Privacy Policy

Last updated: May 18, 2020  

GrowTal Inc. (“GrowTal,” “we,” “us,” and/or “our”) is an organization focused on finding, evaluating, and providing freelance marketing professionals (“GrowTal Freelancers”) for hire to organizations that require their expertise (“Clients”). This Privacy Policy describes how we handle the personal information we collect from and about you when you use this website (the “Site”); use any software, mobile applications, products, or other services we may offer (the “Services”);  engage with us through our newsletters, emails, and branded social media accounts; or otherwise interact with us. This Privacy Policy also describes certain legal rights you may have, subject to applicable law, and how you can exercise them.  “You” refers to you as a user of the Site or Services, or anyone you allow to use the Site or Services on your behalf.

For purposes of this Privacy Policy, “Personal Information” means information about an identified or identifiable individual, such as their name or email address and includes “personal data” as defined by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). Some information that is automatically disclosed to us or collected by us through your use of our Services meets this definition.

By using GrowTal’s Services, you confirm you have agreed to our Terms of Service, to the extent applicable by law, and have read and understood this Privacy Policy.

 

Information We Collect

The types of Personal Information we collect depends on how you interact with us and which services you use.

Information You Voluntarily Provide to Us

We collect some information directly from you in the following ways:

  • Filling in forms on our website: When you fill in forms on our Site, including when you contact us for additional information or request a trial we may require that you provide us with certain information such as your name, contact information, company name, job title, project description (including an estimate of your budget), and the name and affiliation of the person who referred you to us, if applicable.
  • Applying to be a GrowTal Freelancer: When you apply to be a GrowTal Freelancer, we require that you provide us with certain information such as your name, contact information, work experience, education, photo, social network information (such as a LinkedIn profile), relevant skills, and government-issued identification. If and when we undertake additional vetting or background checks, our background check service provider may collect additional information about you, including information about criminal convictions or offenses. Your consent to the collection of such additional information will be requested at that time, in accordance with applicable law.
  • Creating an account: When you create an account on the GrowTal Site and populate your profile, we collect certain information. If you are a GrowTal Freelancer we may collect your name, contact information, work experience, education, photo, and social network information (such as a LinkedIn profile). We also collect financial information necessary to allow you to make and receive payments through the Services and your birthdate or taxpayer identification number as required by law to, for instance, complete tax filings. If you are a Client, we may collect your name, contact information, company name, job title, industry or field, financial information necessary to allow you to make and receive payments through the Services, your taxpayer identification number as required by law, and any information you provide relating to your freelance needs.
  • Screening process: If you’re a GrowTal Freelancer, we may collect certain information during your screening process, for instance, we may collect responses to certain questions, assessments done by you, etc.
  • Registering for an event or webinar: If you register for an event or webinar we host or sponsor, we may collect Personal Information from you including your name, email address and other contact information, company name, job title, and any specific information relevant to the event for which you are registering.
  • Signing up to receive email communications from us, subscribing to our blog, or completing a survey: When you engage in any of these activities, we may collect your name, email address and other contact details, company name, job title, industry, areas of expertise, interests, and any additional information you provide to us as part of that request (such as information about your satisfaction with our Services in response to a survey).
  • Contacting us: When you contact us by email; through our branded social media accounts; through our integrated chat providers; or by telephone, SMS, or physical mail, we may collect your name, username, contact information, company name, job title, and the contents of your communication, which can include any information you choose to provide.
  • Inviting others to join GrowTal. We allow you to invite others to join GrowTal through our Services. If you do this or are invited in this way, we will collect and store the invitee’s email address in order to enable us to send an invitation. We will also let the invitee know who invited them to use GrowTal and let him/her request that his/her information be deleted from our systems.
  • Applying to work with us: If you apply to work with us, we will collect any information you chose to share in your application, which may include your name, contact information, employment history, and education history.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect certain information about you automatically as you navigate our Site and Services or interact with our emails. The type of information we collect automatically includes the following:

  • Log information: We may collect log information about your use of our Site including your browser type and language, access times, pages viewed, Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, approximate geographic location, and the webpage or online service you visited before navigating to our Site.
  • Device information: We may collect information about the mobile device you use to access our Services, including the hardware model, operating system and version, unique device identifiers and mobile network information.
  • Information collected by cookies and similar technologies: We may use cookies and similar technologies to manage and track your interaction with our website. Cookies are small data files that websites send to a visitor’s computer or other internet-connected device to uniquely identify the visitor’s browser or to store information or settings in the browser. We use these technologies to better serve our users and to enhance this Site. For example, we may use cookies to tell us whether you have visited us before or if you are a new visitor. You can configure most browsers to notify you when you receive a new cookie, to reject new cookies, and to disable existing cookies. You can learn how to do this by consulting the help section of your browser. Please note that if you choose to stop accepting cookies you may not be able to use all features of our Site.
  • Analytics information: We also use third-party analytics tools to help us measure traffic and usage trends for our Site. These tools collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, including the web pages you visit, your browser add-ons, and other information that assist us in improving our Site.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

  • Payment processors: In general, when you pay for services through GrowTal, your payment card information is provided directly to our third-party payment processor and GrowTal does not collect or store that information. However, in some circumstances, we may receive limited information about your payment card from our payment processors, such as the last four digits of your card, the country of issuance, and the expiration date.
  • Another individual at your organization: We may collect your Personal Information from other individual at your organization who may provide us with your business contact information in the course of communicating with us.
  • Clients: If you are a GrowTal Freelancer, we may collect information about your performance from Clients with whom you are matched and for whom you provide services. We collect this information in order maintain our high standards of quality.
  • Social media platforms: We may offer social sharing features and other integrated tools such as widgets, which allow you to share content on our Site with third-party social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. If you choose to use these social sharing features, the provider of the third-party social media platform may make certain information available to us. This can include information necessary to facilitate the integration as well as any additional information the provider chooses to share with us or which you have permitted the provider to share through your privacy settings. We encourage you to check the privacy settings and privacy policies of these third-party social media platforms to understand what information might be shared with us.
  • Publicly available sources: We may supplement the information that we collect from you (such as your email address) with additional information about you and your company obtained from publicly available and third-party databases or services that provide information about business people and companies (including an individual’s name, job title, business contact information, and company information).

We may combine the information we collect about you from these various sources. If a combination of information that we collect identifies you as an individual, we will treat the combined information as Personal Information.

How We Use Your Information

GrowTal collects the Personal Information described above so that we can:

  • Assess prospective GrowTal Freelancers;
  • Provide you with Services, including maintaining or servicing accounts, matching Clients with qualified GrowTal Freelancers, and processing payments;
  • Create your GrowTal account and identify you when you sign in;
  • Process your project requests;
  • Enable you to communicate with other GrowTal users (for example, using third-party services like Slack);
  • Communicate with you about products, services, offers, promotions, and events we offer and provide news and information we believe will be of interest to you; 
  • Post testimonials;
  • Operate and improve our Site, including monitoring and analyzing usage, trends, and activities related to the Site;
  • Respond to your requests, inquiries, comments, and suggestions;
  • Send you technical notices, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative messages;
  • Identify, fix, and troubleshoot bugs and service errors;
  • Enhance our communications and the experience we offer you, including requesting feedback about the Site and Services;
  • Protect against, identify, investigate, and respond to misuse of our Services or other unlawful behavior; and
  • Carry out any other purpose described to you at the time the information was collected.

 

How We Share Your Information

We may share information about you with certain third parties in the following circumstances:

  • Companies under common control: We may share Personal Information between and among GrowTal’s current and future parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, and other companies under common control and ownership.
  • Vendors and service providers: To conduct business operations and provide our Services, we may share Personal Information with a variety of third-party vendors and service providers who need to access the data in order to perform services on our behalf, such as providing time tracking, cloud-hosting or cloud-storage services.
  • Business transfers: We may share your Personal Information with another company in connection with or during negotiations of any merger, acquisition, reorganization, bankruptcy, sale of all or a portion of our assets, or transition of services to another provider.
  • Legal requirements: We may share Personal Information when we believe it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation, to protect GrowTal’s rights and property, to protect the safety of our users, and to defend against legal liability.
  • Public: We may offer features that allow you to connect with other GrowTal users and communicate in public or semi-public spaces. If you use these features or post information on our branded social media pages, that information may be displayed and viewable by other users.
  • Consent: We may share Personal Information with your consent and at your direction, including if we notify you that the information you provide will be shared in a particular manner and you provide that information.

We may also share aggregated or de-identified information, which cannot reasonably be used to identify you, for various purposes including compliance with various reporting obligations; for business or marketing purposes; or to assist third parties in understanding our users’ interests, habits, and usage patterns for certain programs, content, services, advertisements, promotions, and/or functionality available through our Services.

 

Our Legal Bases for Handling Your Personal Data

Data protection laws in certain jurisdictions require businesses to tell you about the legal grounds they rely on to use or disclose your Personal Information. To the extent those laws apply, our legal grounds are as follows:

  • Legitimate interest: Most often, we handle Personal Information on the ground that it furthers our legitimate interests in commercial activities such as the following:
  • Providing and personalizing the Services for you;
  • Processing billing and payments;
  • Marketing our business;
  • Protecting our users, personnel, and property;
  • Analyzing and improving our business; and
  • Processing GrowTal Freelancer and GrowTal internal job applications.
  • Legal compliance: We need to use and disclose Personal Information in certain ways to comply with our legal obligations.
  • To honor our contractual commitments to an individual: We need to process some Personal Information in order to meet our contractual obligations to the individual to whom the Personal Information pertains, including performing the contractual obligations in our Terms of Service.
  • Consent: Where required by law, and in some other cases, we handle Personal Information on the basis of implied or express consent. For instance, we will obtain and rely on your consent to send you newsletters.

 

Your Rights and Choices

Depending on applicable law, you may have certain rights and choices with respect to your Personal Information. Those rights may be limited by local law requirements. You may exercise these rights by contacting us as specified below.

  • Opting out of email marketing. You can opt-out of receiving our promotional emails at any time by following the instructions included in those emails. Please be aware that it may take up to 10 days for us to process your request, and you may continue receiving promotional communications from us during that period. If you opt-out of receiving such communications, please note that we may continue to send you non-promotional emails (such as emails related to our business relationship or emails about changes to our legal terms).
  • Restricting cookies/Do Not Track. GrowTal does not change its behavior in response to web browser “do not track” signals. However, you can configure most browsers to reject cookies or to notify you when you are sent a cookie, giving you a chance to decide whether or not to accept it. You can consult the help section of your browser to find out how to do this. Please note that if you choose to remove or reject cookies, this could affect the availability and functionality of our Services.
  • Limiting Information Available Through Social Media Platforms. If you want to limit or stop receipt of information from third-party social media platforms, you can change your privacy settings on those other websites. You also may choose not to use social features we make available.
  • Access, Update, or Delete Your Information. To access, update, or delete information we maintain about you please consult your GrowTal account settings or contact us at privacy@growtal.com. Please note that we may keep certain Personal Information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations or for legitimate business purposes, such as to resolve disputes or enforce our agreements. We may also keep cached archived copies of Personal Information for a certain period of time.
  • Data Subject Requests: Depending on your location, you may be eligible to request that we provide you with access to and/or a copy of certain Personal Information we hold about you, including information we have shared with third parties for their direct marketing purposes; ask that your Personal Information be corrected, updated, or erased; object to our processing of your Personal Information; request that we restrict certain processing; transfer your Personal Information to a third party; or honor your withdrawal of consent for certain processing of your Personal Information.

We will consider all requests and provide our response within the time period stated by applicable law. Please note, however, that certain information may be exempt from such requests in some circumstances, which may include if we need to keep processing your information for our legitimate interests or to comply with a legal obligation. Before responding to your request, we may require that you provide us with additional information to confirm your identity. You have the right to lodge a complaint with the authorities applicable to your situation. However, we invite you to contact us with any concern, as we would be happy to try to resolve it directly.

 

Children’s Privacy 

Our Services are intended for adults and we do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children. If you are a parent or legal guardian and think your child under the age of 13 (or a higher age threshold where applicable) has given us Personal Information without your consent, please contact us at privacy@growtal.com.

 

Data Transfers

Personal Information we collect may be stored and processed for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy in the United States where we are based or in any country where we have operations or engage vendors or service providers. These countries may have different data protection and government surveillance laws than your country. By using our Services and submitting your Personal Information to us, you agree to such transfers.

Where Personal Information is transferred outside the European Economic Area to a third party in a country that is not subject to an adequacy decision by the EU Commission, the information is adequately protected by Standard Contractual Clauses, an appropriate Privacy Shield certification, or a vendor’s Processor Binding Corporate Rules. If you would like to obtain a copy of the relevant mechanism we use, you may contact us at privacy@growtal.com.

 

Links to Other Websites and Third-Party Content

We may provide links to third-party websites, services, and applications that are not operated or controlled by GrowTal. This Privacy Policy does not apply to the privacy practices of those third parties. The fact that we link to a website, service, or application is not an endorsement, authorization, or representation of our affiliation with that third party. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third-party service before providing any information to or through them.

 

Data Retention

 

We only keep your Personal Information for so long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, as required by law, or as necessary to resolve disputes and enforce our rights and agreements. We may, however, retain data in copies made for backup or business continuity purposes for additional time. To dispose of personal data, we may anonymize it, delete it, or take other appropriate steps.

 

Security

GrowTal uses generally accepted administrative and technical safeguards we believe are appropriate to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your Personal Information. Although we make reasonable efforts to protect Personal Information from loss, misuse, or alteration by third parties, you should be aware that there is always some risk in any system for transmitting and storing information electronically. GrowTal cannot and does not guarantee absolute security. If you believe your Personal Information has been compromised through your use of our Services, please contact us immediately at privacy@growtal.com.

 

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or in the law. If we make changes to this policy, we will post the updated Privacy Policy on our Site and indicate when it was last revised. You are advised to review this policy periodically to stay informed of our practices.

If we make material changes, we may provide you with additional notice, such as posting a statement on our homepage or sending you an email notification, if we have your email address on file. Your continued use of the Services after the revised Privacy Policy has become effective indicates that you have read, understood, and agreed to the current version of this Privacy Policy, to the extent permitted by law.

 

Contacting Us 

If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy or how we protect your Personal Information, please contact us at privacy@growtal.com or you may write us at
444 S. Flower St., 13th Floor, Los Angeles CA 90017, United States