Scope & Commitment

 

This policy applies to the personal data that is collected through the products, sites, services, and social media accounts (“Services”) of GDS Instruments Pte Ltd (“GDS Instruments”, “we”, “us” or “our”) and describes how GDS Instruments processes such personal data in operating its business.  GDS Instruments is committed to protecting your personal data and is accountable for its collection, use and disclosure in accordance with this policy and applicable privacy legislation.

​

​

Information We Collect

 

GDS Instruments collects personal data directly from you, automatically through tracking technologies such as cookies, and through your use of GDS Instruments products and Services. GDS Instruments collects the following types of personal data:

​

1. When you register on our website

   1. Name, address and contact information, including your first and last name, phone number, address, email address, and password

   2. Organization information, including the name of your company and your job title

   3. Optionally, consent to receive newsletters and other marketing material

2. When you visit our website while logged in

   1. IP address, web pages visited, and other activities performed on the site including, for example, views of videos and downloads of files

   2. Information relevant to providing our products or services to you, including for example which products you have downloaded or evaluated and responses to our evaluation questionnaire

3. When using our desktop/server software products

   1. For unpaid evaluation and teaching licenses only: machine MAC address, IP address, product version, licensed feature usage and computer operating system

   2. In the event the product detects deliberate attempts to circumvent the licensing technology:

      1. application details such as product, version, and license file

      2. computer system details such as network names and addresses, hardware serial numbers and operating system details

      3. user details such as language, system username, email address, and WiFi geolocation

   3. Usage of web content, including which content files you download and when

 

​

How We Use Your Information

 

GDS Instruments collects, uses, and discloses your personal data to:

• Deliver promotional and marketing material, the delivery of which you can opt out of at any time;

• Provide personalized access to our Services;

• Understand and respond to your needs and preferences, including recommending Services to meet your needs;

• Engage in business transactions, including the purchase and sale of software licenses;

• Create your account in our systems. Your email address becomes your GDS Instruments ID, used to login to our website and products;

• Manage licenses and access to technical support;

• Develop and improve our products and business;

• Notify you about product updates and new features;

• Protect GDS Instruments from error, breach of contract, infringement, misappropriation, negligence, fraud, and illegal activity;

• Determine compliance with licenses and authorizations granted by GDS Instruments; and

• Comply with legal or regulatory requirements or provisions.

 

​

How We Share Your Information

 

GDS Instruments may disclose your personal data to:

• Service providers retained by GDS Instruments to perform services on our behalf, including the hosting of various web assets and services. Some of our service providers are located outside of Singapore.

• GDS Instruments’s authorized sales and support representatives for the purposes described above; and

• Any third party where disclosure is required or permitted by law.

 

GDS Instruments does not sell personal data. For the security of these transfers of your personal data, please refer below to the “How we store your information” section.

 

​

Legal Basis For Processing

 

We process personal data with consent except where otherwise permitted or required by law. For example, we may be permitted to collect, use or disclose personal data without consent in order to collect a debt owed to us or to comply with a subpoena or court order. Your consent may be express or implied, depending on the circumstances.

​

Where the law of Singapore applies, we rely on one of the following legal grounds (as appropriate) to process personal data:

• To enter and perform a contract with you or to perform any steps you require from us before entering into a contract.

• To pursue our legitimate business interests in establishing, managing or concluding our business relationship with you.

• Where you have specifically consented to us processing your personal data.

• To comply with our legal obligations and establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.

 

​

How We Store Your Information

 

Your personal data is stored either at our premises in Singapore, or at the premises of our service providers which may not be located in Singapore.

​

GDS Instruments takes steps to protect your personal data in our custody and control from loss, misuse, unauthorized access and alteration. We have appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk of varying likelihood and severity for the rights and freedoms of you. We maintain these technical and organizational measures and may amend them from time to time to improve the overall security of our systems. To the extent GDS Instruments has arrangements with service providers to store or process personal data on our behalf, our policy is to require them by contractual or other means to provide comparable protection as set forth in this policy while the information is stored or processed by them. However, some of our service providers may be located in countries whose data protection laws are not as protective as those in your country of residence and, despite the measures that we have in place, these laws may permit government and national security authorities to access personal data in certain circumstances.

 

GDS Instruments retains your personal data as long as it is required for the reasons it was collected, to fulfill our legitimate business needs to retain personal information for auditing, reporting or dispute resolution purposes, or to comply with legal requirements. After that, we will retain your personal data for a period of 15 years in an anonymized form for conducting analyses of company performance.

 

​

How You Can Manage Your Information

 

You can opt out of marketing communications at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of each marketing email.

 

You may also have the following additional rights:

• to be informed about how your personal data have been processed;

• to access your personal data;

• to request that errors in your personal data be corrected;

• to request that all of your personal data be permanently erased;

• not to be subject to any automatic individual decisions which produces legal effects on you or similarly significantly affects you;

• to take legal actions in relation to any breach of your rights regarding the processing of the personal data, as well as to lodge complaints before the competent data protection regulators; where the processing of your personal data is based on our legitimate interests, you may object to processing at any time. If you object to such processing, we ask you to state the grounds of your objection for us to investigate the processing of your personal data and decide whether to adjust the processing accordingly; and

• where the processing of your personal data is based on your consent, to withdraw your consent at any time without impact to data processing activities that have taken place before such withdrawal or to any other existing legal justification of the processing activity in question.

 

Depending on the specific situation at hand, GDS Instruments may not be able to fully comply with your requests. For example, even if you request that we erase all your personal data, GDS Instruments may need to retain some or all of your personal data for legal purposes. In these cases, GDS Instruments will explain to you the extent to which we were able to comply.

 

If you wish to exercise any of your rights under this privacy policy, or if you have any questions about how we handle personal data, contact our privacy officer at privacy@gds-instruments.com.

 

​

Website Analytics, 3rd Party Tracking & Cookies

 

GDS Instruments uses cookies and other similar technologies (e.g. web beacons, Flash cookies, etc.) (“Cookies”) to enhance your experience. Cookies are used to indirectly collect information, including personal data, from you. Cookies are small text files which, when placed on your device, enable us to provide certain features and functionality.

 

There are different types of Cookies:

1. Strictly necessary Cookies. These are Cookies that are required for the operation of the Services. They include, for example, Cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of the Services.

2. Functionality Cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to the Services. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences.

3. Targeting Cookies. These Cookies record your visit to the Services, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make the Services and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

 

Although most Web browsers automatically accept Cookies, the decision of whether to accept them or not is yours. You have the choice to accept or decline Cookies by way of consent by adjusting your browser settings to prevent the reception of cookies, or to provide notification whenever a cookie is sent to you. While you may refuse to accept cookies, you may not be able to access the Services to its full functionality. Cookies placed by us will expire when you terminate the website session or after 2 years.

On our website, we use third-party analytics tools to track your usage of the site, measure traffic and to remember your registered information that you have provided when you registered for an account on our website. Traffic refers to the different data flows surrounding activities of the users on the Services. These tools, for example, collect information sent by your device or our Services, including the web pages you visit, add-ons, and other information that assists us in improving the Services. The information will be used to report and evaluate your activities and patterns as a user of the Services to provide services in accordance with these activities.

To obtain these tracking data, GDS Instruments uses third-party analytics providers. They use cookies to help us analyze how customers use GDS Instruments’s website. The information generated by the Cookie about your use of GDS Instruments’s website, including your IP address, will be transmitted to, and stored by the third-party analytics providers’ servers (for more information on the security, please refer to Section 5 “How We Store Your Information” above). On behalf of GDS Instruments, the third-party analytics providers will use this information to evaluate your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity, and providing other services relating to website activity. The third-party analytics providers will not associate your IP address with any other data held by them.

One of our third-party analytics tools is Google Analytics provided by Google, Inc (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA). Google Analytics uses Cookies, small text files containing a string of alphanumeric characters and being stored on your computer. Google will use this information including your truncated IP address to assemble statistics on the use of our Service on to provide other related services as described above. For further information on how Google Analytics collects and processes information about you and information on how to opt out from Google’s collection of information from you, please click here. You may also find further information in the Google Analytics Terms of Service & Privacy.

 

​

Changes To This Policy

 

GDS Instruments reserves the right to change this policy at any time, and GDS Instruments will take reasonable steps to advise affected individuals of any changes, including by posting or otherwise giving you notice of the amended policy. You should review this policy regularly to ensure that you are aware of any changes made.

 

Revised: September 10, 2018