Privacy Policy
Effective November 1, 2022
Our registered users (“Members”) share their professional identities, engage with their network, exchange knowledge and professional insights, post and view content, learn and develop skills, and find business and career opportunities. Content and data on some of our Services is viewable to non-members (“Visitors”).
This Privacy Policy applies to arguspeepl.com, Argus Peepl-branded apps, Argus Peepl educational content, and other Argus Peepl-related sites, apps, communications and services (“Services”), including any off-site Services.
Argus Peepl LLC will be the controller of your personal data provided to, or collected by or for, or processed in connection with, our Services.
As a Visitor or Member of our Services, the collection, use and sharing of your personal data is subject to this Privacy Policy and other documents that may be referenced in this Privacy Policy, as well as updates.
Argus Peepl LLC (“we” or “us”) can modify this Privacy Policy, and if we make material changes to it, we will provide notice through our Services, or by other means, to provide you the opportunity to review the changes before they become effective. If you object to any changes, you may close your account.
You acknowledge that your continued use of our Services after we publish or send a notice about our changes to this Privacy Policy means that the collection, use and sharing of your personal data is subject to the updated Privacy Policy, as of its effective date.
Data We Collect
To create an account you need to provide data including your name, email address and/or mobile number, and a password. If you register for a subscription, you will need to provide payment (e.g., credit card) and billing information.
You have choices about the information on your profile, such as your education, work experience, skills, photo, and location. You don’t have to provide additional information on your profile; however, profile information helps you to get more from our Services, including helping recruiters and business opportunities find you. It’s your choice whether to include sensitive information on your profile and to make that sensitive information public, and you do so are your own risk. Please do not post or add personal data to your profile that you would not want to be publicly available.
We collect personal data from you when you provide, post, or upload it to our Services. We may collect and use your information to keep growing your network such as by suggesting connections for you and others.
You don’t have to post or upload personal data; though if you don’t, it may limit your ability to grow and engage with your network over our Services.
You and others may post content that includes information about you (as part of articles, posts, comments, videos, etc.) on our Services. We also may collect public information about you, such as professional-related news and accomplishments, and make it available as part of our Services, including, unless limited by your settings, in notifications to others.
We may receive personal data (including contact information) about you if others import or sync their contacts or calendar with our Services, associate their contacts with Member profiles, scan and upload business cards, or send messages, invites, connection requests, or other uses of our Services.
We may receive personal data (e.g., your job title and work email address) about you when you use the services of our customers and partners, such as employers or prospective employers and applicant tracking systems providing us job application data.
We may receive data about you when you use some of the other services provided by us or our any affiliates.
We may log usage data when you visit or otherwise use our Services, including our sites, app and platform technology, such as when you view or click on content (e.g., learning video) or ads (on or off our sites and apps), perform a search, install or update one of our mobile apps, share articles or other. We use log-ins, cookies, device information and internet protocol (“IP”) addresses to identify you and log use.
We may use cookies and similar technologies such as pixels, local storage and mobile ad IDs (collectively referred to herein as “cookies”) to collect and use data (e.g., device IDs) as part of our Services and/or to recognize you and your device(s) on, off and across different services and devices where you have engaged with our Services. We also allow some others to use cookies. We also collect (or rely on others who collect) information about your device where you have not engaged with our Services (e.g., ad ID, IP address, operating system and browser information) so we can provide our Members with relevant ads and better understand their effectiveness. You are able to limit certain cookies on your machine, but limiting cookies can have a negative effect on your user experience.
A cookie is a small file placed onto your device that enables Argus Peepl features and functionality. Any browser visiting our sites may receive cookies from us or cookies from third parties such as our customers, partners or service providers. We or third parties may also place cookies in your browser when you visit non-Argus Peepl sites that display ads or that host our plugins or tags. We use two types of cookies: persistent cookies and session cookies. A persistent cookie lasts beyond the current session and is used for many purposes, such as recognizing you as an existing user, so it’s easier to return to Argus Peepl and interact with our Services without signing in again. Since a persistent cookie stays in your browser, it will be read by Argus Peepl when you return to one of our sites or visit a third party site that uses our Services. Session cookies last only as long as the session (usually the current visit to a website or a browser session).
A pixel is a tiny image that may be embedded within web pages and emails, requiring a call (which provides device and visit information) to our servers in order for the pixel to be rendered in those web pages and emails. We may use pixels to learn more about your interactions with email content or web content, such as whether you interacted with ads or posts. Pixels can also enable us and third parties to place cookies on your browser.
Local storage enables a website or application to store information locally on your device(s). Local storage may be used to improve the Argus Peepl experience, for example, by enabling features, remembering your preferences and speeding up site functionality.
We also use other tracking technologies, such as mobile advertising IDs and tags for similar purposes as described herein. References to similar technologies in this policy includes pixels, local storage, and other tracking technologies.
We use cookies and similar technologies to recognize you when you visit our Services. If you’re signed into Argus Peepl, these technologies help us show you the right information and personalize your experience in line with your settings. For example, cookies enable Argus Peepl to identify you and verify your account.
We use cookies and similar technologies to make your interactions with our Services faster and more secure. For example, we may use cookies to enable and support our security features, keep your account safe and to help us detect malicious activity and violations of our User Agreement.
We use cookies and similar technologies to enable the functionality of our Services, such as helping you to fill out forms on our Services more easily and providing you with features, insights and customized content in conjunction with our plugins. We also use these technologies to remember information about your browser and your preferences. For example, cookies can tell us which language you prefer and what your communications preferences are. We may also use local storage to speed up site functionality.
We use cookies and similar technologies to customize your experience on our Services. For example, we may use cookies to remember previous searches so that when you return to our services, we can offer additional information that relates to your previous search.
We use cookies and similar technologies to enable Argus Peepl plugins both on and off the Argus Peepl sites. For example, our plugins, including the “Apply with Argus Peepl” button or the “Share” button may be found on Argus Peepl or third-party sites, such as the sites of our customers and partners. Our plugins use cookies and other technologies to provide analytics and recognize you on Argus Peepl and third-party sites. If you interact with a plugin (for instance, by clicking “Apply”), the plugin will use cookies to identify you and initiate your request to apply.
Cookies and similar technologies help us show relevant advertising to you more effectively, both on and off our Services and to measure the performance of such ads. We may use these technologies to learn whether content has been shown to you or whether someone who was presented with an ad later came back and took an action (e.g., downloaded a white paper or made a purchase) on another site. Similarly, our partners or service providers may use these technologies to determine whether we’ve shown an ad or a post and how it performed or provide us with information about how you interact with ads. We may also work with our customers and partners to show you an ad on or off Argus Peepl, such as after you’ve visited a customer’s or partner’s site or application. These technologies help us provide aggregated information to our customers and partners.
Cookies and similar technologies help us learn more about how well our Services and plugins perform in different locations. We or our service providers may use these technologies to understand, improve, and research products, features and services, including as you navigate through our sites or when you access Argus Peepl from other sites, applications or devices. We or our service providers, use these technologies to determine and measure the performance of ads or posts on and off Argus Peepl and to learn whether you have interacted with our websites, content or emails and provide analytics based on those interactions. We may also use these technologies to provide aggregated information to our customers and partners as part of our Services. If you are a Argus Peepl member but logged out of your account on a browser, Argus Peepl may still continue to log your interaction with our Services on that browser until the expiration of the cookie in order to generate usage analytics for our Services. We may share these analytics in aggregate form with our customers.
Third parties such as our customers, partners and service providers may use cookies in connection with our Services. For example, third parties may use cookies in their Argus Peepl pages, posts and their advertisements on and off Argus Peepl for their own marketing purposes. Third parties may also use cookies in connection with our off-site Services, such as any Argus Peepl ad services. Third parties may use cookies to help us to provide our Services. We may also work with third parties for our own marketing purposes and to enable us to analyze and research our Services.
You have choices on how Argus Peepl uses cookies and similar technologies. Please note that if you limit the ability of Argus Peepl to set cookies and similar technologies, you may worsen your overall user experience, since it may no longer be personalized to you. It may also stop you from saving customized settings like login information.
Most browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings, which may be adapted to reflect your consent to the use of cookies. Further, most browsers also enable you to review and erase cookies, including Argus Peepl cookies. To learn more about browser controls, please consult the documentation that your browser manufacturer provides.
Do Not Track (DNT) is a concept that has been promoted by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for the Internet industry to develop and implement a mechanism for allowing Internet users to control the tracking of their online activities across websites by using browser settings. As such, Argus Peepl may or may not respond to “do not track” signals.
When you visit or leave our Services (including some plugins and our cookies or similar technology on the sites of others), we may receive the URL of both the site you came from and the one you go to and the time of your visit. We may also get information about your network and device (e.g., IP address, proxy server, operating system, web browser and add-ons, device identifier and features, cookie IDs and/or ISP, or your mobile carrier). If you use our Services from a mobile device, that device may send us data about your location based on your phone settings. Your device should require an opt-in before we use GPS or other tools to identify your precise location.
We may collect information about you when you send, receive, or engage with messages in connection with our Services. For example, if you get an Argus Peepl connection request, we track whether you have acted on it and may send you reminders.
Others buying our Services for your use, such as your employer or your school, provide us with personal data about you and your eligibility to use the Services that they purchase for use by their workers, students or alumni.
We may receive information about your visits and interaction with services provided by others when you log-in with Argus Peepl or visit others’ services that include some of our plugins or our ads, cookies or similar technologies.
Our Services are dynamic, and we often introduce new features, which may require the collection of new information. If we collect materially different personal data or materially change how we collect, use or share your data, we will notify you and may also modify this Privacy Policy.
How We Use Your Data
How we use your personal data will depend on which Services you use, how you use those Services and the choices you make in your settings. We use the data that we have about you to provide and personalize our Services, including with the help of automated systems and inferences we make, so that our Services (including ads) can be more relevant and useful to you and others. We use your data to authorize access to our Services and honor your settings.
Our Services allow you to stay in touch and up to date with colleagues, partners, clients, and other professional contacts. To do so, you can “connect” with the professionals who you choose, and who also wish to “connect” with you. Subject to your and their settings, when you connect with other Members, you may be able to search each others’ connections in order to exchange professional opportunities.
We may use data about you to help others find your profile, suggest connections for you and others (e.g. Members who share your contacts or job experiences) and enable you to invite others to become a Member and connect with you. You may also be able to opt-in to allow us to use your precise location or proximity to others for certain tasks.
It is your choice whether to invite someone to our Services, send a connection request, or allow another Member to become your connection. When you invite someone to connect with you, your invitation will include your network and basic profile information (e.g., name, profile photo, job title, region). We may send invitation reminders to the person you invited.
Our Services may allow you to stay informed about news, events and ideas regarding professional topics you care about, and from professionals you respect. Our Services also allow you to improve your professional skills and learn new ones. We may use the data we have about you (e.g., data you provide, data we collect from your engagement with our Services and inferences we make from the data we have about you), to personalize our Services for you. If you let us know that you are interested in a new skill (e.g., by watching a learning path course), we may use this information to personalize content in your feed, suggest that you follow certain members on our site, or suggest related learning content to help you towards that new skill. We may use your content, activity and other data, including your name and photo, to provide notices to your network and others. For example, we may notify others that you have updated your profile, posted content, used a feature, made new connections, were mentioned in the news, or other.
Our Services may allow you to explore careers, evaluate educational opportunities, and seek out, and be found for, career opportunities. Your profile can be found by those looking to hire or be hired by you. We may use your data to recommend jobs, mentees, mentors, show you and others relevant professional contacts. We may use your data to recommend jobs to you and you to recruiters. We may use automated systems to provide content and recommendations to help make our Services more relevant to our Members and customers. Keeping your profile accurate and up-to-date may help you better connect to others and to opportunities through our Services.
Our Services allow you to collaborate with colleagues, search for potential clients, customers, partners and others to do business with. Our Services allow you to communicate with other Members and schedule and prepare meetings with them. If settings allow, we may scan messages to provide “bots” or similar tools that facilitate tasks such as scheduling meetings, drafting responses, summarizing messages or recommending next steps.
Customers looking for professional relationships may be able to export limited information from your profile. Any data stored about you by customers or other 3rd parties is subject to their policies.
We may contact you through email, mobile phone, notices posted on our websites or apps, messages to your Argus Peepl inbox, and other ways through our Services, including text messages and push notifications. We may send you messages about the availability of our Services, security, or other service-related issues. We also send messages about how to use our Services, network updates, reminders, and other from us and our partners. You may change your settings at any time. Please be aware that you cannot opt out of receiving service messages from us, including security and legal notices. We also enable communications between you and others through our Services, including, for example invitations, groups, and messages between connections.
We may target (and measure the performance of) ads to Members and others both on and off our Services directly or through a variety of partners, using the following data, whether separately or combined:
- Data from advertising technologies on and off our Services, pixels, ad tags, cookies, and device identifiers;
- Member-provided information (e.g., profile, contact information, title and industry);
- Data from your use of our Services (e.g., search history, feed, content you read, who you follow or is following you, connections, group participation, page visits, videos you watch, clicking on an ad, etc.), including as described elsewhere herein;
- Information from advertising partners, vendors and publishers; and
- Information inferred from data described above (e.g., using job titles from a profile to infer industry, seniority, and compensation bracket; using graduation dates to infer age or using first names or pronoun usage to infer gender; using your feed activity to infer your interests; or using device data to recognize you as a Member).
We may show you ads called sponsored content which look similar to non-sponsored content, except that they are labeled as advertising (e.g., as “ad” or “sponsored”). If you take a social action (such as like, comment or share) on these ads, your action is associated with your name and may be viewable by others, including the advertiser. Subject to settings, if you take a social action on the Argus Peepl Services, that action may be mentioned with related ads. For example, when you like a company we may include your name and photo when their sponsored content is shown.
We do not share your personal data with any third-party advertisers or ad networks except for: (i) hashed IDs or device identifiers (to the extent they are personal data in some countries); (ii) with your separate permission (e.g., in a lead generation form) or (iii) data already visible to any users of the Services (e.g., profile). However, if you view or click on an ad on or off our Services, the ad provider will get a signal that someone visited the page that displayed the ad, and they may, through the use of mechanisms such as cookies, determine it is you. Advertising partners can associate personal data collected by the advertiser directly from you with hashed IDs or device identifiers received from us.
In addition to advertising our Services, we use Members’ data and content for invitations and communications promoting membership and network growth, engagement and our Services, such as by showing your connections that you have used a feature on our Services.
We use data, including public feedback, to conduct research and development for our Services in order to provide you and others with a better, more intuitive and personalized experience, drive membership growth and engagement on our Services, and help connect professionals to each other and to economic opportunity.
We seek to create economic opportunity for Members of the global workforce and to help them be more productive and successful. We may use the personal data available to us to research social, economic and workplace trends, such as jobs availability and skills needed for these jobs and policies that help bridge the gap. We may work with third parties to perform this research. We publish or allow others to publish economic insights, presented as aggregated data rather than personal data.
Polls and surveys are conducted by us and others through our Services. You are not obligated to respond to polls or surveys, and you have choices about the information you provide.
We use data (which can include your communications) to investigate, respond to and resolve complaints and for Service issues (e.g., bugs).
We may use your data to produce and share insights that do not identify you. For example, we may use your data to generate statistics about our members, their profession, to calculate ad impressions served or clicked on, or to publish visitor demographics for a Service or create demographic workforce insights.
We use your data (including your communications) for security purposes or to prevent or investigate possible fraud or other violations of our User Agreemnt and/or attempts to harm our Members, Visitors or others.
How We Share Information
Your profile is fully visible to all Members and customers of our Services. Subject to your settings, it may also be visible to others on or off of our Services (e.g., Visitors to our Services or users of third- party search engines). Your settings, degree of connection with the viewing Member, whether they are a Subscriber, their usage of our Services, access channels and search types (e.g., by name or by keyword) impact the availability of your profile and whether they can view certain fields in your profile.
Our Services allow viewing and sharing information including through posts, likes, follows and comments.
- When you share an article or a post (e.g., an update, image, video or article) publicly it can be viewed by everyone and re-shared anywhere (subject to your settings). Members, Visitors and others will be able to find and see your publicly-shared content, including your name (and photo if you have provided one).
- In a group, posts are visible to others in the group. Your membership in groups is public and part of your profile, but you may be able to change visibility in your settings.
- Any information you share through companies’ or other organizations’ pages on our Services will be viewable by it and others who visit those pages.
- When you follow a person or organization, you are visible to others and that “page owner” as a follower.
- We let senders know when you act on their message, subject to your settings where applicable.
- Subject to your settings, we let a Member know when you view their profile.
When you like or re-share or comment on another’s content (including ads), others will be able to view these “social actions” and associate it with you (e.g., your name, profile and photo if you provided it).
Some Members (or their employers) need, for legal or professional compliance, or for their own records, to archive their communications and social media activity, and will use services of others to provide these archival services. We may enable archiving of messages by and to those Members outside of our Services. For example, a civil engineer needs to archive communications with his clients through our Services in order to maintain records.
Subject to your settings, other services may look up your profile. When you opt to link your account with other services, personal data will become available to them. For example, you may link your Twitter account to share content from our Services into these other services, or your email provider may give you the option to upload your Argus Peepl contacts into its own service. Third-party services have their own privacy policies, and you may be giving them permission to use your data in ways we would not.
Subject to your settings, excerpts from your profile may appear on the services of others (e.g., search engine results, mail and calendar applications that show a user limited profile data of the person they are meeting or messaging, social media aggregators, talent and lead managers). “Old” profile information remains on these services until they update their data cache with changes you made to your profile.
We may share your personal data with our affiliates to provide and develop our Services. We may combine information internally across the different Services covered by this Privacy Policy to help our Services be more relevant and useful to you and others. For example, we may personalize your feed or job recommendations based on your learning history.
We use others to help us provide our Services (e.g., maintenance, analysis, audit, payments, fraud detection, marketing and development). They will have access to your information as reasonably necessary to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for other purposes.
It is possible that we will need to disclose information about you when required by law, subpoena, or other legal process or if we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (1) investigate, prevent or take action regarding suspected or actual illegal activities or to assist government enforcement agencies; (2) enforce our agreements with you; (3) investigate and defend ourselves against any third-party claims or allegations; (4) protect the security or integrity of our Services (such as by sharing with companies facing similar threats); or (5) exercise or protect the rights and safety of Argus Peepl, our Members, personnel or others. We attempt to notify Members about legal demands for their personal data when appropriate in our judgment, unless prohibited by law or court order or when the request is an emergency. We may dispute such demands when we believe, in our discretion, that the requests are overbroad, vague or lack proper authority, but we do not promise to challenge every demand.
We can also share your personal data as part of a sale, merger or change in control, or in preparation for any of these events. Any other entity which buys us or part of our business will have the right to continue to use your data, but only in the manner set out in this Privacy Policy unless you agree otherwise.
Your Choices & Obligations
We generally retain your personal data as long as you keep your account open or as needed to provide you Services. This includes data you or others provided to us and data generated or inferred from your use of our Services. Even if you only use our Services occasionally, we will retain your information and keep your profile open, unless you close your account, or unless we believe we have reason to close it. In some cases we may choose to retain certain information (e.g., insights about Services use) in a depersonalized or aggregated form.
If you choose to close your Argus Peepl account, your personal data will generally stop being visible to others on our Services. We may generally delete closed account information within 30 days of account closure, except as noted below.
We retain your personal data even after you have closed your account if reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations (including law enforcement requests), meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, maintain security, prevent fraud and abuse (e.g., if we have restricted your account), enforce our User Agreement, fulfill your request to “unsubscribe” from further messages from us, or for record-keeping purposes.
Information you have shared with others will remain visible after you close your account or delete the information from your own profile or mailbox, and we do not control data that other Members have copied out of our Services. Group content and ratings or review content associated with closed accounts may show an unknown user as the source. Your profile may continue to be displayed in the services of others (e.g., search engine results) until they refresh their cache.
Other Important Information
We may implement security safeguards designed to protect your data, such as HTTPS. We make an effort to monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks, but we cannot warrant the security of any information that you send us. There is no guarantee that data may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed.
We will only collect and process personal data about you where you have given consent, where processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with you (e.g., to deliver the Argus Peepl Services), and “legitimate interests.”
Where we rely on your consent to process personal data, you have the right to withdraw or decline your consent at any time and where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object. If you have any questions about the lawful bases upon which we collect and use your personal data, please contact us.
If you have questions or complaints regarding this Policy, please contact us.