SOCIETY OF CRITICAL CARE CARDIOLOGY
PRIVACY POLICY
Effective October 2024
1. Personal Information You Give to Us
The Society of Critical Care Cardiology (“SoCCC,” the “Society,” or “we” or “us”) may collect or process your personal data for a number of different reasons. When we collect your personal data, we will explain why we are collecting the information from you. We will also always make it clear which data is necessary for you to provide and which is optional.
Membership
When you become a member of the Society, we collect information about you, including but not limited to, your name, email, date of birth, occupation, personal and professional addresses, institutional affiliation, education, and training, if applicable, state medical license number, national provider identifier (NPI), and national medical board certification dates and numbers. We ask members to voluntarily provide additional information in their membership profile, such as their mobile phone numbers, their interests, and qualifications. Members may ask us to change, add, or remove personal information that we have collected from them at any time by emailing us at the email address provided on our website.
We process your personal information for membership administration, to deliver member benefits to you, and to inform you of events, content, and other benefits or opportunities associated with your membership in the Society. The Society may also use your personal information to help it to understand members’ needs and interests and to better tailor our products and services to meet them.
The Society will use its best efforts to comply with all applicable laws with respect to the gathering, handling, storage, and use of your personal information.
Events and Conferences
The Society hosts events throughout the year. These include in-person conferences as well as live and on-demand web conferences (collectively “events”). If you register for one of our events and you are a member, we will update your membership record to note that you have attended the event. We will transfer the information you provide on your registration form to your membership record. If you register for one of our events, we will collect your name and contact information; information on your area of expertise; area of work; type of workplace; job level; if you are a Fellow-in-Training; and if you have submitted an abstract or applied for an award. We will store this information in our database(s) and use it to provide you with information and services associated with the event. We process this information to fulfill the registration you have made to receive the event services. There may also be a number of optional fields in your registration, such as your department; mobile phone; email address; and Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/Twitter/X ID.
If you are a presenter at one of our events, we will collect information about you, including your name, employer, and contact information, abstract information, and photograph, and we may also collect information provided by event attendees who evaluated your performance as a presenter. We may also make and store a recording of your presentation and likeness.
We keep a record of your participation in our events as an attendee or presenter. This information may be required to provide you with Continuing Medical Education (CME) and other Continuing Education (CE) credits, and maintenance of certification (MOC) points. We may also use it to tell you about other events and publications. It may also be used to help us understand our members’ needs and interests to better tailor our meetings, products, and services to meet their needs.
You may have the option to download an event application to help you navigate the conference and plan your schedule. That application may require the device identifier associated with your device but does not collect or use any other personal data.
Some of our events are sponsored. The Society may provide an attendee list to co-organizers or sponsors of our events. If you do not wish to receive information from sponsors and/or exhibitors, you can express your preferences when you register for events, or you may contact us directly at the email address set forth on our website. We give attendees a choice not to receive marketing messages from the sponsor or from us.
Journals
If the Society publishes any journal and you have a subscription to that journal, the Society may use your personal information to provide the journal or electronic access to the journal to you. We may share your personal information to the publishers of our journals to enable them to provide their services to us. The Society will not share this information with any third party.
Newsletters and Surveys
To receive emails with any newsletter we may publish, you will need to create a profile with us and provide us with at least, your first and last name, and an email address. To receive membership-specific email communications you will also have to join as a member and provide us with professional information described under Membership above. The Society does not share this information with any third party other than to store the information in our cloud-hosted databases. We rely on a contract basis to process your personal information for purposes of fulfilling your request to receive our publications. You may, at your own option, choose to subscribe to news and updates from the Society which may be considered direct marketing.
You may manage your subscriptions with us by subscribing or unsubscribing at any time. Please note that if you have set your browser to block cookies, this may have an impact on your ability to unsubscribe. If you have any difficulties managing your email or other communication preferences with us, please contact us at the email address set forth on our website.
We also conduct surveys and may use your feedback to help improve our services. While some surveys are anonymous, we still collect IP and geographical information, but we do not track individuals but look at information in the aggregate only. Other surveys request emails, addresses, and phone details. Where we require this information, it is made clear within the survey. Participation in surveys is voluntary.
Payment Card Information
You may choose to pay your membership fees, to purchase goods or services from us, or to make a donation to us using a payment card. Typically, payment card information is provided directly by users, via our website, into payment processing service to which we subscribe, and we do not process or store the card information.
Grant Applications and Abstract Submissions
The Society may offer grants, conduct competitions, and provide opportunities for the presentation of abstracts. In connection with these activities, we collect information such as name, contact email, affiliation, project description, research plan, curriculum vitae, budget and letter of reference, and copies of documents you provide to prove your age or identity. This will include details of your full name, address, date of birth, and facial image. If you provide a copy of your passport, the data will also include your place of birth, gender, and nationality. We rely on a contract basis to process your personal information for purposes of providing your grant. We rely on a legitimate interest basis for collecting, storing, and processing your abstract information and for running the competition.
2. Use of Our Website
Our website collects and stores certain information automatically. The information may include internet protocol (IP) addresses, the region or general location where your computer or device is accessing the internet, browser type, operating system, and other usage information about the use of our website, including a history of the pages you view. We use this information to help us design our website to better suit our users’ needs. We may also use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server and to administer our website, analyze trends, track visitor movements, and gather broad demographic information that assists us in identifying visitor preferences. Our website also uses cookies. It does not track users when they cross to third-party websites, does not provide targeted advertising to them, and therefore does not respond to Do Not Track (DNT) signals.
Cookies
Our website uses cookies to provide enhanced functionality on the website and aggregate data of traffic on our website. These cookies may be delivered in a first-party or third-party context. We may also use cookies in association with emails delivered by us. Our website may also capture limited information (user-agent, HTTP referrer, last URL requested by the user, client-side and server-side clickstream) about visits to our website. We may use this information to analyze general traffic patterns and to perform routine system maintenance. You may have many choices with regard to the management of cookies on your computer. To learn more about your ability to manage cookies, please consult the privacy features in your browser.
3. If you don’t give us your information
You can enjoy many of our services without giving us your personal data. Much of the information on our website is available even to those who are not members of the Society. Some personal information is necessary so that we can supply you with the services you have purchased or requested and to authenticate you so that we know it is you and not someone else. You may manage your subscriptions with us, and you may opt out of receiving marketing communication at any time.
4. Personal information we get from third parties
From time to time, the Society may receive personal information about individuals from third parties. This may happen if your employer signs you up for membership.
5. Purposes for processing your data
The Society processes your data to provide you with the goods or services you have requested or purchased from us, including membership services, events, publications, and other content. We use this information to refine our goods and services to better tailor them to your needs and to communicate with you about other services we may offer that may assist you in your practice.
6. When and how we share information with others
Information about your Society membership, purchases and subscriptions is maintained in association with your membership or profile account. The personal information we collect from you is stored in one or more databases hosted by third parties located in the United States. These third parties do not use or have access to your personal information for any purpose other than cloud storage and retrieval.
We do not otherwise reveal your personal data to third parties for their independent use unless: (1) you request or authorize it; (2) it’s in connection with conferences we host or co-sponsor; (3) the information is provided to comply with the law (for example, to comply with a search warrant, subpoena or court order), enforce an agreement we have with you, or to protect our rights, property or safety, or the rights, property or safety of our employees or others; (4) the information is provided to our agents, vendors, or service providers who perform functions on our behalf; (5) to address emergencies or acts of God; or (6) to address disputes, claims, or to persons demonstrating legal authority to act on your behalf. We may also gather aggregated data about our members and website visitors and disclose the results of such aggregated (but not personally identifiable) information to our partners, service providers, advertisers, and/or other third parties for marketing or promotional purposes.
7. How we protect your personal data
We know how much data security matters to our members and subscribers. Accordingly, we will treat your data with the utmost care and take all reasonable, appropriate steps to protect it once we receive it. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personally identifiable information, we can’t ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us or from our online products or services, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your personally identifiable information, we will make reasonable efforts to ensure its security on our systems.
To help protect the privacy of data and personally identifiable information you transmit using our website, we maintain physical, technical, and administrative safeguards. We update and test our security technology on an ongoing basis. We restrict access to your personal data to those employees and agents who need to know that information to provide benefits or services to you. In addition, we train our employees and agents about the importance of confidentiality and maintaining the privacy and security of your information. We commit to taking appropriate disciplinary measures to enforce the privacy responsibilities of our employees and agents.
We may also collect information about you that is not personally identifiable. This type of information includes your field of practice, city, state, country, zip code, interests, and preferences. We will not collect any such information about you unless you provide it to us voluntarily. We may share this information in the aggregate with business partners, sponsors, and other third parties.
8. How long will we keep your personal data?
Your personal data is stored by us on our servers, and on the servers of the cloud-based database management services we engage. We retain data for the duration of the customer’s or member’s business relationship with us and for a period of time thereafter to allow members to recover accounts if they decide to renew, to analyze the data for our own operations, and for historical and archiving purposes associated with our history as a membership association. For more information on where and how long your personal data is stored, and for more information on your rights of erasure and portability, please contact us at the email address set forth on our website.
9. What are your rights over your personal data?
You may request information about: the purpose of the processing; the categories of personal data concerned; who else outside the Society might have received the data from us; what the source of the information was (if you didn’t provide it directly to us); and how long it will be stored. You have a right to correct the record of your personal data maintained by us if it is inaccurate. You may request that we erase that data or cease processing it, subject to certain exceptions. You may also request that we cease using your data for direct marketing purposes. In many states or other countries, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal data.
Reasonable access to your personal data will be provided at no cost to our members, conference attendees, and others upon request made to us at the email address set forth on our website. If, for some reason, access is denied, we will provide an explanation as to why access has been denied.
You can contact us to request to exercise these rights at any time by calling or emailing us at the numbers or email addresses set forth on our website.
10. How can you stop the use of your data for direct marketing?
You can contact us to stop the use of your personal data by us for direct marketing by emailing us at the address set forth on our website.
11. Links to other websites
We assume no responsibility for the information practices of other websites you are able to access through our website. These links to other websites do not imply affiliation or endorsement of a linked site.
12. Changes and updates to the Privacy Policy
By using our website, you agree to the terms and conditions contained in this Privacy Policy and per Website Terms of Use and/or any other agreement that we might have with you. If you do not agree to any of these terms and conditions, you should not use our website or any services we provide.
We reserve the right to amend the Privacy Policy and our Website Terms of Use at any time, for any reason, without notice to you, other than the posting of the amended Privacy Policy and/or Terms of Use on our website. The provisions contained on our website at the most current time you access it supersede all previous notices or statements regarding our privacy practices and the terms and conditions that govern the use of our website.
13. How to contact us with any questions
If you have any questions, contact us by emailing us at the address set forth on our website.