American Association of Dental Office Management (AADOM) Privacy Policy

Overview

American Association of Dental Office Management (“AADOM” or “Company”) is committed to protecting the privacy of our members’ personal information. The purpose of this policy is to inform you of AADOM’s practices in relation to the personal information that you provide to us when using registering for our services or our Sites (‘Your Information’), including:

  • Collection and Use of Your Information
  • Sharing Your Information
  • Security of Your Information
  • Changing or Correcting Your Information
  • A Note About International Users
  • California Consumer Privacy Act
  • Changes to Our Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by us when you visit the Sites dentalmanagers.com, dentalmanagersconference.com, aadomchapters.com, aadom.com and aadomconference.com. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the terms of the AADOM Terms of Service. Your use of the Sites,  signifies that you have read, understood and agree to be bound by the Terms of Service, which incorporate this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, you must discontinue using the services on our Sites and discontinue your membership.

COLLECTION AND USE OF YOUR INFORMATION

Information You Provide

We collect information that you provide in several areas on the Sites, including member and newsletter sign up pages, site registrations, contests and promotions, product reviews and website surveys, purchasing a subscription or access to courses, customer service requests, and requests for product information. The information that you will provide in order to participate in these features includes Your Information such as your name, title, mailing address, work and cell telephone numbers, email address, username and password, AGD number, license number, employer/practice information, credit card information, gender, date of birth, profile picture, educational details, as well as “demographic” information such as your hobbies, your relation to a dentist, or personal preferences.

Registration

During the process of registering on the Site, you may be required to provide certain personal information, such as your name, mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, and password. Please keep in mind that, although your personal information will not be viewable by other members, once you are registered, your user name will be displayed on the Site. Once you have created your user name and password they will become non-transferable. Each password is unique to each authorized user and is non-transferable. Users will log into our Sites using only their authorized user name and password.

Participation in Surveys

From time-to-time, we may request information from our users via surveys. When you participate in one of our surveys, we may request contact information (such as your name and e-mail address). AADOM conducts surveys in order to target advertising and content and to better understand members’ needs and opinions. AADOM may share, in aggregate form, information it collects from these surveys with its advertisers, partners, affiliates and the general public, but will not share survey information containing personally identifiable information with any third party without prior consent. Your participation in our surveys is completely voluntary. However, we encourage our members to participate in these surveys as they provide us with important information that helps us to improve our services or services that may be offered on our Sites or by our affiliates or third-party advertisers.

Using the Blog Center

Information submitted to our Blog is displayed to AADOM members, so please exercise care in choosing what information you wish to disclose. We have the right, but not the obligation, to monitor any activity and content associated with the Blog section of the Sites.

Information We Collect Automatically From Your Use of the Sites

When you use our Sites, we and our third-party service providers may collect information from you through automated means, such as cookies, web beacons, and web server logs. By using the Sites, you consent to the placement of cookies, beacons, and similar technologies in your browser and on emails in accordance with this Privacy Policy. The information collected in this manner includes, without limitation, IP address, browser characteristics, device IDs and characteristics, operating system version, language preferences, referring URLs, and information about the usage of our Sites.

We may use this information, for example, to ensure that the Sites function properly, to determine how many users have visited certain pages or opened messages or newsletters, or to prevent fraud. We use IP address to derive your approximate location.

We work with analytics providers such as Google Analytics, which uses cookies and similar technologies to collect and analyze information about use of the Sites and report on activities and trends. This service may also collect information regarding the use of other websites, apps and online resources. You can

learn about Google’s practices by going to https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/, and opt out of them by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available

at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

AADOM uses cookies and similar technology to identify registered users of our Sites and to automatically give them access to “member only” content areas such as articles and reports, and to provide them with access to previously-stored information. AADOM and our third-party partners, such as online advertising networks and website analytics providers, also use cookies and other similar technology for such activities as estimating our audience size and usage patterns, showing you personalized advertising on other websites based on your usage of the Sites, and tracking the aggregate number of customer returns at our Sites. Our partners also may collect information about your online activities over time and on other web sites or apps. Finally, AADOM uses cookies to help simplify the process of filling out certain forms on our Sites that allow you to request information from manufactures in our catalog and/or our advertisers.

If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, most browsers allow you to automatically decline cookies or be given the choice of declining or accepting the transfer to your computer of a particular cookie (or cookies) from a particular site. You may also wish to refer

to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/index.html. If, however, you do not accept cookies, you may experience some inconvenience in your use of the Sites.

When You or Third Parties Contact Us

If you contact AADOM by phone, email or letter, we may keep a record of such correspondence. Thus, if you report any issue with the site, we may retain such information in a file. Moreover, if you contact us through our feedback area, we require your name and email address in order to send you a response.

We may use the information we collect:

  • For internal and service-related purposes, such as to respond to your specific requests, fulfill your purchase, respond to comments and questions, and otherwise provide support to users.
  • To contact you for administrative and promotional purposes. This may include to send you periodic information and special offers from AADOM and our sponsors and partners, to provide you with updates on AADOM offerings and features, to provide you with product information from manufacturers in our database, and to provide notice of changes to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
  • To understand users’ interests and behavior, improve the Sites, and, services, features, and functionalities. We may combine your information with information AADOM may have from other online or offline sources.
  • For marketing purposes, such as developing and providing promotional and advertising materials, and to provide our sponsors with aggregate data about our users.
  • For our business purposes, such as account verification, security, compliance with applicable laws and regulations, fraud monitoring and prevention.
  • Conference attendees mailing addresses may be shared with third party conference sponsors.
  • To enforce our Terms of Service or other legal rights.

We may anonymize and aggregate data we collect and use it for any purpose.

 SHARING PERSONAL INFORMATION

1. Confidentiality

AADOM will only share your information with others when we have your direct permission or under the circumstances described in this Privacy Policy. We will also limit access to your information to only those employees who we believe need to come into contact with that information to provide products or services to you or to do their jobs.

2. Third Party Advertising

The advertisements that appear on the Sites are generally delivered through internal software operated by AADOM. AADOM has no control over the content or privacy practices of any third-party website, and therefore we encourage you to review such content and policies prior to submitting any personal information to them. We do share certain aggregate information, such as demographic information and the number of times that our members have viewed an advertisement, with our third-party advertisers. This information is not linked with any personally identifiable information, and we do not provide any such information to third party advertisers.

AADOM may use aggregated, statistical information to describe our membership and to establish advertising and other business relationships with third parties. AADOM may serve you with targeted advertisements based on your personal and/or profile information, but AADOM does not provide any of this personal information to any advertiser or any third party with the exception of those uses expressly disclosed in this policy. However, if you click or view an ad on our Sites then you consent to the likelihood that the advertiser will assume that you meet the targeting criteria, if any, used to display such ad and, as described above, you will be subject to the advertiser’s privacy policy and information collection practices.

3. Service Providers

We may use a third party to provide specific services on our behalf, including sending e-mails to our members, conducting member surveys, processing transactions or performing statistical analysis of our services. In these cases, we may provide certain personal information, such as your name and e-mail address and other financial information necessary for the service to be provided. However, these third parties are required to maintain the confidentiality of this information and are prohibited from retaining, sharing, storing or using this information for any other purposes.

4. Affiliates and Business Transitions

AADOM may share Your Information with its affiliates that are subject to privacy policies that protect your personally identifiable information from disclosure to third parties in a manner similar to this Privacy Policy. In the event that AADOM goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition, liquidation or sale of all or a portion of its assets, our members personal information will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred or shared.

5. Legal Matters; Protection of Rights, Property and Interests; Safety

We may, without your consent, access and disclose Your Information, any communications sent or received by you, and any other information that we may have about you or your account: as may be permitted or required by law, regulation, rule or court order; pursuant to requests from governmental, regulatory or administrative agencies or law enforcement authorities; or to prevent, investigate, identify persons or organizations potentially involved in, or take any action regarding suspected fraud, violations of our Terms of Service, or activity that appears to us to be illegal or may expose us to legal liability. Additionally, we may disclose Your Information in situations that we believe to be emergencies involving potential threats to the physical safety or any person or property if we believe that Your Information in any way relates to that threat.

CHANGING, CORRECTING OR REMOVING YOUR INFORMATION

AADOM provides you with ways in which you can update Your Information. To make changes to Your Information, please login to the Sites and go to your account area. Here you may change such information as your name, mailing address, e-mail address, password and payment information. If at any time you wish to have your membership deleted from any of the Sites for any reason, you can send an email to info@dentalmanagers.com. Upon removal of your membership, we may retain your information for a period of time in our internal databases and systems.

THE SECURITY OF YOUR INFORMATION

We have instituted physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to store and maintain your information in a secure environment. For example, when highly confidential information, such as a credit card number, is transmitted through our Sites, it is encrypted by using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) software. You will also be required to use a password to access certain pages on the Sites where certain types of information can be changed or deleted. Therefore, it is important for you to keep your password and email correspondence that we send you confidential.. While we have implemented safeguards, you should be aware that Internet security technology changes rapidly. We are not able to guarantee that the safeguards we employ today can protect Your Information from future threats. You should be aware that regardless of our efforts, factors beyond our control may result in the disclosure of Your Information. Accordingly, we are not in a position to guarantee that Your Information will be secure under all circumstances. Accordingly, your use of the Sites is done at your own risk.

A NOTE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL USERS

We collect, process and maintain Your Information in the United States, where privacy laws may not be comparable to those of your home country. If you are using the site from outside of the United States, by providing Your Information to us you are consenting to the transfer of Your Information to the United States for processing and maintaining in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy.

CALIFORNIA CONSUMER PRIVACY ACT

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, Cal. Civ. Code §§ 1798.100 – 1798.199 (CCPA) gives California consumers certain rights as to their personal information as defined by that law. The following applies to California consumers.

You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past 12 months. You may request (i) the categories of personal information we collected about you; (ii) the categories of sources for the personal information we collected about you; (iii) our business or commercial purpose for collecting that personal information; (iv) the categories of third parties with whom we shared that personal information; and (v) the specific pieces of personal information we collected about you. The categories of personal information that is collected in the past 12 months, the commercial purposes the information is collected and processed; and the third parties to whom that information has been disclosed are described above.

You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions.  Once we receive and confirm your request, we will delete your personal information from our records, unless an exception applies. We may deny your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for us to: (i) complete the transaction for which we collected the personal information, provide a good or service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our contract with you; (ii) detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities; (iii) debug products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality; (iv) exercise free speech, ensure the right of another party to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law; (v) enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us; (vi) comply with a legal obligation; or (vii) make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.

To exercise your CCPA rights, please submit a request to us by either calling us at 732-842-9977 or by sending an e-mail to info@dentalmanagers.com.

Only you or a person registered with the California Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf may make a request related to your personal information. The request must: (i) provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or an authorized representative; and (ii) describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it. We may need to contact you to request additional information in order to verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or that you are an authorized representative. We will not use any information provided as part of a request, including any contact information you provide or that we request in order to respond to or verify a request, for any purpose other than to respond to or verify your request.

We will make an effort to respond to your request within 45 days of its receipt. If we require more time (up to 90 days), we will inform you of the reason and extension period in writing either by mail or electronically, at your option. Any disclosures we provide will only cover the 12-month period before our receipt of the request. The response we provide will also explain the reasons we cannot comply with a request, if applicable.

We do not charge a fee to process or respond to your request unless it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded. If we determine that the request warrants a fee, we will tell you why we made that decision and provide you with a cost estimate before completing your request.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights by (i) denying you goods or services; (ii) charging you a different price or rates for goods or services; or (iii) providing you a different level of quality of goods or service.

RETENTION AND DELETION OF YOUR INFORMATION

This section sets out our data retention policies and procedure, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal data.

Your Information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes. Your Information will be retained for a minimum period of 26 months.

The retention period for a specific user will reset with each new event from that user (thus setting the expiration date to current time plus retention period). For example, if data retention is set to 26 months but a user initiates a new session every month, then that user’s identifier is refreshed every month and never reaches the 26-month expiry. If the user doesn’t initiate a new session before the retention period expires, then that user’s data is deleted.

Notwithstanding the other provisions of this section, we may retain your Information where such retention is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject, or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

OUR POLICY TOWARDS CHILDREN

Our services are not directed to children. If a parent or guardian becomes aware that his or her child has provided us with personal information without their consent, please contact us. If we become aware that a child has registered for a service and has provided us with personal information, we will delete such information from our files.

We have not sold personal information in the preceding 12 months.

For additional information regarding your rights under the CCPA, or how to exercise them, you may contact us at  info@dentalmanagers.com.

CHANGES TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY

AADOM may make changes to this policy from time to time if our information practices are modified or changed. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information regarding our policies.

Date of current version: September 2, 2022