General Privacy Notice

Effective: Feb 2nd 2025.

Introduction - General Privacy Notice

At Volts & Amps Batteries we take your privacy and the security of your information seriously. This Volts & Amps Batteries General Data Privacy Notice (“General Privacy Notice”) explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal data about you, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. We are committed to protecting your information and being transparent about the information we collect about you and how we use it. By being transparent, we hope to build on the trust you already have in us. We want you to understand what we do with your information, why we do it and what it means to you. We recommend that you read this General Privacy Notice in full to ensure you are fully informed.

For purposes of this General Privacy Notice, “Personal Data” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual, including, for example, your name, phone number, post code, device id, ip address and email address. Further information about the Personal Data that we collect and where we collect that Personal Data from is set out below under the various categories.

This General Privacy Notice applies to the processing of Personal Data collected by Volts & Amps Batteries or provided to Volts & Amps Batteries from the following: * visitors and users of our websites that display or link to this General Privacy Notice, such as voltsnamps.ca, and any related website operated by Volts & Amps Batteries (together the “Sites”); * visitors and users of our branded social media pages; * visitors of our offices; * customers and prospective customers and their representatives; * attendees and participants of events, webinars or contests; * participants in Volts & Amps Batteries community and open source development; * participants in research studies; or * suppliers and business partners and their representatives.

For Personal Data that we collect:

• When you use or interact with the Volts & Amps Batteries product services (together, the “Services”), please see our Services Privacy Notice
• When you apply for a position with Volts & Amps Batteries through our Site or otherwise, please see our Applicant Privacy Policy
• When interacting with our Sites, you also have the ability to link or connect with non-voltsnamps websites, services, social networks, applications or other features. Enabling these features will lead to other parties, rather than Volts & Amps Batteries, processing information about you. Volts & Amps Batteries does not review, cannot be responsible for, nor has any control over these features of other parties. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy notices of these parties before using these features.

1. The information we collect about you

Pickestry collects personal data about you both offline and online. Offline information about you originates from our interactions with you, for example, during in-person meetings or at pickestry events, conferences, or workshops. Online Information originates from your activities on our Sites, for example, by chatting with our online chat tool, subscribing to receive information about pickestry, filling in forms on our website, tracked automatically by cookies or beacons, participating in surveys or online communities offered by pickestry, etc. Information about you may also be provided by third party sources, such as data aggregators who may not have a relationship with you.

The offline and online information we collect falls into various categories:

a. Personal Data you provide to us.

The Personal Data that we collect directly from you includes the following:

* If you express an interest in obtaining additional information about our Services, request customer support, use our "Contact Us" or similar features, register to use our Sites, sign up for an event, webinar or contest, or download certain content, we may require that you provide to us your contact information, such as your name, job title, company name, address, phone number, email address or username and password;
* If you make purchases via our Sites or register for an event or webinar, we may require that you provide financial and billing information, such as billing name and address, credit card number or bank account information;
* If you attend an event, we may, with your consent, scan your attendee badge, which may include your name, title, company name, address, country, phone number and email address which we may then use to contact you;
* If you visit our offices, you may be required to register as a visitor and to provide your name, email address, phone number, photograph, company name, and time and date of arrival; or
* Pictures, videos or audio recordings may be collected by pickestry in a variety of contexts. For example, if you attend a pickestry event, your image may be captured in a photo or video. If you participate in a pickestry research study your research session may be recorded with your consent.
* If you provide to us or to our service providers any Personal Data relating to other individuals, you represent that you have the authority to do so and permit us to use the Personal Data in accordance with this General Privacy Notice. If you believe that your Personal Data has been provided to us improperly, or to otherwise exercise your rights relating to your Personal Data, please contact us by using the information in the “How to Contact Us” section, below.

b. Personal Data collected automatically

* When you visit our Site, we may collect certain information automatically from your device such as your ip address, device type, unique device identification numbers, browser-type, broad geographic location (e.g. country or city-level location), user id, and other technical information. We may also collect information about how your device has interacted with our Site, including the pages accessed and links clicked.
* Collecting this information enables us to better understand the visitors who come to our Site, where they come from, and what content on our Site is of interest to them.  We use this information for purposes such as our internal analytics purposes to improve the quality and relevance of our Site to our visitors, as well as marketing.
* Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technology, as explained further in the pickestry Cookie Policy.

c. Personal Data obtained from third parties

We may receive Personal Data about you from third parties.  We have checked that such third party companies have an appropriate legal basis to provide us that data, be that your consent, a legitimate business interest, or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your Personal Data.  Third party companies may supply us with Personal Data, such as your name, e-mail and mailing address information in order to help us establish an account or fulfill orders. Our third party company relationships help us to update, expand, and analyze our Personal Data records, identify new customers, optimize our Site and Services, create more tailored advertising to provide services that may be of interest to you, and manage open source projects. When we receive Personal Data about you from a third party, we will apply the principles outlined in this General Privacy Notice when dealing with your information. Personal Data that we collect from third party sources includes:

* Third party providers of business contact information, including mailing addresses, job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, intent data (or user behavior data), ip addresses, social media profiles, LinkedIn URLs and custom profiles, for purposes of targeted advertising, delivering relevant email content, event promotion and profiling;
* Third party resellers, referral and joint-marketing partners, distributors, managed service providers, IAAS or PAAS partners, cloud providers, and other technical alliances who provide business contact information, including mailing addresses, job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, and details about the potential customers’ software environment to tailor the purchase of Services.
* Third party vendors who provide products used by pickestry, such as survey tools, or payment processing services. In such instances, pickestry is the controller and the vendor is the processor of such Personal Data.

2. How we use your Personal Data

In general, Personal Data you submit to us is used either to respond to requests that you make, or to aid us in serving you better. Pickestry also uses your Personal Data in the following ways:

• to deliver functionality on our Sites and for their technical and functional administration;
• to provide our Services and perform our contract with you as our customer;
• to manage the security of our Sites, physical locations, networks, and systems;
• to communicate and respond to your requests and inquiries to pickestry;
• to market our Services or related products and services, and to tailor or marketing and sales activities to your company’s interests and in accordance with your communication preferences;
• to link or combine information about you with other Personal Data we get from third parties, to help understand your needs and provide you with better and more personalized service;
• to engage in transactions with customers, suppliers and business partners and to process orders for pickestry Services;
• to operate, analyze, develop, improve and optimize the use, function and performance of our Sites, Services and systems;
• to conduct research you agree to participate in, through meetings, surveys, or other tools;
• to manage code check-ins and pull requests for open source and community development projects;
• to comply with applicable laws and regulations and to operate our business.

We may create anonymous data records from Personal Data by deleting all information that identify you, in accordance with applicable law. We use this anonymous data to analyze request and usage patterns so that we may improve our Services and Site navigation.

3. How we share your Personal Data

We may disclose your Personal Data to the following categories of recipients:

to our pickestry Group, third-party service providers and partners who provide data processing services to us (for example, to support the delivery of, provide functionality on, or help to enhance the security of our Site, to provide technical support or to provide specific services, such as hosting of your applications, communicating with you via live chat software, e-mail delivery, auditing, event/campaign management, analytics, payment processing for purchases, or other similar service providers), or who otherwise process Personal Data for purposes that are described in this General Privacy Notice or notified to you when we collect your Personal Data;

to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;

to an actual or potential buyer (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any actual or proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your Personal Data only for the purposes disclosed in this General Privacy Notice;

to any other person with your consent to the disclosure;

Except as otherwise stated in this General Privacy Notice, we do not sell, trade, share, or rent the Personal Data collected from our Services to third parties.

4. Legal basis for processing your Personal Data

When we use your Personal Data, we take care to ensure that it is used in an appropriate way. Use of Personal Data under European data protection law must be based on one of a number of legal grounds as set out below. We will use your Personal Data and share that Personal Data where:

Its use is necessary in relation to our Services or contract you have entered into or because you have asked for something to be done so you can enter into a contract with us.

Its use is necessary because of a legal obligation that applies to us (except an obligation imposed by a contract). This may include responding to subpoenas, warrants or other requests served on pickestry anywhere in the world or to protect or defend the rights or property of pickestry or its users.

You have consented to its use in a specific way. For example where you have consented to receiving marketing materials. You may withdraw your consent at any time as further described in Section 9 (Your choices and data protection rights).

Its use is necessary to protect your vital interests. This will only arise in exceptional circumstances where we will use and/or disclose information about you to identify, locate and protect you if requested by a regulatory authority.

Its use is in accordance with our legitimate interests e.g. to manage our business, subject to those interests not overriding your fundamental rights and freedoms. This may include monitoring and administering our Site, corresponding with you in connection with our Services, research and development purposes, participating in partnership agreements or for the purposes of detecting and preventing illegal activities. We may also need to transfer some or all of your Personal Data to a third party or their advisors in connection with a sale, merger or reorganisation of our business. We will do this on the basis of our legitimate interests as part of any due diligence process for the purpose of analysing the proposed sale or reorganisation or after the sale or reorganisation for the same purposes as set out in this notice.

If we ask you to provide Personal Data to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your Personal Data is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your Personal Data).

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your Personal Data, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” section below.

5. Profiling

In connection with our marketing activities, we analyze some of the information that we collect about our customers to determine what offers are more likely to be of interest to different categories of customers in different circumstances and at different times. We call this the creation of “segments”. From time to time, we will assess the Personal Data that we hold about you in order to assign you to a particular segment. We may use the segment that you have been assigned to in order to tailor our marketing communications to include offers and content that are relevant to you. We may also use this method to avoid sending you offers that are unlikely to be of interest to you.

6. How long we hold your Personal Data

We retain Personal Data we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements). This may also include situations where litigation is pending or ongoing and such information is subject to a legal hold.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your Personal Data, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your Personal Data has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your Personal Data and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the retention of your Personal Data, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to Contact Us” Section below.

7. International Data Transfers

Your Personal Data may be transferred to, and processed in, countries other than the country in which you are resident. These countries may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country.

Specifically, if you are located in the EEA, you should note that your Personal Data will be accessed by pickestry staff or suppliers, transferred, and/or stored outside the EEA, including to the US and other countries which have different data protection laws.

However, we have taken appropriate safeguards to require that your Personal Data will remain protected in accordance with this General Privacy Notice. These include implementing an adequate method of transfer, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or Privacy Shield, for transfers of Personal Data with our third party service providers and partners, further details of which can be provided upon request. We also participate and comply with the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks. Please click here to read our Privacy Shield Notice.

8. Your choices and data protection rights

Providing and holding Personal Data comes with significant rights on your part and significant obligations on ours.

a. Your marketing choices

We offer you choices regarding the collection, use, and sharing of your Personal Data. We will periodically send you newsletters and emails that directly promote the use of our Site or the purchase of our Services, in accordance with your marketing preferences.

When you receive newsletters or promotional communications from us, you have the opportunity to “opt-out” from receiving further marketing communications from us by following the unsubscribe instructions provided in the email you receive or by contacting us or about our Services by sending an email to support@pickestry.com.

Should you decide to opt-out of receiving future mailings, we will retain a record of your preference (including retaining your email address) and we may share your email address with third parties solely for the purpose of ensuring that you do not receive further marketing communications related to our Services from third parties.

Your email preferences only affect marketing communications. Pickestry retains the rights, as well as the obligation in some circumstances, to send you notices of any updates to our Terms of Service, Services Privacy Notice, or General Privacy Notice, as well as necessary transactional communications.

b. Your data protection rights

Data protection rights that apply to all individuals:

• You may correct, update or amend any of your Personal Data contained in your account by editing your profile within the registration portion of our Site, by sending an e-mail to us at the e-mail address at support@pickestry.com.
• You may also request deletion of your account information by sending an email at support@pickestry.com. However, please note that we may be required (by law or otherwise) to keep this information and not delete it (or to keep this information for a certain time, in which case we will comply with your deletion request only after we have fulfilled such requirements).
• We will endeavor to respond without delay. We will otherwise retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you Services as well as is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

9. Advertising

We partner with third party ad networks to either display advertising on our Site or to manage our advertising on other sites. Our ad network partner uses cookies and web beacons to collect non-personally identifiable information about your activities on this Site and other websites to provide you targeted advertising based upon your interests. To learn more about targeted advertising and advertising networks and about your ability to opt out of collection by certain third parties, please visit the opt-out pages of the Network Advertising Initiative, here, and the Digital Advertising Alliance, here. In addition, if you wish to opt-out of interest-based advertising click here (or, if located in the European Union, click here).

Please note this does not opt you out of being served advertising. You will continue to receive generic ads.

10. Third Party Websites and social media widgets

This General Privacy Notice applies only to the use and disclosure of Personal Data that we collect while you use our Site(s).

Our provision of a link to any other website or location is for your convenience and does not signify our endorsement of such other website or location or its contents. When you click on such a link, you will leave our site and go to another site. During this process, a third party may collect Personal Data from you.

We have no control over, do not review, and cannot be responsible for, these outside websites or their content. Please be aware that the terms of this General Privacy Notice do not apply to these outside websites or content, or to any collection of data after you click on a link to a third party. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy statement of any website you visit.

Our Sites also include social media features, such as the Facebook Like button and widgets, such as the “Share this” button or interactive mini-programs that run on our site. These features may collect your ip address, which page you are visiting on our Site, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Site. Your interactions with these features are also governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.

11. Security of Your Personal Data

Pickestry is committed to protecting the security of your Personal Data. We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your Personal Data from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For instance, when you enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number) on our order forms, we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). All account accesses require users to provide their username and password. It is the responsibility of each user to maintain this information in a secure manner. Despite these measures, you should know that pickestry cannot fully eliminate security risks associated with Personal Data and mistakes and security breaches may happen. If you have any questions about security on our Sites, you can contact us using the details provided under the “How to Contact Us” Section below.

12. Changes to this General Privacy Notice

This General Privacy Notice is subject to occasional revision, and if we make any substantial changes in the way we use your Personal Data, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make. We will obtain your consent to any material changes in the way we use your Personal Data and in accordance with applicable data protection laws. You can see when this General Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this General Privacy Notice.

VABatteries Team