Effective as from 18 January 2023
Founded by Dr Christopher Hsu in 2009, the Global Dermatology Initiative aims at improving knowledge sharing in skin health within the medical community. Considered as a digital media, Global Dermatology provides Delegates with open access to scientific and medical knowledge augmented by its artificial intelligence technologies. You will be able to access on our platform to: Live Events, including live symposium, round-tables and Q&A discussions, virtual booth and online exhibition, and live meetings w/ faculties and Delegates; to the AI-Library, including AI-augmented scientific and armamentarium presentation and re-Live events; and to a Curriculum Dashboard, including an academic curriculum & learning dashboard, a CME accreditation dashboard and a networking dashboard. In order to deliver the full potential of artificial intelligence within the boundary of our mission, Global Dermatology may retrieve and process information related to users and usage.
This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, share, store or otherwise process the information we hold about you. We are committed to ensuring the personal data we retrieve is used for its original purpose and is kept secure and confidential.
1. Personal information
Any personal information provided to or gathered from our platform is administered by Global Dermatology, Boulevard James Fazy 4, 1201 Geneva, Switzerland. We follow the Regulation 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of individuals in reference to the processing of Personal Data. For any information or to exercise your rights on the processing of personal data managed by The Global Dermatology Foundation, you can contact our Data Protection Officer (DPO) at any time: data-privacy@global-dermatolgy.com.
2. Why do we collect information:
In order to personalize and to continually enhance your experience on our platform, we gather information from users that visit this platform. We use the information with the purpose to deliver educational services:
• Core purposes: to personalize your experiences machine learning, to enable dynamic search, natural language processing, multi-media encapsulation, and generative image & voice processing
• Personalized purposes: to improve our offering – monitoring and analyzing the information we hold about our customers in order to make informed decisions about our content, products, services and offers.
• Marketing purposes: to correspond with you about queries, to provide other services and offers that might be of interest to you, to provide you with marketing services and offers via various means including e-mail and postal mailings, in accordance with the applicable regulations.
• Business purposes: to understand our users’ needs and objectives, and to expand our services and offers.
• Administrative and legal purposes: to keep internal records of our operations and carry out our obligations arising from any contract settled.
• Notification purposes: to notify you about changes or updates to our services or in your account.
This information allows us to provide the services you have asked for or might need, as well as enables us to improve those services by understanding your interests and preferences.
3. What information we collect:
We receive, store and treat information that you enter on our platform or give us by any other means. You can choose not to provide certain information but then you may not be able to take advantage of a number of our features. You may choose to provide information when you create an account, register for a congress, submit an abstract, submit a visa request, reserve a hotel or contact any of our departments. For example, you provide information when you: register for a congress; provide information in your account; communicate with us by phone, e-mail or post mail; use our services; and participate in community features. As a result of these actions, you might supply us with such information as: your name; address and phone number; content of e-mails to us; personal description and photograph; and financial information. We only retrieve data related to the core of our activity, i.e. enable search relevance, pluriversal accessibility and metaversal experience for knowledge sharing in skin health. For examples, we collect contact details such as your name, postal address, e-mail address and phone number to inform and direct to you of our latest services and offers.
Our platform is not intended to individuals that are not professional users active in Medical Dermatology, Surgical Dermatology, Pediatric Dermatology, Cosmetic Dermatology and other medical specialties of the skin, as well as professional users from Learned Societies, Laboratories, Pharmacies and Industries active in skin health. We do not knowingly obtain Personal Data from such individuals outside these groups.
4. How we collect information
Indirect collection: whenever you anonymously interact with us, we receive and store certain types of information. For example, like a lot of websites, we use “cookies” and we obtain certain types of information when your web browser accesses our platform or advertisements and other content served by or on behalf of our platform on other websites.
Direct collection: when you participate to one of our events, attend scientific and armamentarium presentations, navigate and search through our libraries, sign up to a mailing list, fill in forms on the website, purchase services, contact us by telephone, email or otherwise, give us feedback or enter a poll. Some examples of information that we receive from other sources include: learned society membership; professional data; updated delivery and address information from our carriers or other third parties, which we use to correct our records and deliver our next communication more easily; account information, purchase, payment or redemption information and page-view information.
Automatic collection: Some examples of the automatic information that we collect and analyze include: the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; cookie number; computer and connection information such as browser type and version; and time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions; purchase history; operating system and platform; the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our website (including date and time); media you viewed or searched for. We may also use browser data such as cookies, or similar data on certain parts of our website for fraud prevention and other purposes. During some visits we may use software tools such as JavaScript to measure and collect session information, including page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used
to browse away from the page. We may also collect technical information to help us identify your device for fraud prevention and diagnostic purposes.
5. How we use information
We process your Personal Data to the necessary extent to perform our contract with you or to take the necessary steps at your request prior to entering into a contract with you. The Personal Data collected as part of the services offered on our platform are processed according to security protocols that allow us to accurately and safely manage the information received. We ensure, before and throughout the processing, compliance with the obligations set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
We do not sell your information to third parties, but we may, with your permission, for the purposes above-stated, transmit your information to third party partners. As such: your information may be transferred outside your country or region of residence to other countries for processing and storage in accordance with applicable regulations; your information may be transferred outside your country or region of residence to provide the requested services only.
6. Cookies & internet advertising policy
Cookies are unique identifiers that we transfer to your device to enable our systems to recognise your device. Cookies allow you to take advantage of some of our essential features. If you block or reject our cookies, you will not be able to add items to register for a congress, submit an abstract or use any other services that require you to sign in to your account. By visiting our platform with your browser settings adjusted to accept cookies, you consent to our use of cookies and other technologies to provide our services to you. We use cookies for additional purposes, including: Identifying you when you sign-in to your account on our website in order to display personalised content; Delivering recommendations that are relevant to your interests on our website; Conducting research and diagnostics to improve our content and services (web analytics tools); Preventing fraudulent activity; Improving security.
We do not give any your personal information to advertisers.
7. Third-party services
• Technology partners: We employ other companies and individuals to perform certain functions on our behalf. Examples include AI-data management; System / API architecture; Intelligent information system; Communication technologies; Processing payments; and Website management services. The third party service providers have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but are not permitted to use it for other purposes. Moreover, they must process the personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and as permitted by applicable data protection laws.
• Marketing partners: we may occasionally send you offers on behalf of our partners. If you do not want to receive these offers, please adjust your preferences in your account.
• Business partners: we may merge or develop joint ventures with other businesses and legal entities. In such operations, customer information may be a part of one of the assets transferred but will always remain bound to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy, unless otherwise accepted by the data subject.
8. International data transfers
Whenever we transfer personal information as set out above to countries outside of Switzerland and the European Economic Area, we will ensure that the information is transferred in accordance with this Privacy Policy and within the scope of the terms expressed by the applicable Swiss and EU provisions on data protection and data transfer.
9. Security
We maintain at all times the appropriate physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that guarantee the collection, storage and disclosure of personally identifiable user information.
• Database storage: your information is stored in a dedicated professional and encrypted server. Access to the server is permitted only with private log in details.
• Security procedures: we will request a proof of identity before we disclose any personal information to you.
• Access to private password and to your computer is your responsibility, make sure to sign out when you finish using a shared computer and to report any unauthorized activity you detect back to us.
• Physical security measures: we restrict the access to personal information only to Global Dermatology employees. This prevents unauthorized access or misuse of this information, close tracking and a secured access is put in place. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations.
10. Data retention & legal basis
We retain data for one of the following purposes: for the achievement of our legitimate knowledge sharing activities; for the fulfilment of our contracts and services; for consented use; for compliance of legal obligations; for public interest.
We will retain your information for as long as necessary for the uses set out in this Policy. The period of time is stablished by several applicable laws including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for EU members, and will be kept for legitimate business or legal purposes, or when there is a public interest. If you ask us to delete your information before this time frame, we will be required to keep the necessary data for technical, legal, regulatory or contractual constraints.
11. Access, correction & choice
You can access a range of information about your account and your interactions with the platform for the purpose of viewing and, in certain cases, updating this information on your account and/or withdraw your information.
• Access: some examples of information that you can access via your account on the platform include: personal information (including name, e-mail, password, postal address and communications); professional data (specialty and biostatement); photo; preferences (favorite themes); event participation history.
• Correction: you can add or update certain information on some pages. When you update information, we may save a copy of the previous version for our records.
• Choice: as mentioned above, you can choose to not provide any information, although it may be needed to take advantage of some the platform features. You can change your mind about receiving direct marketing from us at any time. To do this simply change your preferences by
logging into your account, if you have one, opting-out in any marketing or product communication you have received from us or by getting in touch with us using the contact details above.
• Other rights: you may have the right to object, erase, or restrict our processing of your information. However, if you do not provide your Personal Data to us this may result in disadvantages to you, e.g. we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you.
12. Changes to this privacy policy
Our business constantly evolves and so does our Privacy Policy. Our current policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account, unless otherwise stated. We stand behind our promises and will never change our policies and practices to make them less protective of user information collected in the past without the consent of the affected users. We will always display clearly when the Privacy Policy was last updated and when appropriate, notify you of any changes.