Privacy Standard

This content is marked source of information.

Effective Date: September 1, 2022.

We appreciate your concern about knowing about the standards that we are maintaining to protect your privacy rights on our digital properties. These privacy standards apply to Digital Setups (SMC-Private) Limited (collectively ‘Digital Setups’, ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, ‘DS’). Digital Setups websites include digitalsetups.com, digitalsetups.net, digitalsetups.pk, and digitalsetups.org (collectively ‘DS Websites’, ‘Digital Setups websites’, ‘Websites’, ‘Digital Setups Digital Properties’). Digital Setups mobile application includes PWA version of Digital Setups website and native apps on Android & Apple official play stores (collectively ‘DS Apps’, ‘Apps’). Collectively, Websites and Apps are referred to as ‘DS Services’ or ‘Services’.

By interacting with our Websites or Apps, you may share certain information about you that we might use to provide better content, improve our editorial and advertising standards, deliver the right ads, and help you directly with more information.

We do our best to inform you what information we collect about you, how we use and share it, and how you can manage it (collectively, ‘Privacy Policy’, ‘Privacy Standard’). We highly recommend reading our privacy standards completely. In case you think we’re missing acknowledgment of any information that we use or share, please let us know by emailing standards@digitalsetups.org

1. Introduction
2. What Information do we collect
   1. Information you provide us yourself
   2. Information we collect in the background

Introduction

This Privacy Standard explains:

1. What information do we collect, its types, and how you generally share it with us
2. How we use the collected information for editorial and advertising improvements
3. How you can manage the information that you share with us as your privacy right

We have tried our best to keep the points easier to understand and defined the terminologies right on this page, however, if you encounter an abbreviation or another unknown term, please refer to the applicable data protection and privacy laws glossary assets.

What information do we collect?

When you interact with Digital Setups Digital Properties or Services, we look forward to particular information about you based on your interaction or activity.

Information you provide to us by yourself

You might provide us information by yourself for certain services in several ways as given below:

• Subscription to Mailing List: When subscribing to one or more of our newsletters and other mailing lists, you share your first name, last name, and email with us to let us send newsletter email straight to your inbox.
• Contacting us directly via contact form: When you contact us to inquire about something, report an issue, for an advertising opportunity, or related, you share your first name, last name, email, phone, and company information in case of advertising to contact you.
• Making a purchase or donation: When you donate to us or make a purchase of advertisement space, besides your first & last name, email, phone, and address, you share your payment details (credit/debit for online payments, bank account for offline payments). This information is used by payment processors to authorize and verify the purchase. We use this information for our records and provide you services accordingly.
• Giving feedback on our content: When you share your feedback via Feedback option on individual article page, you share your email, first name, and last name. We do not require phone number to share feedback. We use this information to ensure the feedback is shared by a legit person and we can contact you to request more details about a particular feedback.
• Reporting infringement or flagging content: When you directly report us for infringed content or article on our site, we request for your complete details to carry the case. It includes your first name, last name, email, phone, occupation, profession, address, web address, and reference to your/original content. We use this information to contact you and proceed the case on official grounds.
• Surveys, Quizzes, & Polls: When you participate in either survey, quiz, or poll advertised on our website, we collect participant data to help our business analyst, editorial team, and support team to better understand how we are performing, what should we improve, and if you consent, provide you with relevant services, offers, and ads.
• Partner or Advertiser Promotions: When you intentionally take part it, or click, or sign up for any of our partner or advertiser promotions advertised on our website via sponsored posts and/or ad units, you share your identity, device, location (sometimes), and personal data (where requested). Our partners and advertisers generally use this data to offer you personalized services or products. We do not control or store this data directly, however, sometimes where the promotion is linked to our business need, we store it to fulfil our business promotional need.
• Employment-related data: We do not advertise any employment via digitalsetups.com, however, you might share your identity, professional, some personal, and other employment-related data when you apply to our advertised jobs via digitalsetups.org and social networks. We use this data to process your application, to retain you as an employee, or to connect with you for future business need (if necessary). We do not advertise jobs on 3rd party platforms such as Linkedin, Rozee, Indeed, or job content scraping sites.

Information we collect about you in the background

When you use our digital services, we collect some information automatically in the background and it happens when: –

• Cookies: When you use our digital services or websites or apps, we store several cookies in your local storage (browser and/or device storage) to keep track of some activities such as login/logout status, privacy setting, consent cookies, visit and session activity cookies (pixels, tags, trafficking scripts), ad cookies (to decide interest-based and behavioral advertising), and 3rd/internal party cookies for surveys, quizzes, polls, & forms. We use these cookies to provide you personalized, better, and right experience from our digital services, apps, or websites. Generally, all cookies that we/3rd party store & retrieve from your device are necessary, however, you can manage your privacy settings to allow/disallow some optional cookies from our website.
• Location Information: To personalize & enhance your content, ads, and related experience on our website, we collect location data. You can always manage your location-sharing setting from your device or browser you use to connect to our website or digital channel. This information is collected by 3rd parties as well and sometimes you may see location-specific ads or offers because you shared your data with that 3rd party via another digital channel such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, or other medium. Those third parties use that data for remarketing and advertising to the right audience using their own data store.
• Cross-device and Cross-Platform tracking: We also collect information such as from where you landed on our website i-e referral site/channel, where you left to, what devices you use to connect to us to centralize the cookies and provide seamless transition and synchronization of your data, and more. Collecting cross-platform and device data is the need of our effective advertising as well and usually this data is also tracked via 3rd party tracking scripts such as Analytics, Pixels, and more.
• Additional Data Analytics: Using 3rd party services such as Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel, we collect additional data such as OS information, IP address, ISP, click-activity, cross-device & platform data, datetime stamps, and more to understand and analyze our visitor & user data. We require this information to define and analyze certain business KPIs, ROI on our ad-revenue model, and to provide targeted content (editorial, sponsored, and ads) to you.
• Interaction-driven Data: We monitor interactions such as click-activity, download, and connection request activities to not only provide right content to you but also prevent fraudulent or spam clicks, sign ups, subscriptions, and connections to our services/content.
• Email Interaction-driven Data: We capture data related to your interaction with our emails sent to you. This data includes tracking which link(s) from email you click or open, which email you opened, and more. We use this information to understand how we are doing with our communication with you, improving our newsletter content for you, respecting your removal request from our mailing list, and tracking conversions through email.

Information we receive from other sources

At certain times other sources help us to improve our communication, content delivery, and advertising strategy and decisions. This information may include: –

• Customer or Partner Requests via 3rd Party: When our existing customer, partners, or outsourcing service providers directly connect us with new customer, advertiser, partner, employment application candidate, or affiliate, we collect identity, professional, business, and end-users information from them. This is important for us to process referred applicant’s application or request.
• Credit Status and Financial Data: We may collect credit status of our advertisers, customers, and partners who want to connect with us. We collect this data to ensure we are trusting on a stable, trustworthy, and right party to carry out services with. We do not require any credit status checkups for our general audience, visitors, or content consumers.
• Data for Retargeting and Remarketing: Our advertising and marketing team collect data from 3rd party to target right people to consume our content, ads, and market our services to only highly interested prospects. Generally you already give your consent to those 3rd parties for collecting and sharing your data to cross-advertising networks. One thing: we do not buy people’s data directly such as emails, identity information, or activity on 3rd party platforms. We do our best to rely on our direct and data collected based upon general consents at third party platforms.
• Public & Social Media Data: We collect profile information including email, gender, interests, likes, and general interaction-data from publicly observed content (articles, videos, social campaigns). We collect this data to conduct research for case-studies, whitepapers, forecasting KPI performances in similar campaigns, and improving our business strategy. Again, we do not misuse any of your data to manipulate or over-optimize our services or products since we strictly respect privacy acts.

How we use collected information about you?

We use the collected information to improve our editorial standards, advertising approach & strategy, and to provide you better experience on our websites, apps, or other channels. Refer to the following use cases to understand how we use your personal and public information collected through our (direct) and 3rd party sources: –

• To provide better user experience on and across all of our digital channels (websites, apps, and social media)
• To personalize and improve ad recommendations, sponsored stories/posts, and core services. Having your information help our system to not spam you with ads and to show only right ads based on your activity, preferences, consent for interest-based ad targeting, and opt-ins.
• To analyze and optimize our growth KPIs, improve our editorial and technical standards, and align our workflows. We, generally, analyze our traffic demographics, behavior, preferences, and reactions. Based on our analysis results, we improve our strategic workflows, standards, and content delivery.
• To identify you as our member, visitor, or client in order to serve you right service, ad, or content. The other purpose of this identification is to ensure safety and right & permissible use of our service/products/platforms by you based on our terms of use.
• To carry out transactions, when you make a purchase of service or product or donate, with secure, identity-theft protection, and fraud protection services. We keep a record against transactions to track our sales, provide you service/product in return, and offer applicable discounts and deals.
• To communicate with you, for general and promotional messages, via email, profile messages or general notices, push notifications, feedback or reports, and other online/offline channel based on your consent and preferences
• To ensure our rights over you, investigation of security issue or misconduct, entertaining requests, defending against legal claims, and related administrative & legal matters.
• For all other general and legal purposes that are not stated in this privacy policy based on your consent to our privacy policy informed and uninformed updates and related actions. When you use or connect to our digital platforms in any form, it directly means that you’re giving us consent to accept all enabled cookies, privacy policy, terms of use, and acknowledgement of disclaimer, however, you can manage necessary and unnecessary cookies stored by our websites and apps via device, browser, and ad choices settings as explained in next section.

When and How we disclose your information?

Besides using your information directly for our administrative, strategic, editorial, and advertising purposes, we may disclose your information to 3rd parties when needed. Following are the main situations when we might share your info: –

Government and Legal

• While filing taxes, sometimes, we need to show our transaction records which may include your info.
• To defend or challenge against legal claims
• To challenge, protect, and maintain our official standings

We strictly respect your privacy, therefore, we promise to use your information for legitimate business purposes only. We do not sell your data or misuse your data in any way. We love your presence and trust in us, so we do our best to not disappoint you in any way, however, when it comes to 3rd parties like Google, Bing, or other advertising and data tracking networks, we are not 100% sure how they might be using your information. We recommend reading their privacy policies besides ours to ensure that you know how they might be using your information.

How to manage or give us consent to store, use, and share your information?

Again, we do respect your privacy, therefore, we have shared the following information with complete transparency to control your information about you that we/3rd parties collect.