to the terms of the then-current Privacy Policy.
You can generally visit our Site without revealing any personally identifiable information about yourself. However, in certain sections of this Site, we may invite you to contact us with questions or comments, request information, invite you to participate in surveys, questionnaires and/or contests, and/or ask you to complete a registration form. In order to use our services, you will be required to submit the following personally identifiable information: your name and/or company name, address, email address, phone number, password, screen name, gender, employment history and income level. We also collect other contact information that you voluntarily transmit with your communication to us. In addition, we collect information about you and your use of our Site, services and/or through the log-in process or when you contact us.
We use your personally identifiable information to register you to use our services, contact you to deliver certain services or information you have requested, verify your authority to enter our Site, improve the content and general administration of the Site and our services and provide you with notices regarding services that you have purchased or may wish to purchase in the future. We also use your personally identifiable information to send you notices via email or SMS regarding potential employment opportunities.
If you are interested in pursuing a particular employment opportunity, you must click on the button in the notification that indicates your affirmative consent to having BusinessElite disclose your detailed employment and contact information to the specific potential Employer (as defined below) who has inquired about your Anonymized Candidate Profile (as defined below). If you are not interested in pursuing a particular employment opportunity, you should click on the button provided in the notification that indicates that you are not interested in, and do not consent to, having your detailed employment and contact information sent to the specific potential Employer. If you do not respond to an e-mail notification within seven (7) days of the date of the e-mail notification, then your failure to respond shall be deemed to be a response that you are not interested in, and do not consent to, having your detailed employment and contact information sent to the specific potential Employer.
We also use your personally identifiable information to send you communication requesting your affirmative consent to disclose your personal information to third party recruiting firms with whom we partner to expand the pool of potential Employers who may view your candidate profile. As described above with respect to particular employment opportunities offered by Employers using the services on this Site, if you are interested in having BusinessElite disclose your detailed employment and contact information to third party recruiting firms, you must click on the button in the notification that indicates your affirmative consent to having BusinessElite disclose such information to the specific potential Employer (as defined below) who has inquired about your Anonymized Candidate Profile (as defined below).
This Site is a career site that, among other things, facilitates relationships between recruiters and hiring managers ("Employer(s)") and potential employees ("Talent"). BusinessElite gives Employers the ability to access Talent candidate profiles that provide a description of the specific Talent's employment history and qualifications but does not include such Talent's name or contact information (each, an "Anonymized Candidate Profile"). The Anonymized Candidate Profiles will be stored in BusinessElite's database, and Employers will have the ability to search for Talent through this database ("Candidate Database"). BusinessElite will attempt to limit access to the Candidate Database only to paying Employers and law enforcement and other governmental agencies in accordance with the terms of the Disclosure section below. BusinessElite, however, cannot guarantee that other third parties will not gain access to the Candidate Database, and BusinessElite is not responsible for the use made of Anonymized Candidate Profiles by any such third parties who access the Candidate Database.
If you choose to use an email referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend's name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. BusinessElite.com stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email, tracking the success of our referral program, and following up with additional information if the friend has opted-in. Your friend may contact us at privacy@businesselite.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
We use PayPal to facilitate our payment process, so you will be directed to their Web site to complete your order for BusinessElite services. PayPal will share your order information with us (not including credit card number), so we can complete your transaction. Please note: PayPal's privacy policy governs the collection and use of the information you submit while on their site.
In the "Feedback" section of our Web site, we use a service provider, Crowdsound, to gather feedback and improvement suggestions for our site. When a user submits feedback, they can submit anonymously or with the users' name, the choice is up to the user. We utilize framing techniques to make it appear that the user is still on the site when the user is actually on a third party Web site. For example, if you are on a page that has the look and feel of www.businesselite.com but the URL listed in your browser is a different URL than www.businesselite.com, then know that the information is being collected by this third party. However, our privacy statement governs the collection and use of that information and our third party service provider cannot use it for their own promotional purposes.
We provide your personally identifiable information to Employers for whom you have provided your affirmative consent (as described above in the "Information Collection and Use" section above) to have BusinessElite provide such Employers with your detailed employment and contact information. We also provide your personally identifiable information and the data generated by cookies and the aggregate information to partner entities that are not within BusinessElite's corporate family such as vendors and service agencies that we engage to assist us in providing our services to you (for example, we provide your personally identifiable information to a credit card processing company to process your payment). We will not sell, rent or otherwise provide your personally identifiable information to any company or organization for marketing purposes.
We also will disclose your personally identifiable information (a) if we are required to do so by (or we in good faith believe that such action is necessary to comply with) any law, regulation or other government authority, or otherwise in cooperation with an investigation of a governmental authority or to comply with a legal process served on BusinessElite, (b) to enforce the BusinessElite Terms of Use agreement or to protect our rights and/or (c) to protect the safety of users of our Site and our services. We also may transfer your personally identifiable information to a successor entity upon a merger, consolidation or other corporate reorganization in which BusinessElite participates or to a purchaser or acquirer of all or substantially all of BusinessElite's assets to which this Site relates. As such, we cannot ensure that your Personal Information will not be disclosed to third parties in such circumstances (for example, we may be legally obligated to disclose information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, or third parties may circumvent our security measures to unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications).
BusinessElite takes your privacy very seriously. The Site tracks the total number of visitors to the Site, the number of visitors to each page of the Site, browser type, IP addresses and/or External Web Sites (defined below) to which the Site links, and we analyze this data for trends and statistics in the aggregate, but such information will be maintained, used and disclosed in aggregate form only and it will not contain personally identifiable information. We use such aggregate information to analyze trends, administer the Site, track users' movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. We also provide such aggregate information to prospective advertisers on the Site, and use such aggregate information to segment our users by company, job function (e.g., business development, etc.), title (e.g., Director, Vice President, etc.), industry or geographic location in order to more effectively provide you services via the Site, for aggregated research purposes and/or to offer other segment-specific products to you.
Like most websites, we collect Internet Protocol ("IP") address from all visitors to the Web site. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our Web site, analyze trends, track users' movement, gather broad demographic information for aggregate use in order for us to improve the Web site, and deliver customized, personalized content. We use a third-party tracking service that uses cookies and web beacons to track non-personally identifiable information about visitors to our site in the aggregate including Unique Visitors, Page Views, Geography, Browser, Operating System and Referral site to help with site management and metrics analysis. The use of tracking technologies by our tracking utility company and other trusted partners is not covered by our privacy statement. We do have access or control over these cookies.
We use small text files called cookies to improve overall Site experience. A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's hard drive containing information about the user. Cookies generally do not permit us to personally identify you.
We also use "Web beacons" or "clear GIFs" that monitor your use of our Websites. Web beacons and clear GIFs (or Web bugs) are small strings of code that provide a method for delivering a graphic image on a Web page for the purpose of transferring data, such as the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer that downloaded the page on which the Web beacon appears, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the page on which the Web beacon appears, the time the page containing the Web beacon was viewed, the types of browser that fetched the Web beacon and the identification number of any cookie on the computer previously placed by that server. When corresponding with you via HTML capable e-mail, Web beacons let us know whether you received and opened our e-mail.
By accepting this Privacy Policy, you specifically agree to our use of cookies, Web beacons and/or clear GIFs as described herein. You may adjust your browser to reject cookies from us or from any other Website. Additionally, by setting your Web browser to display HTML e-mails as text only, you may be able to prevent the use of some Web beacons. If you choose to reject cookies from us or any other Web site, or to prevent the use of certain Web beacons, you may lose the potential benefit of receiving advertisements or offers for other services that are more targeted to your interests, which may limit your ability to fully realize the benefits of the content and services fully offered by BusinessElite and its third-party partners.
We employ procedural and technological measures that are reasonably designed to help protect your personally identifiable information from loss, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction. BusinessElite uses encryption, secure socket layer and password protection to help prevent unauthorized access to your personally identifiable information and any sensitive information (e.g. credit card and/or social security number) that may be collected on the site. It is your responsibility to protect the security of your login and other personal information used by you to access the Site.
BusinessElite recognizes the privacy interests of children, and we encourage parents and guardians to take an active role in their children's online activities and interests. BusinessElite targets its services and this Site to adults (at least 18 years of age) and not to children under 13. This Site is not intended for use by any user under the age of eighteen (18) years old (particularly children under the age of 13), and we endeavor not to collect any personally identifiable information from children under the age of 13.
If you use a bulletin board, blog, or chat room on this Web site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. Please know that even though our Community/Support forum has the look and feel of our site, you are on our third party service provider's platform. However, our privacy statement governs the collection and use of that information and our third party service provider cannot use for their own promotional purposes.
The Site provides links to other Web sites or resources over which BusinessElite does not have control ("External Web Sites"). Such links do not constitute an endorsement by BusinessElite of those External Web Sites. You acknowledge that BusinessElite is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and further agree that BusinessElite is not responsible for the content of such External Web Sites. Your use of External Web Sites is subject to the terms of use and privacy policies located on the linked to External Web Sites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on all such Web sites as their policies may differ from ours.
When you register for our site, we use your email address to send you internal communications from BusinessElite.com. These emails include welcome and notification emails so that you can activate your account and know if you have positions or interested recruiters/talent. If you've registered to receive email communications from us and later change your mind, you may opt out of receiving any such communications by changing your Account Settings (in such case, please go to Account Settings and indicate from which distribution lists you would like to have your name removed) or you may contact us to have your name removed from our distribution lists (by sending an email to privacy@businesselite.com).
BusinessElite provides you with the ability to review, correct and update your personally identifiable information that you provide to us by accessing and modifying this information on your account page. To update your information, log-in to your BusinessElite account and click on "My Account." In addition, you can delete your personally identifiable information from the Site's online database by contacting BusinessElite. In the event you terminate your account, we will remove all copies of your Anonymized Candidate Profile and your account information from the Site, however, BusinessElite will retain a copy in its files of all personally identifiable information, even if removed, in order to resolve disputes or enforce its terms of use.
If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, please contact via email at privacy@businesselite.com. Our computer systems are currently based in the United States, so your personal data will be processed by us in the United States where data protection and privacy regulations may not offer the same level of protection as in other parts of the world, such as the European Union. If you create a user account with one or both of the Sites as a visitor from outside the United States, by using either Site, you agree to this Privacy Policy and you consent to the transfer of all such information to the United States, which may not offer an equivalent level of protection of that required in the European Union or certain other countries, and to the processing of that information as described in this Privacy Policy.
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact us at: 703-581-6048, info@businesselite.com, 45150 Russell Branch Parkway, Suite 303, Ashburn, VA 20147, www.businesselite.com.
