Privacy Policy
This privacy policy tells you about the information we collect from you when you use any website or mobile application owned or operated by GTEK, its subsidiaries and affiliates, including information about who we are, what information we collect, why we use your information, who we share your information with and why, how we protect your information, and how you can change or review your information. By using our services, and the Site, you understand and consent to GTEK collecting, storing, processing, and sharing your information as described in this privacy policy. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, do not use the Site.
1. WHO ARE WE
GTEK is the retail electronics store in the United States. The business operates on 727 Phillips Drive, Rowland Heights, California, along with their main website (www.thegtek.com) and GTEK store on eBay and Amazon.
Due to the nature of the retail and e-commerce business, GTEK is often required to obtain Personal Information from our consumers, Organizational sale customers, affiliates and vendors to successfully operate. GTEK recognizes the need to maintain the confidentiality of private, highly confidential and proprietary information. This Data Privacy Policy ("Policy") will offer a transparent breakdown of how GTEK and our strategic partners protect the confidentiality of the information collected by GTEK.
GTEK is a "Data Controller" which is a legal term which means we make decisions regarding how and why we collect and use your personal data. As the "Data Controller" we are responsible for ensuring that your Personal Information is only used for the purposes on which it was originally collected and in compliance with all applicable data protection laws. We are also responsible to ensure that any third party that we authorize to process the data on our behalf, known as "Data Processors," also follow these standards and use the data only for these same reasons.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this Privacy policy, the use and collection of your personal data by GTEK, or if you require more details on how we collect, store or use your Personal Information, you can contact our team at mail@thegtek.com
You may also write to us at the following address:
Compliance Team
GTEK Inc
727 Phillips Drive,
Rowland Heights, CA 91748
626-964-1222
This Policy should be read in conjunction with all the GTEK Website terms and conditions.
2. PURPOSE OF THIS POLICY
In this policy, when we talk about "Personal Data", we are referring to any information that relates to you as an identifiable natural person such as your name, email address, mailing address, telephone number etc.
When we talk about the GTEK Platform we mean the GTEK websites, www.thegtek.com and GTEK store on eBay and Amazon.
3. WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?
We collect and use your Personal Information for a range of different business purposes and according to different Legal Bases of processing. The following is detail of how and according to which Legal Basis we use your Personal Information.
A. Processing necessary to fulfil a sales order/contract and provision of services
We use your Personal Information to fulfil sales and provide you with our Services. This includes the following:
- To manage your registration as a user on the GTEK Platform. This helps us identify you as a Platform user, and offers you access to different functionalities, and a better experience.
- To complete business transactions and fulfil orders (online or in our store). This involves sending your Personal Information to our partners for shipping and tracking your purchases.
- To process payments. We do not store or capture any credit card information. This information is collected directly by our payment processing partners. Since this information is collected from our site and from you, our customer, we would like to inform you about its collection.
- To update you with order status, shipping and tracking information.
- To provide you with the best quality of customer service via our chat, email and phone lines.
- To provide you with services related to the warranty of your purchase, usually provided through our warranty partners or sometimes directly from the manufacturer of your purchased product.
- To provide you with important information about your purchased product including any updates or other manufacturer notices.
- To ask you to review your purchase, your experience on our Platform and review us as a company.
- To detect, prevent, mitigate and investigate fraud, or other criminal or potentially prohibited activities.
B. Processing necessary for us to comply with our legal obligations
We may use your Personal Information to comply with our local laws and regulations, this includes:
- To comply with all relevant tax and financial reporting requirements and regulations
- To comply with all legal proceedings
- To deal with requests form you to exercise your Data Subject access rights
- To process information regarding a crime or offence and support associated proceedings
- To monitor activities and safeguard your welfare on our Platform and premises
- To protect you, ourselves and our employees through appropriate legal action against third parties who have committed a criminal act or are in breach of their legal obligations.
C. Processing based on our Legitimate Interests
We may use your personal data to pursue our Legitimate Interests where your rights and freedoms do not outweigh those interests. We have implemented controls to balance our interests with your rights. Our use of your Personal Data for our Legitimate Interest includes:
- Improving our services; for example, reviewing information associated with nonfunctioning pages or links, so we can fix them and give you a frustration free experience on our Platform.
- Personalize, measure and improve our advertising based on your activities on our Platform.
- Contact you view email, push notifications on your browser and mobile app and by SMS/text message to offer you information about your purchased products, our products, sales, offers and services.
- Measure the performance of our marketing campaigns; for example, analyzing the open and click rates of an email campaign
- To serve you better, we may combine the information you provide us online, in our superstore and through our catalogs to improve your overall shopping experience, for example analyzing browsing behavior to create a better navigation menu, so you need less clicks to get to your product of choice.
- To improve the content on our website. For example, we may use cookies to find out which parts of our site or our products are visited most often.
- Contact you by email, telephone or SMS, or other equivalent forms of electronic communication, such as the app's push notifications etc., regarding updates or informative communications related to the functionalities, products or contracted services, including Platform security updates, when necessary or reasonable for their implementation.
- To respond to your posts, comments and provide customer service on our Platform and other social media Platforms including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
- To provide customer service to you via chat and email.
- Measure the performance of our Customer Service associates.
- To verify product and customer experience reviews left on the B&H website provide a truthful assessment of our services and merchandise.
- For the internal management and audit of business operations and financials.
- We use CCTV monitoring in our physical locations including our Superstore to prevent criminal activity and protect you, our customer.
D. Processing based on Consent
With your consent, we may use your Personal Information to:
- Provide you with marketing via email, SMS/Text message and push notifications on your browser and through our mobile application
- Provide you with targeted advertisements from other parties while you are experiencing our Platform
- Provide you with targeted advertisements on third party websites including our advertisements and those of third parties
- Send you our industry leading catalogs and other printed mailings.
- Allow select partners to profile your activities on our Platform so you can have a better experience on our, their and other third party websites.
Our partners may use automated profiling technologies for purposes of serving you more relevant ads and improving your browsing experience. They do not make automated decisions which might significantly affect you.
4. HOW AND WHEN YOU CAN WITHDRAW CONSENT
You can withdraw your consent from GTEK at any time, for specific data processing that is based on your consent.
A. Email Marketing
For email marketing and communications, please visit our Email notifications page in your profile which can be accessed from the 'My Account' menu on the top of any page on our Platform. You can also unsubscribe using the links at the bottom of any of our emails to you.
B. Advertising
If you do not wish to participate in our advertising personalization programs, you can opt out by clear all cookies from browser setting. We do not allow third parties to track or collect your Personal Information on our sites for their own advertising purposes without your consent.
Please note that you can disable all cookies from your browser settings. However, our websites require cookies to function and disabling all cookies will limit functionality of the site, including actions like adding products to a cart etc.
You can also contact us directly at mail@thegtek.com should you have a question or need more information.
5. THE DATA WE COLLECT FROM YOU AND HOW WE COLLECT THAT DATA
We collect Personal Information from you and any devices (including mobile devices) you use when you use our Platform, register for an account with us, provide us information on a web form, update or add information to your account, participate in a community board discussion chat, or when you otherwise correspond with us.
The provision of Personal Information is voluntary, but may be necessary in order to use our Services, such as setting up an account, conducting a transaction, commenting on a blog post or reviewing a product.
A. Personal Information you give us when you use our Services or register for an account with us
- Identifying information such as your name, addresses, telephone numbers or email addresses when you register for an account with us.
- Postage, billing and other information used to send an item, as well as, if needed, information required to clear customs (such as Tax ID or other identification numbers) and relevant postage information (such as tracking numbers and tracking updates).
- You may also provide us other information through a web form, by updating or adding information to your account, through your participation in blog posts, community discussions, chats, or when you otherwise communicate with us regarding our Services.
- Additional information we are required or authorized by applicable national laws to collect and process in order to authenticate or identify you or to verify the information we have collected.
- Note: GTEK does not collect credit card or other financial information from you, that information is collected directly by our trusted third party payment processing partners. On occasion for some international customers GTEK will require bank account information.
- When selling a used item, it is required that GTEK collect a copy of a valid government issued ID.
NOTE: If you give us Personal Information about someone else, including our social media Platforms and reviews and comments on our websites, you must do so only with that person's authorization. You should inform them how we collect, use, disclose, and retain their Personal Information according to our privacy notice.
B. Personal Information we collect automatically when you use our Services or register for an account with us
- We collect information about your interaction with our Services, your advertising preferences and your communications with us. This is information we receive from devices (including mobile devices) you use when you access our Services. This information could include the following: Device ID or unique identifier, device type, ID for advertising and a unique device token.
- Computer and connection information such as statistics on your page views, traffic to and from the sites, referral URL, ad data, your IP address, your browsing activity, history and your web log information.
C. Personal Information we collect using cookies and similar technologies
- We use cookies, web beacons, unique identifiers and similar technologies to collect information about the pages you view, the links you click and other actions you take when using our Services, within our advertising or email content.
D. Personal Information we collect from third parties
- On occasion we might collect Personal Information from third parties such as tradeshows or email lists to market our products and services to you. This information is usually limited to name, email address and rarely mailing addresses.
6. COOKIES AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGY
When you visit our Platform, we or our authorized service providers may use cookies, web beacons, and other similar technologies for storing information to help provide you with a better, faster, and safer experience, for advertising purposes.
A. What is a Cookie
A Cookie is a small text file that a website stores on your PC, telephone or any other device, with information about your navigation on that website. Cookies are necessary to facilitate browsing and to make it more user-friendly, and they do not damage your computer and are never used to store your sensitive Personal Information.
The purpose of using cookies is to improve your web browsing experience, enhance site security, and for marketing and promotional purposes. Cookies allow us to remember your preferences (like preferred language and country), estimate patterns of use, and provide improved search results. We also collect certain technical information from your computer, like your IP address and the address of a referring web site, if any. This information will allow us to enhance our site to match your preferences. This information is used only for the benefit of B&H, our authorized Partners and you, our customer.
You can visit our site without cookies if you choose to do so. However, please be aware that some features of the site may not function properly or may be slower if you refuse cookies. To visit our site without cookies, you can configure your web browser settings. Please check the browser's help menu to learn how to change your cookie preferences.
B. Types of Cookies on our Platform
There are several types of cookies that we may use on our site. These are constantly changing while we monitor and upgrade our site.
- Session cookies - These are cookies which expire/are erased at the end of your browser session, but allow us to recognize your actions within a website during that browsing session.
- Persistent cookies - These are cookies which are stored on your hard drive until it expires or you delete the cookie. This allow us to identify your preferences across multiple sessions.
- First Party Cookies - These Cookies are set exclusively by us. We use both session and persistent Cookies.
- Third Party Cookies - These Cookies are set by our service providers at our request while on our Platform. They may be Session or Persistent cookies. These are cookies that sit out on Platform and are managed by third parties at our request, to provide services and improve the customer browsing experience and for advertising. They may also be used to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. These cookies collect data about your activities while on our Platform and may be used to enhance the setting party's datasets. They can be used to serve advertising to you on our Platform and other websites.
We do not permit any third-party content on our Platform with exception of our authorized service providers. If you have a concern about our, or our authorized third party service providers personal data collection, please e-mail mail@thegtek.com
C. Purposes for our Cookies
We use cookies for the following purposes:
- Essential Website Operations: these technologies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available on our Platform and to use its features such as adding products to a cart, form submissions, video playback etc. Turning these off would result in limited functionality being available on our Platform.
- Performance and Functionality: these technologies are used to enhance the functionality of our Platform but are not critical to their use. We recommend you use them, since that would give you the best experience of our Platform.
- Analytics: These Cookies collect information that is used in aggregate form to help us understand how our websites are being used and to help us improve our Platform and provide you with a better experience.
- Advertising: these are technologies which help us make advertising messages more relevant to you. They collect behavioral information about your activities on our Platform and perform functions like preventing the same ad from continuously appearing, ensuring ads are properly displayed and in some cases relevant to your interests. These cookies may be used to serve ads for our products or products of third parties on our, or third party websites.
D. Managing your Cookie consent and preferences
Please visit cookies setting in your browser where you can manage your preferences for the types of Cookies listed above.
Should you wish to turn off all Cookies, you may do so in your browser's settings.
7. RELATIONSHIPS AND SHARING INFORMATION
GTEK maintains special relationships with a select number of authorized business partners. For your security or benefit, we may share information about you and your transactions with other companies for many reasons including verification, fraud prevention, government policy compliance, order fulfilment, and warranty purposes. We also may be required to disclose an individual's Personal Information in response to a lawful request by public authorities, including meeting national security or law enforcement requirements.
With your consent, GTEK shares your information with our marketing partners who serve advertising, send emails and push notifications, and distribute catalogs on our behalf.
For more information about the companies with whom GTEK shares customer information, please contact ususing the details at the top of this policy.
8. INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS OF INFORMATION
While GTEK has domestic reach offering products through our website, we only have employees and operations in the United States. We do not transfer or store Personal Information across geographical borders, unless it is requested by you, required for the fulfillment of a sale, the provision of services, or requested by a governing authority.
9. CALIFORNIA PERSONAL DATA RIGHTS
If you are a California resident, you have the right to receive: (a) information identifying all third-party companies to whom GTEK may have disclosed, within the past year, Personal Information pertaining to you and your family for that company's direct marketing purposes; and (b) a description of the categories of Personal Information disclosed. To obtain this information, please email your request.
10. UPDATES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
We regularly review and, if appropriate, update this privacy policy from time to time, and as our services and use of personal data evolves. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our homepage.
We will update the date of this document each time it is changed.
Version History
- Version 1.0 Initial Policy date Aug 01 ,2018