Last Updated: October, 2024
Who We Are
Scope
We at Benchmark Products, Inc. (“Benchmark” or “Company”) respect your privacy and the confidentiality of your Personal Information. This Privacy Notice explains how and why Benchmark collects, uses, and discloses your Personal Information safely and securely, and how you may exercise your rights with respect to your information.
This Privacy Notice applies to all Company websites, products, services, and applications that link to it; it also applies to in-person, over-the-phone, electronic communications, and online services provided by Company (collectively, the “Services”).
“Personal Information” refers to any information that directly or indirectly that identifies a person.
We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the date at the top of the notice and, in some cases, we may provide you with additional notice (such as sending you an email notification or posting a banner notice on our web page). We encourage you to review the Privacy Notice whenever you access the Services or otherwise interact with us to stay informed about our information practices.
Information We Collect
We collect information from you when you visit our website, purchase merchandise, register as a customer, or engage in business relationships with us. We also collect information about how you use our services. We may also receive information about you from third parties. This information can identify you or your device or can be linked to you.
Information You Provide
We collect Personal Information that you provide when you purchase our products, enter contracts or other business relationships with us, or sign up for communications from us. We may collect or receive the categories of information listed below, which may depend on the products or services you may use and your relationship with us. Not all categories of personal information will be collected or be received about every individual.
- Identifiers and Account Information:
- Name
- Address
- Email
- Phone Number
- Government-issued identification number
- Account number
- Registration Information
- Financial Information
- Commercial Information:
- Business entity information
- Business Taxpayer information/EIN
- Purchase and Order History
- Payment or other Financial Information
- Communications:To improve the quality of Company’s Services, we collect certain information provided in your communications with us. The information collected includes:
- Questions or concerns you submit via our customer service functions or in consultations with our personnel.
- Marketing Communications:We collect Personal Information you may provide in connection with customer testimonials, surveys, promotions, , marketing events, trade shows, webinars, conferences, customer research, feedback, or a similar event or occurrence.
- Social Media:We may monitor and collect information from interactions with our social media accounts, which are operated by third parties, posted on our accounts or linked to us on third-party operated social networks or other web offerings Your interactions with our social media accounts are governed by the privacy notice of the company providing it.
- Information you provide offline: You may also provide us with information in person and offline. For example, we may record your if you visit our corporate offices (including by security surveillance of our premises, including CCTV).
- Information when you do business with us: If you are a vendor, service provider, or business contractor of Company, we may collect information about you and the services you provide, including your employees’ contact information. We may also collect other information you or your employees provide as part of your services and our agreement with you.
- Publicly available information:In addition to the information you provide, we may also collect information from publicly available sources, affiliated companies, or third parties, such as when we partner with other companies or use service providers to help us optimize our marketing activities.
Usage Information
Company collects information about your browser or device as it interacts with the Services. Usage information may be combined with other information we collect about you to improve the services we offer you, our marketing, analytics, and site functionality. This information includes:
- Computer or mobile device informationyou use to access our Services, including:
- your IP address
- the hardware model
- operating system version
- mobile network information
- location information
- other information that identifies your computer or device
- User interaction information:
- We log information about your use of the Services, including, information such as:
- the type of browser you use
- loading and access times
- pages viewed and features accessed
- the page you visited before navigating to our Services
- whether you have started or completed use of an offering
- other events that occur while engaging with our Services
- Links: We also may keep track of how you interact with links on the Services, such as in emails, third-party services, and client applications
- Email read receipts: If we send you a communication, such as an electronic mail, we may collect available information regarding your receipt and review of such communication.
- Cookies, etc.:We and our service providers use cookies and similar technologies to automatically or passively collect information about the use of our Services, analyze trends, administer the Services, track users’ in-offering movements while utilizing the Services, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. These technologies may include small data files stored on your hard drive or in device memory or electronic images or strings of HTML, JavaScript, or URL code that can be added within emails, online ads, and websites, and help us to improve our Services and your experience, enhance security, see which areas and features of our Services are popular, and measure total usage. Examples of these technologies include cookies, web beacons/pixels, local shared objects, and UTM codes/tags. You may elect to have your browser not accept cookies, however, this may disable or render unusable some of the features of the Services. For further information, please see “Your Rights” below.
- Mobile Analytics:When you interact with us on your mobile device, our mobile analytic software may record information such as how often you use the application, the events that occur within the application, aggregated usage, performance data, and where the application was downloaded from. This information allows us to better understand the functionality of our mobile software. We do not utilize the information we store within the analytics software in connection with personally identifiable information you submit within the mobile application.
Third-Party Tools and Collecting Information
We use third-party tools to obtain information on how visitors interact with our Services. These tools collect information about the performance of our site and how visitors navigate around and interact with our web pages, which allows us to evaluate and further improve and optimize our web pages. These third-parties include, for example, vendors that provide measurement and analytics on the performance of our website and effectiveness of advertising campaigns and services. To learn more about Google Analytics, please click on the links provided below.
Other Sources
We may also receive your Personal Data from various other sources, such as our affiliates, advertising networks, business partners, contractors, data analytics providers, or social media networks.
How We Use Your Information
We use account information and other information you provide, including Personal Information, for the following purposes:
- to complete orders and provide you our Services,
- to assist the development of our Services, including to
- analyze and improve the Services we offer to you generally
- better understand the functionality of our Services in your web browser or on your device
- provide a customized or personalized experience
- to communicate with you, including to
- send marketing messages or to show you tailored advertising
- notify you of new or enhanced products and services
- to address issues that may arise, including to
- notify you if there are issues with the Service or your order
- send you product or technical notices, updates, and security alerts
- research and address any questions or problems submitted through our technical support and customer service systems
- monitor and investigate fraud, identity theft, and other illegal activity
- protect the safety and security of Company, our Services, our customers and others
We use your Personal Information for our legitimate business interest in operating and improving our business and services, such as:
- to establish, manage, and administer your account with us.
- to provide the information, products, and services you request.
- to provide you with effective customer service.
- to communicate with you (in accordance with any privacy preferences you have expressed to us), including to
- contact you with information and notices related to your use of our Services
- notify you of new or enhanced products and services
- send you newsletters
- send you marketing messages or show you tailored advertising
- provide you with special offers and other information that we believe will be of interest to you
- to invite you to participate in surveys and provide feedback to us.
- to assist the development of our Services, including to
- analyze and improve the products and services we offer to you
- better understand the functionality of our Services in your web browser or on your device
- provide you a customized or personalized experience
- to address issues that may arise, including to
- notify you if there are issues with our Services, or your order
- send you technical notices, updates, and security alerts
- research and address any questions or problems submitted through our technical support and customer service systems
- monitor and investigate fraud, identity theft, and other illegal activity
- protect the safety and security of Company, our Services, our members, and others
- for any other purpose identified in an applicable privacy notice or other agreement between you and us.
We may also use data that we collect on an aggregated or anonymous basis (meaning that it does not identify any individuals) for various purposes, where permissible under applicable laws and regulations, to help deliver products, services, and content that are better tailored to the users of our Services and for other purposes.
Retention Policy
We will only retain your Personal Information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of our legitimate business interests that have been accessed and satisfy any legal or reporting requirements. For clarity, we retain all information collected for as long as you have an active account with us, so that we can service your account efficiently, and for a set period of time afterward as needed to fulfill a legal obligation or for other purposes as permitted by law.
How and Why We Disclose Your Information
We disclose your information in the course of supporting and providing our Services, as follows:
- Business Partners: We may share your data with our affiliates, subsidiaries and parent companies (“Affiliates”), to assist in providing and maintaining the Services or, if we have received your consent, for their own purposes
- Payment Processors:When you make a payment for products or Services, we process your payments via a third-party payment processor. In these instances, the third-party payment processor may collect certain Financial Information from you to process a payment on behalf of Benchmark, including your name, email address, address and other billing information in which case the use and storage of your Financial Information is governed by the third-party payment processor’s terms, conditions and privacy policies.
- Vendors: Benchmark engages certain third parties that may process data submitted to Company to perform certain business-related functions and to increase the functionality of our Services.
- Supporting Service Providers:With vendors, consultants, affiliates, and other service providers who assist us in providing our Services and use and disclose such Personal Information to perform services on our behalf.
- Marketing Service Providers:We may also disclose certain information with companies, including our affiliated entities and third parties, that provide services that help us market our products or otherwise support the promotion of our business. We disclose information with these companies as they provide us such services as needed to perform their functions on our behalf in a manner that is consistent with this Privacy Notice.
Third party companies provide various other services to us, such as monitoring and analyzing how our Services are used or performing. When we engage another company to perform such functions, we may provide them with information, including Personal Information, Account Information and Usage Data in connection with their performance of such functions. These third parties may analyze the data we provide, combine that data with publicly available data, and provide us with access to their analysis and reports.
Other Purposes
We also may disclose information about you to support these other purposes:
- Law Enforcement or Regulatory Requests: To law enforcement, government agencies, and others if we believe disclosure is in accordance with any applicable law, regulation, or legal process, or as otherwise required by any applicable law, rule or regulation
- Fraud and Abuse Prevention: If we believe your actions are inconsistent with the spirit or language of our user agreements or policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of Company or others
- Professional Advisors: We may share Personal Information with our professional advisors, including accountants, auditors, consultants, and lawyers when reasonably necessary for our professional advisors to perform services for us and give us appropriate advice.
- In a Merger:In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company
- Reporting of De-identified & Aggregated Info: We may also disclose aggregated or de-identified information, which cannot reasonably be used to identify you, in our discretion. Examples may include, but are not limited to, the total number of users served by a Company product or service, general age group ratios, summary reports of tax preparation practices across large groups of customers, and other statistical data relating to tax preparation and electronic filing service.
How We Protect Your Information
We work to protect your Personal Information from loss, misuse, or unauthorized access, alteration, and destruction by using industry standard safeguards, procedures, and practices.
These safeguards include physical, logical, and technical protections for physical security, information security, and additional measures to restrict access to data we hold in physical and electronic forms. Examples of how we protect your information include:
- Security Infrastructure:Implementation and maintenance of commercial grade firewalls and other monitoring systems.
- Access Controls:Access to Personal Information is restricted on a need-to-know basis
- Encryption:data and credit card information placed under encryption when it’s transmitted to us.
- Passwords:Access to the Services is password-protected with complex password requirements. Remember: You should use a unique password and not it with anyone.
- Multi-factor Authentication:Security questions or authentication codes sent by email or text and utilized to verify your identity.
Children’s Privacy: We do not market our Services to children, and the Services are not intended for use by individuals under the age of 13. Individuals under the age of 13 should not furnish any Personal Information into our products or Services. If you believe that we might have any information from a child under 13, without parental or guardian consent, please inform us by contacting us at [email protected].
Your Rights
The rights in this section apply to all users of our Services. In certain jurisdictions you may have additional rights regarding the Personal Information we collect about you, such as the right to request access and receive information about Personal Information we maintain about you, to update and correct inaccuracies in your Personal Information, to request deletion of Personal Information, or to receive a copy of your Personal Information. If you would like to make such a request, please contact us at [email protected]. We attempt to respond to all requests within a reasonable timeframe and as required by applicable law.
Your Communications and Opt-Out Options
Email Communications: We may periodically send you communications or otherwise contact you about new products, services, or upcoming events.
Opt-out: You may choose to be removed from our electronic mailing list by following the instructions in those messages or by contacting Company using one of the methods listed in our contact information at the bottom of this notice (email, phone, or mail) to request that you be removed from our marketing list.
Note, however, that even if you opt-out of receiving marketing communications, we may still contact you for non-marketing purposes (such as account information, feedback or research purposes, legal notices, account security, bug alerts, or changes that may impact your ability to use Company products and services).
Our Use of Interest-Based Ads and Choosing Do Not Track
We partner with third parties to either display advertising on our website or to manage our advertising on other sites. Our third-party partners may use technologies such as cookies and other tracking technologies to gather certain information about your activities on this website and other sites in order to provide you advertising based upon your browsing activities and interests. Data gathered from one site may be combined with data from other websites, mobile applications, and sources.
Certain web browsers allow users to opt-out of tracking by websites and online services by enabling an opt-out preference signal such as Do Not Track (“DNT”) or Global Privacy Control (“GPC”). If you choose to enable an opt-out request preference signal you will only be opted out of online sales or sharing of your information and will need to turn it on for each browser you use.
You may opt-out of interest-based advertising by advertisers that are part of the National Advertising Initiative at: http://optout.networkadvertising.org/ or the Digital Advertising Alliance at: (http://www.aboutads.info/choices/)
Please note this does not opt you out of being served ads and opting out via one browser, device, or app may not necessarily opt you out of collection from all browsers, devices, or apps. You will continue to receive ads, but they will not be targeted to your interests.
To submit a request to opt out of offline sales and sharing which would not otherwise be controlled by an opt-out preference signal, please contact us at [email protected].
U.S. State Privacy Rights
Some U.S. states have enacted comprehensive privacy laws that provide certain rights to residents of that are defined as consumers under those laws. These rights may include:
- Access or Right to Know: consumers may request what Personal Information we process about them and request access to it, which may include the categories and sources of Personal Information, our purpose for processing Personal Information, and how we disclose Personal Information to others.
- Rectification or Correction: consumers may request that inaccurate Personal Information processed by the Company be corrected.
- Deletion: consumers may request that we delete the Personal Information that we collected and retained about them, subject to certain exceptions.
- Restrict: consumers may opt-out or request that we restrict our processing of Personal Information.
- Opt-out of sale or share:Consumers may have the right to opt out of the following uses of Personal Information: (a) targeted advertising; (b) the sale of Personal Data; and (c) profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. To opt-out of the sale and share of your Personal Information as well as opt-out of the sale and share of your cookies for marketing purposes, including targeted advertising, please email us at [email protected]
Privacy Request Submissions
To exercise consumer privacy rights under state law, please submit an authenticated consumer request by emailing [email protected] with subject: Privacy Request.
These requests must:
- Detail sufficient information that allows us to reasonably authenticate you are the person about whom we collected Personal Information; and
- Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.
We cannot respond to your request or provide you with Personal Information if we cannot authenticate your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the Personal Information relates to you. We will only use Personal Information provided in an authenticated consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request.
We will respond to your privacy request within the required time period under applicable law, unless we notify you it will take us longer. We will provide a written explanation for any privacy request we are unable to fulfill in whole or in part. If you have any questions about how we manage your Personal Information or about a privacy request, please contact us at [email protected]
No Discrimination
Unless permitted by law, we will not discriminate against you for exercising the rights by:
- Denying goods or services to you;
- Charging different prices or rates for goods or services, including through the use of discounts, benefits, or other penalties;
- Providing a different level or quality of goods or services; and
- Suggesting a different price or quality of goods or services will apply if rights are exercised.
No Financial Incentive
We do not offer any financial incentives or price or service difference in an attempt to influence a consumer’s decision whether or not to exercise a right afforded to the consumer under their state consumer privacy laws.
Legal Basis for Processing Personal Information
We may process your Personal Information for the purposes identified in this Privacy Notice, pursuant to the following legal basis: (1) with your consent, (2) for compliance with a legal obligation to which company is subject, (3) for the performance of a contract to which you are party, (4) in order to protect your vital interests, or (5) when we have assessed it is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by Company or a third party to whom it may be necessary to disclose information and are not overridden by your rights and freedoms, including your right to have your Personal Information protected
Storage and Transfer of your Information
In accordance with applicable laws, we keep and store your information to provide you with the Services and for the uses identified herein. We also may retain or use your information as necessary to comply with our policies, legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.
The Services are intended for access and use in the United States. Any information Company collects about you may be stored, transferred, processed, and/or accessed by us in the United States, or to the extent permitted by law, any other country where we or our service providers operate. Please know that Personal Information may be transferred to, and maintained on, computers not in the state or country where you live, meaning the privacy laws could differ from and may not be as protective as those where you live.
If you are located outside the United States and allow us to collect information about you, please be aware that Company may, where permitted by law, transfer your Personal Information to other countries, including the United States, and process and store it there. By allowing collection of your Personal Information, you consent to having your Personal Information transferred to, processed, and stored in the United States.
For Further Information
For questions about our privacy policy or practices, you may contact us at:
Our postal address:
325 Marriott Drive, Suite 200
Lincolnshire, IL 60069
Other ways to reach us:
Telephone: 800-432-3624
Email: [email protected]