Privacy Policy

When you use ours services, you entrust us with personal information (Personal Data). This Privacy Policy sets out what information we collect, and how we use it.

1. Commitment to Protect Your Privacy

We are committed to protecting your Personal Data and your privacy.

The laws of certain countries require us to provide you with additional information about our processing activities and we have included separate appendices to deal with these. As well as this document, please refer to the appendices which apply to you.

We will notify you of any changes to our Privacy Policy, including by posting the revised policy at this website. The changes will be effective from the date of posting.

2. The Personal Data We Collect

As necessary for good service to you, we will collect and process some or all of the following Personal Data about you:

(a) Information about you, such as name, contact information, and employment

(b) Your payment details

(c) Information in relation to the service to you

(d) Information about your transactions with us

(e) Information about your use of ours products and services

(f) Your interests, preferences and opinions

(g) our interactions with you

(h) Survey information

(i) Your use of our website, apps and social media platforms

3. How we collect Personal Data

3.1 We will collect some Personal Data from you directly. We may collect other Personal Data from third parties including, such as:
(a) the agents and other persons that interact with us on your behalf; (b) our service providers and agents such as our contracted auditing/training partners and auditors/trainers; (c) other certification bodies and customers; (d) our third party marketing partners; (e) ours partners for audit, certification, and training service; (f) operators of our loyalty programmes, if applicable; (g) organizations which conduct credit, fraud, and other due diligence checks; (h) government or regulatory bodies; and (i) providers of third party websites, apps and social media platforms.

3.2 If you provide us with information about other individuals, you must tell those individuals in advance and let them know this Privacy Policy.

4. Why we collect and use Personal Data

4.1 For good service to you, here are some of the ways we will use your Personal Data:

(a) To provide our products and services to you

(b) To tailor and personalise our products and services to you

(c) To provide customer support

(d) For marketing purposes

(e) To operate and facilitate your participation in our loyalty programmes, when applicable

(f) For social interactions

(g) To improve our products and services

(h) To comply with our legal obligations and for safety and security purposes

(i) For legal and administrative purposes

5. Who we share Personal Data with

In certain circumstances, we will provide or make accessible your Personal Data to third parties as described below:

5.1 our service providers, and members or licensed partners of the DQS group who process personal data on our behalf for the purposes described in section 4

5.2 Third parties such as accreditation/recognition and regulating bodies related to the service to you

5.3 our third party partners for audit, certification and training service related to you

5.4 our third party partners, for marketing purposes

5.5 our Loyalty Programmes

5.6 Government and regulatory bodies

     6. Marketing

6.1 We may use Personal Data for marketing and promotional purposes, including
(i) for sending or showing you updates on latest standards, training courses, news, offers and promotions in connection with our products and services
(ii) for tailoring and tracking your interactions with internet　advertisement and links from third party websites to our website.

6.2 We may also use Personal Data to analyse our customers’ preferences and market trends and derive insights, which we may use to tailor the types of products and offers present to you. This may involve our combining Personal Data that we hold about your use of our services with information that we have collected about your web usage. We may also combine information that we have collected about you with information that we have collected about our other customers in order to derive these insights and establish market trends. We may use these insights for marketing and promotional purposes. We also use advertising services and products provided by third party service providers (such as marketing agencies and social media platforms) for marketing and promotional purposes, which may involve our sharing Personal Data that we hold about you with them.

6.3 We may communicate marketing and promotions to you by post, telephone, email or online approach and, as appropriate and where required, we will ask you for your consent, or otherwise provide you with the opportunity to choose not to receive marketing, at the time we collect your data.

6.4 We will provide an option to unsubscribe or opt out of further communication on any direct marketing communication sent to you. You may also opt out by contacting us as set out in paragraph 8 below.

6.5 Please note that if you choose to unsubscribe or opt out of marketing communication, we will still send you communications about the ordered service to you. If you maintain a Registered Account holder at our websites or current user of our service, you will also continue to receive administrative emails and updates to our services.

7. Transmission, storage and security of Personal Data

7.1 IT Security

No data transmission over the Internet, a website, mobile application or via email or other message service can be guaranteed to be secure from intrusion.  However, we maintain commercially reasonable physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your Personal Data in accordance with the requirements of data protection legislation.

All Personal Data we collect about you is stored on our or our subcontractors’ servers of appropriate controls.

All personal data we collect about you may be stored on our servers controlled or used by us, associated DQS affiliates, and our subcontractors. They are listed below, and their contact information is in the listed webpages.

• Service partners within DQS group: DQS Holding GmbH (https://www.dqs-holding.com/en/contact-us/contact-form-general-inquiry),
• eMail and cloud storage service provider: Microsoft (https://support.microsoft.com/contactus),
• eMail and website hosting service provider: Vodien Internet Solutions Pte Ltd (https://www.pachosting.hk/zh-cn/about-us/contact-us.php),
• Website hosting service provider: Access Solutions Limited (https://www.advanhost.com.hk/contact)
• Cloud storage service provider: Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/support).

We comply with our security policies and standards when accessing or using this information and restrict access to your Personal Datato those persons who need to use it for the purpose(s) for which it was collected.  You are responsible for keeping any information that we send to you confidential and for complying with any other security procedures that we notify you of.  In particular, where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our website or mobile applications, we ask you not to share a password with anyone.

7.2 Exporting your Personal Data

For our service, data storage/backup, website maintenance or software problem fixing purpose, your Personal Data may be transferred to suitable service providers, including those outside the country in which you or we are located, where the level of data protection may not be equivalent.

Specially, for courses provided by PECB, your personal data associated with the service will be provided to PECB. Its contact information is at https://pecb.com/en/contact-us.

7.3 Retention period

We will retain your Personal Data for as long as is necessary for the processing purpose(s) for which it was collected and any other permitted linked purpose (for example where we are required to retain personal data for longer than the purpose for which we originally collected it in order to comply with certain regulatory requirements).  Our retention periods are based on business needs and your information that is no longer needed is either irreversibly anonymised (and the anonymised information will be retained) or securely destroyed.

8. Your rights and contacting us

8.1 General rights

You have the right (subject to various exceptions and in accordance with data protection legislation in your country) to access certain Personal Data held about you and correct any inaccuracies. We may charge a reasonable fee for the processing of any data access request. While our business is operated according to the local laws and other applicable regulations, you also have the right to raise a complaint about our processing with the data protection regulator in your jurisdiction, if applicable.

8.2 Right to opt out of direct marketing

You have the right to ask us not to process your Personal Data for direct marketing purposes.  You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by indicating that you do not consent to direct marketing at the point at which we collect your Personal Data.  You can also exercise the right at any time after we have collected and used your Personal data for direct marketing purposes by:

(a) following the opt-out instructions contained in the relevant communications; or

(b) updating your email subscriptions at our websites.

We will take reasonable steps to try and ensure that your Personal Data is accurate.  To help us do this, please notify us of any changes to your Personal Data.

8.4 Contacting us

Refer to the Contact Us page at our website for our latest contact information.

9. Use of Cookies

9.1 Purpose

Our websites use cookies which help us to improve customers’ experience of our websites.

9.2 Consent

By using this website, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You should have seen a pop up to this effect on your first visit to this website; although it will not usually appear on subsequent visits you may withdraw your consent at any time by following the instructions below.

9.3 Disabling cookies

If you do not agree to the use of these cookies please disable them by reference to the instructions for your browser set out here of sources operated by external parties. Please note that some of the services will not function so well if cookies are disabled.

Some browsers make it possible for you to signal that you do not want your internet browsing activity to be tracked. Disabling tracking may interfere with some uses of this website and the services provided on this website.

After your initial visit to this website we may change the cookies we use.

9.4 What are cookies?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating web domain on your subsequent visits to that domain. Most web pages contain elements from multiple web domains so when you visit the website, your browser may receive cookies from several sources.

Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device. Cookies allow you to navigate between pages efficiently, remember preferences and generally improve the user experience. They can also be used to tailor advertising to your interests through tracking your browsing across websites.

Session cookies are deleted automatically when you close your browser and persistent cookies remain on your device after the browser is closed (for example to remember your user preferences when you return to the site).

9.5 Google Analytics

Tools used on this website include Google Analytics, a web analysis service of Google Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses so-called “Cookies”, text data that is stored on your computer and which enables an analysis of your use (frequency, navigation, links, preferences etc.) of this website. The Cookie-generated information on your visit to this site (including your IP Address) is transferred to a Google server for storage. Google uses this information to evaluate your use of the website, draw up reports on the totality of activity on the site for the site’s webmaster and for the purposes of further advancing and refining Internet services. Google may provide such information to third parties for contracted data processing. For more detail on this, please read Google’s general terms of business at http://www.google.com/policies/terms.

10. Links to Other Sites

This website contains links to other sites that are operated by third party companies with different privacy or cookies practices.  You shall remain alert when you leave our site and read the privacy statements of other websites. We have no control over Personal Data that you submit to or receive from these third parties.

This notice is written in English language and may be translated into other languages. In the event of any inconsistency between the English version and the translated version of this notice, the English version shall prevail.

Revised on 2 Sep 2021.