Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 1st October 2024

bChannels Pty, Ltd, its affiliated companies and websites (“The Channel Company”, “our”, “we”, ”us”) are committed to protecting your privacy. Please read this policy carefully as it describes the way in which we collect, use disclose and otherwise handle your personal information in relation to CRN Asia. This applies to all personally identifiable information we receive, such as your name, address, email address and telephone number.

We take this stance not just to fulfil our legislative obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (“the Act”), but also because we value your trust and our ongoing relationship. You have no obligation to provide any personal information however if you choose to withhold your personal information, we may not be able to provide the products or services that depend on the collection and use of your information.

This policy describes how we will abide by the Australian Privacy Principles (“APPs”) that form part of the Act. By using CRN Asia, you agree to the collection, use, disclosure and handling this Privacy Policy describes. If you are part of the EEA (European Economic Area) this policy is also applicable.

  1. What Personal Information Do We Collect About You?

When you use CRN Asia or the products or services it offers by, among other actions, ordering a subscription or other product, providing registration details, setting newsletter preferences, browsing our sites, attending an event or conference, completing a survey, entering a contest or otherwise interacting with CRN Asia, we collect personal information. Personal information is information or an opinion related to an identified or reasonably identifiable individual, regardless of whether the information or opinion is true or not, or is recorded in a material form or not. Several different types of personal information can be collected when you interact with CRN Asia, depending on the type of product or service being used. Collection of personal information is necessary to delivering you CRN Asia or to enhance your customer experience.

If you disclose any personal information relating to other people to us or to our service providers in connection with CRN Asia, you represent that you have the authority to do so and they have consented to us collecting, using, disclosing and hadling their information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

We and our service providers collect personal information in a variety of ways, including:

A) Through CRN Asia

Registration: When you subscribe for CRN Asia, we collect personal information. For example, registration on our websites can be done by supplying a unique email address and password, or by linking your Facebook or Google accounts. See below “From Other Sources” for more information about linking your Facebook or Google Accounts. To subscribe to our newsletters, you need to supply your name, email address, phone number, job title and country and optional additional information about your company may also be provided during the subscription process. Registration to an event, conference or digital resources requires that you complete a form that will include, at a minimum, your name and email address. 

Browsing: When you brwose CRN Asia, we collect information about the computer, mobile device or other device you use to access CRN Asia, such as Internet protocol (IP) addresses (the region or general location where your computer or device is accessing the Internet), geolocalisation informationm unique device identifiers, browser type, browser language and ither transactional information. We also collect other usage information about your use of CRN Asia, including a history of the pages you view.

User-Generated Content and Public Activities (Including Comments and Reader Reviews): We offer you opportunities to engage in public activities on our websites and other events from The Channel Company. “Public activities” are any actions you take on The Channel Company websites, publications that are designed to be visible to other users, including comments, recommendations, reader reviews, ratings or any other items that you submit. If you choose to engage in public activities, you should be aware that any personal information you submit can be read, collected and used by other users of these services. We are not responsible for the personal information you choose to submit in the course of your public activities, and we have no responsibility to publish, take down, remove or edit any of your public activities or submissions (except as required by applicable laws) but reserve the right to do so in our absolute discretion. For more information, read the “Use of The Channel Company sites and the Community Areas” section of the Terms & Conditions.

Competitions, Promotions and Special Offers: We collect personal information, such as your name, address, age and email address, from you when you participate in competitions, promotions or special offers.

Reader Surveys and Market Research: We and our service providers collect personal information from you through voluntary surveys or feedback programs conducted via CRN Asia, through our service providers’ platforms, by phone, by mail or during in-person interviews or events. We also conduct similar research for advertisers.

Loyalty Programs: When you interact with our loyalty programs and answer questionnaires, we collect personal information about you.

Contact With Our Call Centres. We collect personal information from you in non-digital contexts, including, for example, when you place an order over the phone or contact customer service.

Application for Employment and Internship. We collect personal information from you such as your name, date of birth, address, and email.

B) From Other Sources

i. Publicly available databases, including privately held marketing and data analytics resources. For example, we may receive demographic information (age, sex, household income, job industry and job title) from these sources.

ii. Joint marketing and third parties, when they share the information with us.

iii. Social-media platforms or other third-party services (such as Google Play Store or Apple App Store). If you choose to link your social-media account or account relating to other third-party services to CRN Asia, you may be asking third parties to send us certain information from those social media accounts or services accounts, and you are authorising us to collect, store, and use what they send us in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

  1. What Do We Do with The Personal Information We Collect About You?

We collect, use, disclose or otherwise handle personal information as allowed under applicable law, including where based on one or more of the following:

  • The purpose for which the personal information was collected (as set out further below) and related purposes you would reasonably expect, including: (1) to ensure that our networks and information are ensure: (2) to administer and generally conduct business within The Channel Company; and (3) to prevent fraud;
  • The consent you provide to us at the point of collection of your personal information;
  • The performance of the contract we have with you; or
  • The compliance of a legal obligation to which we are subject;
A) Provide CRN Asia Products and Services You Request. We use the information we collect about you to enable your use of CRN Asia and fulfilill your requests for certain products and services, such as providing CRN Asia’s functionality to you, arranging access to your registered account, providing you with customer service, responding to your inquiries, requests, questions, suggestions, compliments or complaints, completing your transactions, sending you administrative information (such as change of our terms, conditions, or policies) and enabling you to participate in and renew paid services, polls, promotions, surveys, research, events, digital resources and message boards (forums). 

B) Analysis and Development of New Products and Services. We perform statistical, demographic and marketing analyses of users of CRN Asia, and their subscribing, purchasing, browsing and reading patterns, so we can analyse or predict our users’ preferences for product and services development purposes, to determine our promotional campaign effectiveness so we can adapt our campaign to the needs and interests of our users, and to generally inform advertisers about the nature of our subscriber base. We use this information for analytical purposes, including analysis to improve customer relationships, to support strategic business decisions and our marketing tactics and to measure and track our brand health. 

C) Customising Your Experience. We use the information that we have to better understand you and customise certain features of CRN Asia to provide you with an enhanced experience including to show you offerings, promotions or products that may be of interest to you, based on the demographic information, type of device you are using to access the CRN Asia, your usage of the CRN Asia and your browsing and reading history.

D) Email Newsletters and Other Marketing Activities as well as Facilitating Social Sharing. The Channel Company will send you email newsletters or promotional emails about services offered by The Channel Company where you have subscribed to receive them. To opt out of these emails, please see the section labelled “How do I opt out of receiving emails and promotions?“. We will use the information we have about you to advertise our services to you on our Services but also on other platforms. If you choose to use social-sharing functionalities, we will use your information to facilitate such action, and such action — along with any information you share — will be covered by the social-media platform’s privacy policy.

E) Administrative Purposes. We and our service providers use the information we have about you for the following legitimate business purposes:
  • For auditing purposes, to verify that our internal processes function as intended and comply with legal, regulatory and contractual requirements;
  • For fraud and security monitoring purposes, including, for example, to detect and prevent cyberattacks; and
  • To understand and assess satisfaction with our Services or our customer care team.

F) Allowing you to participate in Competitions, Promotions and Special Offers. Some of these promotions have additional rules containing information about how we will use and disclose your personal information.

G) Aggregating and/or Anonymising Personal Information. We aggregate and/or anonymise personal information so that it will no longer be considered personally identifying. We do so periodically to generate other data for our use, which we may use and disclose for any purpose.

H) User-Generated Content and Public Activities. When you share or recommend links to content on a social-media platform, that action and any information you share will be covered by that platform’s privacy policy. Any information you disclose in your public activities, along with your screen name or ID, or any image or photo, becomes public.

3. With Whom Do We Share The Personal Information We Collect?

A) Sharing Within The Channel Company. We share your personal information with our affiliated companies for the purposes listed in this Privacy Policy.

B) Sharing With Service Providers. We contract with other companies, agents or contractors (“service providers”) to provide services on our behalf. These services are, for example, credit-card, payment and billing processing, fulfilment of subscriptions, orders and prizes, information technology and related infrastructure provision, customer service, ad serving, shipping, email distribution, lead generation, list processing and analytics, research surveys, interviews, event management and analysis, or promotions management. In the course of performing these services, our service providers have access to your information including your personal information.

C) Sharing With Other Third-Parties. We will not knowingly sell, rent, swap or authorise any third-party (other than in the ordinary course of business with our service providers, sponsors and clients, as set out further below) to use your details without your permission. Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to restrict our use or sharing of aggregated or de-identified information in any way.

i. We may share personal information, such as name, email, company and title, about attendees to our live events and conferences with sponsors and will let you know at the point of collection if we do;

ii. We may also share personal information to third-party sponsors of competitions, promotions and special offers and will let you know at the point of collection of your information if we do.

iii. We may use a third-party payment service to process payments made through the CRN Asia. If you wish to make a payment through the CRN Asia, your personal information will be collected by such third-party and not by us and will be subject to the third-party’s privacy policy, rather than this Privacy Policy. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, this third-party’s collection, use and disclosure of your personal information.

iv. We share de-identified, aggregated results from research surveys or events with advertisers and clients.

v. We may disclose or transfer your personal information to a third-party without obtaining further consent from you in the event of any reorganisation, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings). Such third parties may include, for example, an acquiring entity and its advisors.

D) Compliance With Legal Process. We may access, preserve and disclose personal information if we are required to do so by law or we have a good faith belief that such action is necessary to (1) comply with the law or with legal process; (2) protect and defend our rights and property; (3) protect against misuse or unauthorised use of CRN Asia; (4) protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public (among other things, this means that if you provide false information or attempt to pose as someone else, information about you may be disclosed as part of any investigation into your actions); and (5) cooperate with public and government authorities (which may be outside your country of residence).

E) By Using CRN Asia, You May Elect to Disclose Personal Information.

i. Public Activities: See above for more details on such activities. Public activities may be included in our RSS feeds, APIs and other distribution formats. As a result, your public activities may appear on other websites, blogs, or feeds.

ii. Through Your Social Sharing Activity: When you connect your CRN Asia account with your social media account, you will share information with your friends associated with your social media account, with other users, and with your social media account provider. By doing so, you authorise us to facilitate this sharing of information, and you understand that the use of shared information will be governed by the social media provider’s privacy policy.

iii. Other Information Collected Using Technology

Other information does not specifically identify you and is collected through technology. It includes tracking information collected by us as well as third parties.

We use various internet technologies to manage and track the use of CRN Asia. We use and disclose this information for any purpose. Information that we collect using these technologies may be combined with personal information about you. If we combine such information with personal information, we will treat the combined information as personal information.

A) Cookies, Beacons, Local Storage and Other Similar Technologies. We use “cookies,” Web beacons, tags and scripts, and other similar technologies including local storage objects such as HTML5. These technologies allow us to manage access to and use of CRN Asia, recognise you and provide personalisation, and help us understand how people use CRN Asia. You will not be able to access certain areas of our websites, if your computer does not accept cookies from us. Because there is no accepted standard on how to respond to “do not track” browser-based signals, we do not respond to such signals. For more detailed information about our use of cookies and local storage, see the Cookie Policy.

We transmit website usage information to third parties in order to show you advertising for The Channel Company and affiliated brands when you visit other sites. For more information about our third-party ad servers, or to learn about your choices about not having this information used to target ads to you, please click here (for Google).

B) Analytics, Log Files and Reading History. We gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes IP address, browser type, operating system and other usage information about the use of CRN Asia, including a history of the pages you view.

We automatically combine this collected log-information with other information we collect about you. We do this to improve services we offer you, including customised recommendations, advertising to improve marketing, and to track access and use of CRN Asia across the devices that you use to access us.

One of the analytics service providers we use is Adobe Analytics. To learn more about how Adobe use data, visit Adobe.

  1. Third-Party Advertising

Some of the services and advertisements included within CRN Asia, are delivered or served by third-party companies, which may collect information about your use of CRN Asia.

These companies place or recognise cookies, pixel tags, web beacons or other technology to track certain information about CRN Asia website users. For example, in the course of serving certain advertisements, an advertiser may place or recognise a unique cookie on your browser in order to collect certain information about your use of CRN Asia. For another example, an advertiser or ad server may also be able to collect your device’s unique identifier in the course of serving an ad. In many cases, this information could be used to show you ads on other websites based on your interests.

We do not have access to, nor control over, these third parties’ use of cookies or other tracking technologies or how they may be used.

For example, we use Google to serve advertisements on CRN Asia, which use the Google Ad Manager cookie, and in some cases, a unique device identifier, to show you ads based on your visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the Google Ad Manager cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy. If you would like more information about this practice, and to learn how to opt out of it in desktop and mobile browsers on the particular device on which you are accessing this Privacy Policy, please visit http://www.youronlinechoices.com.au/.

Your access to our websites should not be affected if you do not accept cookies served by third parties.

  1. How Do I Opt Out From Receiving Emails and Promotions?

You can choose not to receive commercial email messages in the future by either (1) following the “unsubscribe” instructions located near the bottom of each email, or (2) you can email us at [email protected]. It is important to note that this request does not prohibit us from sending you important administrative disclosures for non-marketing purposes.

A) Email Newsletters. The Channel Company and its affiliated websites offer email newsletters. If you no longer wish to receive a specific newsletter, follow the “unsubscribe” instructions located near the bottom of each newsletter. If you experience difficulty with the “unsubscribe” process, please contact us at [email protected] and provide your email address along with the name of the newsletter from which you would like to unsubscribe.

B) Mail or Telephone Promotions. We may use your personal information for direct marketing purposes. If, at any time, you prefer not to receive mail or telephone solicitations originated by CRN Asia, please email us at [email protected]. Please include your name and phone number in the body of your email or letter and put “Opt-out” in the subject line.

7. How Do I Access, Change or Update My Personal Information?

If you would like to request to access or correct personal information that you have previously provided to us, or make a complaint about our handling of your personal information, you may contact us [email protected].

In your request, please state what personal information you would like to access, have changed; or whether you would like to have your personal information deleted from our database or de-identifie. For your protection, we only implement requests with respect to the personal information associated with the particular email address that you use to send us your request, and we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request.

We will respond to your request consistent with applicable law.  A fee may apply for providing access to personal information.

Please note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping purposes and/or to complete any transactions that you began prior to requesting a change or deletion (e.g., when you make a purchase or enter a promotion, you may not be able to change or delete the Personal Information provided until after the completion of such purchase or promotion).

Please note that your request does not ensure complete or comprehensive removal of the content or information, as, for example, some of your content may have been reposted by another user.

  1. Sensitive Personal Information

Unless specifically requested (for example, in connection with a particular survey), we ask that you not send us, and you not disclose, any sensitive personal information (e.g., information related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or other beliefs, health, biometrics or genetic characteristics, criminal background or membership of a professional or trade association or union) on or through CRN Asia or otherwise to us.

  1. Data Retention

We retain personal information for as long as needed or permitted in light of the purpose(s) for which it was obtained and consistent with applicable law. The criteria used to determine our retention periods include:

  • The length of time we have an ongoing relationship with you, provide CRN Asia to you and to support strategic business decisions for CRN Asia;
  • Whether there is a legal obligation to which we are subject (for example, certain laws require us to keep records of your transactions for a certain period of time before we can delete them); or
  • Whether retention is advisable in light of our legal position (for example, in light of applicable statutes of limitations, litigation or regulatory investigations).
  1. Is My Information Protected?

We seek to protect personal information with reasonable organisational, technological and physical safeguards commensurate to the sensitivity of the personal information.   Although we take appropriate measures to safeguard your information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.  To further protect your data, we recommend that you use complex passwords for your accounts with us and for accounts with third parties that you link to any of your accounts with us. Please do not use the same passwords you use for CRN Asia for other services or share your password with unauthorised people. If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure, please immediately notify us in accordance with the “Contact Details” section below.

  1. Children’s Guidelines

We do not knowingly collect or store any personal information from children except as permitted by applicable law or unless otherwise stated (for example, as per the specific competition entry terms and conditions).

  1. Global Transfers

bChannels Pty, Ltd is headquartered in Australia. The information you provide to us or that we obtain as a result of your use of CRN Asia is collected in Australia and subsequently transferred to Ireland for storage on our servers. Your information may also be transferres to countries which we have facilities, or our affiliates operate or in which we engage service providers, including to the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

We have in place adequate measures to ensure that any organisation which we disclose your personal information to is bound by obligations to safeguard and protect your personal information and comply with Australian Privacy Laws and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In certain circumstances, courts, law enforcement agencies, regulatory agencies or security authorities in those other countries may be entitled to access your personal information.

  1. Contact Details and Complaints

Should you wish to contact us in relation to any of the information contained within this Privacy Policy, seek access to or correction of information we may hold on you, or make a complaint about our privacy practices, you may do so by writing to:

The Privacy Officer
bChannels Pty., Ltd.
The Commons 388 George Pty Ltd
Mezzanine, 388 George St
Sydney
NSW 2000

Please enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope in which we will send copies of any personal information held on you.

Alternatively, you may email: [email protected].

You may be required to provide identification prior to us releasing personal information.

You mau lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (Here) in relation to an alleged infringement of the Act or APPs.

  1. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We evaluate this privacy policy periodically in light of changing business practices, technology and legal requirements. As a result, it is updated from time to time. Any such changes will be posted on this page.