The Kinetic Co., Inc., and its subsidiaries (collectively “we” or “Kinetic”) respect and are committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) explains the types of personal data we might collect and how we use, share, store, and secure your personal data.
For purposes of this Policy, “personal data” means the information either on its own or in combination with other information that identifies you or allows you to be identified, such as your name, physical address, email address or other contact details, online identifiers, details of your use of our website navigational information, and any information that becomes personally associated with you.
Personal Data Collection
We only conduct business-to-business (“B2B”) business and do not engage in business-to-consumer (“B2C”) business. Accordingly, we collect personal data in a number of different ways:
- When you visit one of our websites and/or use online applications we provide (“Sites” or “Site”);
- In email, text, and other electronic messages between you and our Site;
- When you voluntarily provide your personal data to us (for example, when you opted-in for our electronic mailings, when you registered for an account on a Site, when you completed a web form to contact us on our website) or when it is provided to us by the company or organization you work for;
- When you participate in webinars, seminars, trade fairs, or other events;
- From publicly available sources (for example, LinkedIn or corporate websites);
- When you use our services (for example, customer care support, technical support) and when it is necessary for us to provide or receive services or otherwise do business with you or the company or organization you belong to;
- We buy services from selected third party vendors that utilize aggregated cookies data to target ads based on common characteristics, such as industry;
- When we have disclosed the collection of personal data and intended use to you in advance through this Policy or at the time of collection;
- We also combine the personal data that we collect from different sources for the uses further described below (for example, to identify better the areas of your business interests); and/or
- You are not required to provide personal data to us; however, if you do not, we may not be able to provide certain services or information you may request.
We collect a number of different types of personal data:
- Relevant business contact information, such as your name, the name of the company or organization you work for, your business address, your location of operation, your title, your email address, your telephone, and other business contact details;
- Records and copies of your correspondence (including email addresses), if you contact us; and/or
- We also automatically collect information your browser makes available whenever you visit a Site, through the use of commonly used tracking technologies, such as cookies and web beacons. This information includes your Internet Protocol (IP) address; the source of a Site visit; the domain name of the web site from which you came; number of visits; pages viewed; links, browser type, version, and language; and/or the date and time of your query.
The technologies we use to automatically collect information may include:
- Cookies (or browser cookies). A cookie is a small file placed on the hard drive of your computer. You may refuse to accept browser cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser. However, if select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our Site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you direct your browser to our Site.
- Web Beacons. Pages of our Site may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit us, for example, to count users who have visited those pages and for other related website statistics.
We are committed to using personal data only for the purpose of the provision of our services, to keep it confidential and to follow the instructions that your company may provide to us in this context in a separate agreement, it being understood that we are allowed to use aggregated data for the improvement of our products, services, and software solutions.
For the avoidance of doubt, there are certain types of personal data we typically do not collect:
- We do not proactively collect any personal data considered as sensitive personal data (for example, health-related data);
- We do not proactively collect private financial information about you, nor information about your private home and family, but we may collect financial information regarding the company you work for;
- Any third party, including through any application or content (including advertising) that may link to or be accessible from or on the Site; and
- Our Sites are for persons aged 16 years or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you are under 16, do not use or provide any information on this Site, register on the Site, or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, email address, or any screen name or user name you may use. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under 16 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information.
Our Use of Your Personal Data
This Policy provides you with information as to how we may use your personal data. We hope this will help you make an informed decision about sharing your personal data with us.
We may use personal data that you provide to us for the following business, transactional, and marketing purposes:
- To present our Site and its contents to you;
- Contact you about a specific request or inquiry;
- Deliver requested services or business transactions we have agreed;
- Administer our Sites and your account(s) (for registered users); analyze trends and improve functionality of our Sites;
- Consider an application for employment from you;
- As deemed necessary to protect our legal rights and our property, to protect other users or any third party, or to prevent personal injury or loss;
- Communicate (via email, regular mail or telephone) with you about products, services, and events of Kinetic and its business partners that you may be interested in;
- Generate leads (the identification of particular interest an existing or potential customer may have in our products, solutions and services; for example, based on your level of interest and expressed desire for follow-up information, such as by downloading a document, visiting certain website pages or making a direct inquiry with us) to provide you better support and services and/or to better respond to your requests or inquiries;
- Use such information in the context of our overall customer relationship management; and/or
- To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it.
Every promotional communication will include a link allowing you to opt-out of receiving such communications in the future and to manage your preferences to include or exclude certain communications.
The legal basis for using and processing your personal data are, as the case may be, your consent; necessity for responding to inquiries; the performance of requested services; the entering into and performing of contracts and business transactions; and our legitimate business interests.
Information Sharing with Third Parties
Within Kinetic, we restrict access to your personal data to employees who need to know the information for the above use purposes. We do not rent or sell your personal data to other companies or individuals. However, we may share your personal data with third parties outside of Kinetic for the following purposes:
- With authorized distributors, channel partners and other suppliers selected by us, who are involved in providing our products, services or solutions to you, to communicate with you about Kinetic and related products, services, and solutions that you may be interested in, or to respond to your requests or inquiries;
- With selected service providers and subcontractors who provide services to us or on our behalf, such as hosting websites, sending out information, conducting surveys, IT services, analyzing data, organizing events, and other professional services. We only provide these service providers with the personal data they need to deliver their services to us or on our behalf;
- With selected service providers and subcontractors who provide services to us or on our behalf, such as advertising and marketing services, including telemarketing; we provide, for example, information collected about you through our cookies in order to generate and provide advertising about our products, services and solutions that are more relevant or useful to you;
- With governmental and/or regulatory authorities where we are required by applicable law or pursuant to a court, administrative or similar order;
- To a buyer or other successor in the event of a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Kinetic’s assets, in which personal information held by Kinetic about our Site users is among the assets transferred; and/or
- To fulfill the purpose for which you provide it.
We take commercially reasonable steps to implement contractual safeguards and to promote that the third party companies mentioned above:
- Protect your personal data and keep it secure and confidential;
- Do not collect, use, or disclose your personal data for any purpose other than to perform such functions for us or on our behalf and in accordance with applicable privacy laws and our instructions;
- Do not keep this information longer than is needed; and
- To report to us immediately in case of a data breach incident leading to the accidental or unlawful theft, loss, disclosure of or access to personal data.
Aggregating Information
Aggregated or anonymized personal data does not personally identify you or any other user of the Sites. It may be used for statistical analysis and administration, including analysis of trends, tailoring products and services, risk assessment and analysis of costs and charges in relation to our products, services, and solutions.
Direct Marketing
We may wish to provide you with information about existing and new products, services, solutions, about webinars, seminars, trade fairs, and other events, and about promotions and offers, which may be of interest to you. We may also invite you to take part in market research or request feedback on our products, services, and solutions.
We will ensure that any direct marketing or market research that you receive or are contacted about by e-mail will provide a simple means for you to withdraw from such further e-mail communication. For example, we may provide you with an ‘unsubscribe’ link in emails, or an email address where you can send an opt-out request.
In such cases, we would not necessarily remove all your personal data from our database(s) but would note and respect your changed direct marketing preferences.
Obtaining Your Consent — Communication Preferences
You may gain a lot of information about our products, services, and solutions without having to provide any personal data. However, for certain services, information and events we may require and request certain personal data. This information will enable us to provide you with additional relevant information or service and to use it for the other purposes described in this Policy or described specifically for the requested service, information or event.
We will request, where required by applicable laws, that you grant your explicit consent for our online, electronic direct marketing activities. Where required, we will request that you grant your explicit consent for us to collect and use your personal data as explained in this Policy.
Information Security
We have adopted reasonable, risk-based, technical, and organizational measures, which seek to protect your personal data against unauthorized access, accidental loss, alteration, disclosure, or destruction.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the security of any transmission of personal data over the Internet, via email or other electronic communication. We also cannot guarantee the security of different methods of electronic storage. Electronic communications such as via email are not secure unless they have been appropriately encrypted. While we strive to protect such information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information transmitted or exchanged between us. You therefore accept the inherent security implications of dealing online and through email and will not hold us responsible, unless a security breach incident has been caused by the specific gross negligence of Kinetic, its subsidiaries or its agents.
Retention
We retain your personal data in our active systems as long as you have accessed or used our Sites and services or have interacted with us online or offline over the past twelve months, and for as long as we may need the information for the purposes described in this Policy.
We may retain and use your information for longer periods as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes and/or to execute and enforce our agreements.
Links to Other Websites
Our Sites may contain links to other websites. We are not responsible for the content, terms of service, security, and privacy practices of these other websites. Your access and use of such links or websites remains solely at your own risk. You should be aware of this when you leave our Sites and we encourage you to read the privacy statements on other websites you visit.
How to Access, Correct, or Delete Your Personal Data
Under applicable privacy laws, you have certain rights in relation to the personal data we hold about you, such as rights of information about and access to your personal data, rights to rectify your personal data, rights to reject or restrict certain processing, rights to delete your personal data and rights to be forgotten.
You can request for the exercise of those rights by contacting us using the below Contact Us information or through the Contact Us form that is accessible at the top of each page within the knifemaker.com domain.
You may also send us an email at orders@knifemaker.com to request access to, correct or delete any personal information that you have provided to us. We cannot delete your personal information except by also deleting your user account. We may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement or cause the information to be incorrect.
EU General Data Protection Regulation, Enforcement
To correct your personal information, to send an “opt-out” message, or if you have questions or concerns about Kinetic’s privacy policy, you may contact Kinetic using the contact information above.
Kinetic processes your personal information for our legitimate business interests. ‘Legitimate interests’ means the interests of Kinetic in conducting and managing our business to enable us to offer you the best products and customer service that we can. Processing your personal data also allows us to:
- Enhance, modify, personalize and improve our customer service;
- Understand how visitors interact with our website;
- Produce relevant and timely online and offline marketing campaigns as well as determine the effectiveness of our advertising; and
- Enhance online security.
Kinetic holds and processes your personal data for as long as required for the purpose for which the data was initially collected. Once we no longer need your personal data, we dispose of it securely. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider:
- Amount, nature and sensitivity of information.
- Potential risk from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal information.
- Purposes for which we collected and stored it and whether we still need to keep it in the same form.
- Legal retention requirements that may apply to that information.
Whenever we process personal data we will ensure that we always keep your personal data rights in high regard and take account of these rights. Under certain circumstances by law, you have the right to:
- Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
- Request correction of the personal information we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
- Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
- Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or that of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation that makes you want to object to processing on this ground.
- Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example, if you want us to establish the accuracy or the reason for processing it.
- Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.
You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data, and if you wish to do so please contact us using the contact information above. Please bear in mind that if you object this may affect our ability to carry out tasks for your benefit.
In certain circumstances, Kinetic holds and processes personal data that has not been obtained from the data subject. For example, Kinetic rents ‘postal mailing lists’ of contacts which we use to send catalogues and other forms of marketing. In these circumstances, you have the right to contact Kinetic to determine the source of your personal data.
Enforcement
Kinetic uses a self-assessment approach to assure compliance with this privacy policy and periodically verifies that the policy is accurate, comprehensive for the information intended to be covered, prominently displayed, completely implemented and accessible. We encourage interested persons to raise any complaints or concerns using the contact information provided in this section and we will investigate and attempt to resolve any concerns regarding use and disclosure of personal information.
Privacy Complaints by UK and European Customers
Kinetic commits to resolve complaints about your privacy and our collection or use of your personal information. If a complaint or dispute cannot be resolved through our internal process, UK or European customers are able to report a concern or raise a complaint via the Information Commissioner’s Office. The Information Commissioner’s Office is an independent authority established by the UK government to uphold information rights in the public interest.
Contact Us
If you have questions regarding this Policy or our handling of your personal data, please contact us at 6775 West Loomis Road, Greendale, Wisconsin 53129, USA, phone number +1 414-425-8221. You may also send us an email at orders@knifemaker.com.
Changes to this Policy
Please note that we may update or change this Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the last updated notice at the bottom of the Policy. If the changes are material, we will also provide a more prominent notice on our corporate website. Regularly reviewing this page ensures that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.
This Policy was last updated on April 7, 2021.