This Privacy Policy describes what information CIOPages (CIOPages.com) collects, how we use it, who processes it for us, and your rights with respect to it.
1. Information We Collect
1.1 Information You Provide Directly
When you interact with CIOPages, you may voluntarily provide personal information, including:
- Contact Form Submissions: Your name, email address, organization, and the content of your message when you use our Contact Form.
- Store Purchases: Your name, email address, and billing information when you purchase digital products. Payment processing is handled by our third-party payment processor (Stripe); CIOPages does not store full payment card details.
- Accounts: Your name, work email address and a hashed password when you create an account to use the Apps, and the dates you sign in.
- What you enter in the Apps: When you ask an App’s AI for help, the text you entered is sent to our AI provider to produce a response (see section 3). We do not store that text, except answers you choose to add to the quarterly benchmark (below).
- Benchmark contributions: Some Apps let you add your answers to our quarterly benchmark. It is off unless you tick the box. If you do, we store those answers with the App’s name, your industry and your company size band. We do not store your name, email, company or account with them.
- Tool reports: Your name, email address, and optionally your title and company, when you ask for a tool’s results to be emailed to you. The results are in the email; we keep your contact details and the name of the tool.
- Newsletter and research downloads: Your email address when you subscribe to The Throughline, and your name, work email and company when you request a research file.
- Contributions: Your name, title, work email and answers when you contribute to State of Play or Trench Notes, or apply to the Executive Forum. Contributions publish with your name and title.
- Vendor accounts and orders: Your name, work email and company when you sign in to the vendor portal, claim a Directory listing or order a placement.
1.2 Information From Public Sources
To invite technology vendors to take part in State of Play and to offer them placements, we collect the business contact details of people at those companies (name, title, work email) from their companies’ websites and from Hunter, an email-finding service. Every message we send includes a way to opt out, and we stop writing to anyone who asks. We do not track whether these emails are opened or which links in them are clicked.
1.3 Information Collected Automatically
When you visit CIOPages, certain information is collected automatically through standard web technologies:
- Log Data: IP address, browser type and version, operating system, referring URLs, pages visited, and timestamps.
- Cookies and Similar Technologies: Session cookies, preference cookies, analytics cookies, and advertising cookies set by Google. See our Cookie Policy for full details.
- Usage Data: Information about how you interact with our website, including which pages you visit, how long you spend on each page, and which links you click.
- App usage log: For each AI request in the Apps, we record the account (or a shortened IP address for visitors who are not signed in), the App, the AI provider and model, the number of tokens, the cost and the time. The log does not contain the text you entered. We use it to apply the monthly allowance and rate limits.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect for the following purposes:
- Service Delivery: To run your account and the Apps, process purchases, deliver digital products, send tool reports and research files you have requested, and publish contributions you have submitted.
- Benchmark: To publish figures from benchmark contributions. Each published figure combines at least 20 contributions and does not identify a person or a company.
- Newsletter: To send The Throughline if you subscribed. Every issue has an unsubscribe link.
- Communication: To respond to your inquiries submitted via the Contact Form, and to send transactional emails related to your purchases.
- Website Improvement: To understand how visitors use our Website and to improve content, navigation, and functionality.
- Security and Fraud Prevention: To detect, prevent, and address technical issues, spam, and fraudulent activity.
- Legal Compliance: To comply with applicable laws and regulations.
We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to third parties for money. We do not use the information you give us, such as your email address or what you enter into our tools, to target advertising.
3. AI Processing in the Apps
The Apps send the text you enter to Anthropic. If Anthropic is unavailable, the request goes to Google (Gemini) instead. They process it to produce the response under their API terms. We use no other AI provider for the Apps.
- Anthropic: privacy policy.
- Google: privacy policy and Gemini API terms.
Do not enter information you are not allowed to share. See section 3 of the Terms of Service.
4. Advertising
We show ads on some pages through Google AdSense. Google and other third-party vendors use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this Website and to other websites.
- Google's advertising cookies let Google and its partners serve ads to you based on your visits to this Website and other sites on the Internet. See how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
- You can opt out of personalized advertising from Google at https://www.google.com/settings/ads.
- You can opt out of personalized advertising from other participating vendors at https://www.aboutads.info/choices, or in the EU and UK at https://www.youronlinechoices.eu.
If you opt out, you still see ads, but they are not based on your browsing.
Visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland are asked for consent before Google uses advertising cookies. Under some US state privacy laws, letting Google use advertising cookies can count as selling or sharing personal information. Visitors in those states can opt out with the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link that Google shows on this Website.
5. Third-Party Service Providers
These providers process data for us to run the Website. Each handles it under its own terms and privacy policy:
- Stripe: Payment processing for digital product purchases. Stripe's privacy policy governs the handling of payment card data.
- Resend: Email delivery for purchase confirmations, download links, tool reports, sign-in links, the newsletter and contact form responses.
- Google AdSense: Ads on some pages. See section 4.
- Google reCAPTCHA: Bot and spam protection on our Contact Form. Google's privacy policy governs data collected by reCAPTCHA.
- Anthropic and Google (Gemini): AI processing in the Apps. See section 3.
- Vercel: Hosting, file storage for uploaded logos and documents, and page-view analytics that set no cookies. Vercel collects standard server log data.
- Neon: The database that holds accounts, orders, subscriptions, contributions, benchmark contributions and the App usage log.
- Hunter and Smartlead: Finding and verifying vendor business contacts, and sending our emails to them. See section 1.2.
6. Cookies
CIOPages uses cookies and similar tracking technologies to enhance your experience. For full details on the types of cookies we use and how to manage your preferences, please read our Cookie Policy.
7. Data Retention
We keep personal information only as long as the periods below, or longer where a law or a dispute requires it.
- Accounts: deleted 12 months after the last sign-in, or when you ask us to close the account.
- App usage log: deleted 12 months after each request.
- Benchmark contributions: deleted 12 months after they were given. Figures already published stay published. Because a contribution is stored without your name or account, we cannot find or delete a single one after you give it.
- Contact form messages, tool-report and research-download requests, and inquiries sent to vendors through the Directory or Trench Notes: deleted 12 months after they were sent.
- Purchase and payment records: kept for at least six years, as tax law requires.
- Newsletter: kept while you are subscribed.
- Opt-out requests: kept indefinitely, so that we keep honoring them.
- Contributions: kept while they are published, and removed on request.
8. Data Security
We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. However, no method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
9. Your Rights
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the following rights with respect to your personal information:
- Access: The right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
- Correction: The right to request correction of inaccurate personal information.
- Deletion: The right to request deletion of your personal information, subject to legal retention requirements.
- Objection: The right to object to certain processing of your personal information.
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us via our Contact Form.
10. Children's Privacy
CIOPages is not directed at children under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child, please contact us immediately.
11. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes by updating the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page. Your continued use of the Website after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated Policy.
12. Contact Us
If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please contact us via our Contact Form or email us at support [at] ciopages [dot] com. Our postal address is CIOPages, 437 Cold Brook Drive, Unit 316, Sudbury, MA 01776.