Published on October 1, 2024
This Privacy Policy (the "Policy") explains what information Area Co. (“Area”) collects, how we use it, and what choices you have about it with Area’s website, apps, and APIs (collectively, the "Service"). Please read this Policy carefully and contact us at hi@area.us with any questions.
We may revise and update this Policy occasionally. All changes are effective immediately upon posting and apply to all subsequent access to and use of the Service. Your continued use of the Service following the posting of the revised Policy indicates your acceptance of and agreement to the changes. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify you of any material changes, either through the Business Account interface, a pop-up notice, email, or other reasonable means.
Area provides matching and verification services as well as compliance assistance and risk analysis services to employers and contractors. This Policy applies to personal information that we collect in connection with the Service that links to this Policy but does not apply to any business information collected in connection with the Service.
Area will provide you with remote access to the Service through a Business Account. The Service allows Users to invite their contractors, suppliers, vendors, or service providers (collectively, "Contractors") to provide requested information and upload documents ("Business Data"). The Business Account initiating the request is an "Employer," while the responding party is a "Contractor" (collectively, "Businesses").
The Service is intended for Businesses and is not intended for personal, family, or household use. Accordingly, we treat all personal information covered by this Policy as pertaining to individuals acting as business representatives, rather than in their personal capacity.
The information you provide to Area is as follows.
Business contact information — if you are a representative of one of our actual or prospective customers, suppliers, or business partners, we may collect personal information about you (such as your name, contact details, and role) when entering into an agreement with your company and during the course of our relationship with your company.
Account information — your name, email address, phone number, taxpayer identification number or TIN, insurance information, and other similar information when you register an account with us or otherwise provide us with information.
Transaction information, such as your credit card or other payment information and authentication details when you purchase a license for the Service. We do not directly process your credit card information and instead rely on Stripe as our payment processor.
Feedback or correspondence, such as information you provide when you contact us with questions, feedback, reviews, or otherwise correspond with us online.
Usage information, such as information about how you use the Service and interact with us.
Marketing information, such as your preferences for receiving communications about our activities, services, and publications, and details about how you engage with our communications.
Other information that we may collect which is not specifically listed here, but which we will use in accordance with this Policy or as otherwise disclosed at the time of collection.
Area may obtain information about your Business from publicly available sources and other third parties as necessary to provide the Service. In addition, we may maintain pages on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other third-party platforms. When you visit or interact with our pages on those platforms, the platform provider’s privacy policy will apply to your interactions and their collection, use, and processing of your personal information. You or the platforms may provide us with information through the platform, and we will treat such information in accordance with this Policy. We may obtain your personal information from other third parties, such as marketing partners, publicly available sources, and data providers.
Area and our service providers may automatically log information about you, your computer or mobile device, and your interaction over time with our Service, our communications, and other online services, such as the following.
Device data, such as your computer’s or mobile device’s operating system type and version, manufacturer and model, browser type, screen resolution, RAM and disk size, CPU usage, device type (e.g., phone, tablet), IP address, unique identifiers (including identifiers used for advertising purposes), language settings, mobile device carrier, radio/network information (e.g., WiFi, LTE, 4G), and general location information such as city, state or geographic area.
Online activity data, such as pages or screens you viewed, how long you spent on a page or screen, browsing history, navigation paths between pages or screens, information about your activity on a page or screen, access times, and duration of access, and whether you have opened our marketing emails or clicked links within them.
Email open or click Information. We may use pixels in our email campaigns that allow us to collect your email and IP address as well as the date and time you open an email or click on any links in the email that we may send to you.
Area uses the following tools for automatic data collection.
Cookies, which are text files that websites store on a visitor’s device to uniquely identify the visitor’s browser or to store information or settings in the browser for the purpose of helping you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, enabling functionality, helping us understand user activity and patterns, and facilitating online advertising.
Local storage technologies, like HTML5, that provide cookie-equivalent functionality but can store larger amounts of data, including on your device outside of your browser in connection with specific applications.
Web beacons, also known as pixel tags or clear GIFs, which are used to demonstrate that a webpage or email was accessed or opened, or that certain content was viewed or clicked.
We process your personal information to perform and improve our Service. This includes (A) providing, operating, maintaining, securing, and enhancing the Service; (B) offering information about the Service; (C) communicating with you about the Service through announcements, updates, security alerts, and support messages; and (D) addressing your requests, questions, and feedback.
For marketing and advertising, we may occasionally send you direct marketing communications as permitted by law, including, but not limited to, notifying you of special promotions, offers, and events via text messages, email, and in-app notifications. You may opt out of our marketing communications as described in the “Opt out of marketing communications” section below.
For research and development, we may use your personal information for research and development purposes, including to analyze and improve our Service and our business. As part of these activities, we may create aggregated, de-identified, or other anonymous data from personal information we collect. We make personal information into anonymous data by removing information that makes the data personally identifiable to you. We may use this anonymous data and share it with third parties for our lawful business purposes, including to analyze and improve our Service and promote our business.
For compliance and protection, we may use personal information to (A) comply with applicable laws, lawful requests, and legal process, such as to respond to subpoenas or requests from government authorities; (B) protect our, your or others’ rights, privacy, safety or property (including by making and defending legal claims); (C) audit our internal processes for compliance with legal and contractual requirements and internal policies; (D) enforce the terms and conditions that govern the Service; and (E) prevent, identify, investigate and deter fraudulent, harmful, unauthorized, unethical or illegal activity, including cyberattacks and identity theft.
When you visit the careers portion of our website (the “Jobs”), we collect personal information that you provide to us in connection with your job application. This includes business and personal contact information, professional credentials and skills, educational and work history, and other information of the type that may be included in a resume. This may also include diversity information that you voluntarily provide. We use this information to facilitate our recruitment activities and process employment applications, such as by evaluating a job candidate for an employment activity, and monitoring recruitment statistics. We may also use and share this information to provide improved administration of the website, and as otherwise necessary: (A) to comply with relevant laws or to respond to subpoenas or warrants served on us; (B) to protect and defend the rights or property of us or others; or (C) in connection with a legal investigation.
If you are using the Service as a Contractor, we may share information about you with Businesses who are seeking to verify your insurance, tax and other business information.
As permitted by applicable laws, we may share your personal information with businesses with which we have a relationship to provide you with offers that we believe may be of interest to you.
We may share your personal information with third party companies and individuals that provide services on our behalf or help us operate our Service (such as lawyers, bankers, auditors, insurers, and providers that assist with hosting, analytics, email delivery, marketing, and database management).
We may disclose your personal information to law enforcement, government authorities, and private parties, as we believe in good faith to be necessary or appropriate for the compliance and protection purposes described above.
We may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of our business or assets, including your personal information, in connection with a business transaction (or potential business transaction) such as a corporate divestiture, merger, consolidation, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, or in the event of bankruptcy or dissolution. In such a case, we will make reasonable efforts to require the recipient to honor this Policy.
We may share personal information with our current and future affiliates, meaning an entity that controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with us. Our affiliates may use the personal information we share in a manner consistent with this Policy.
We are headquartered in the United States. To provide and operate our services, it is necessary for us to process your personal information in the United States. If we transfer personal information across borders such that we are required to apply appropriate safeguards to personal information under applicable data protection laws, we will do so. Please contact us for further information about any such transfers or the specific safeguards applied.
In certain circumstances (including based on where you are located), you may have the following rights in relation to your personal information.
The right to learn more about what personal information of yours is being processed, how and why such information is processed and the third parties who have access to such personal information. We have made this information available to you without having to request it by including it in this Policy.
The right to access your personal information.
The right to rectify or correct your personal information.
The right to restrict the use of your personal information where permitted under applicable law.
The right to request that your personal information is erased/deleted where permitted under applicable law.
The right to data portability (i.e. receive your personal information or have it transferred to another controller in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format) where permitted under applicable law.
The right to object to processing of your personal information or to direct us not to share your personal information with a non-affiliated third party where permitted under applicable law.
To make a request, please email us as provided in the “How to Contact Us” section below. We may ask for specific information from you to help us confirm your identity. We will require authorized agents to confirm their identity and authority, in accordance with applicable laws. You are entitled to exercise the rights described above free from discrimination.
Please note that in some circumstances, we may not be able to fully comply with your request, for example if we are required to retain certain information about you to comply with applicable laws and regulations or if the information is necessary in order for us to provide the services you requested. In particular, we, and our collection and processing of your personal information, may be governed by laws and regulations on anti-money laundering, fraud prevention, taxation and financial services. We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights. We will not deny you access to our services, or provide you a lower quality of services if you exercise your rights.
We collect anonymous data from the Service, such as searches, user session data, IP address, web browser type, the time spent on the page by the user, and user-clicked buttons. The “cookie” alone can’t be used to reveal the identity of the visitor. The “cookie” is a file, which is sent to the browser of the visitor and stored on the hard drive of the visitor. Cookies don’t damage the computer of the visitor. The browser can be set to indicate when a cookie is received, so the visitor can decide to accept the so-called cookie or not. We do not collect or manage any information that would allow the identification of the visitor.
Types of cookies we use are the following.
Functional — cookies essential for the Service operation, therefore the operation and availability of the Website and the Services cannot be provided without them.
Preference cookies — cookies that enable the Service to remember information impacting the way the Website behaves or looks (say, preferred language, or the region you are browsing from).
Analytics cookies — cookies help us providing a better user experience by analyzing how users interact with Area. For instance, they help us identify which pages are used most frequently, which newsletters are most engaging, and what type of Area features are the most popular.
Advertising cookies — these cookies help us to inform you and provide you with customized advertisement based on your past use of the Service. These cookies are monitoring your usage data and by using cookies, information, which information does not consider as personal data, is transferred to the partners that manage the remarketing and behavioral targeting activity. We also use third-party pixel tags and tracking snippets via Google Tag Manager to tailor your experience better.
You may opt out of email based marketing communications by following the opt-out or unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of Area emails or your Area account Settings. You may opt out of text message based marketing communications by contacting us at hi@area.us and stating your request for us to stop text message based marketing communications or through other means communicated by us to you.
There are a number of ways to opt out of having your online activity and device data collected through our Service, which we have summarized below.
Most browsers let you remove or reject cookies. To do this, follow the instructions in your browser settings. Many browsers accept cookies by default until you change your settings. Learn more about cookies here, including how to see what cookies have been set on your device and how to manage and delete them.
You can block our Service from setting cookies used for interest-based ads by using a browser with privacy features or installing browser plugins like Privacy Badger, DuckDuckGo, Ghostery or uBlock Origin, and configuring them to block third party cookies or trackers.
We may use Google Analytics to help us better understand how people engage with the Service by collecting information and creating reports about how users use our Service. For more information on Google Analytics, click here. For more information about Google’s privacy practices, click here. You can opt out of Google Analytics by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available here.
Note that because these opt-out mechanisms are specific to the device or browser on which they are exercised, you will need to opt-out on every browser and device that you use.
Some Internet browsers may be configured to send “Do not track” (DNT) signals to the online services that you visit. Area currently does not respond to DNT or similar signals. Learn more about DNT here.
We may retain your personal information for as long as it is reasonably needed in order to maintain and expand our relationship and provide you with our services; in order to comply with our legal and contractual obligations; or to protect ourselves from any potential disputes. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of such information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of such information, the purposes for which we process it, and the applicable legal requirements.
Our Service may contain links to other websites, mobile applications, and other online services operated by third parties. These links are not an endorsement of, or representation that we are affiliated with, any third party. In addition, our content may be included on web pages or in mobile applications or online services that are not associated with us. We do not control third party websites, mobile applications or online services, and we are not responsible for their actions. Other websites and services follow different rules regarding the collection, use and sharing of your personal information. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of the other websites and mobile applications and online services you use.
We use reasonable organizational, technical and administrative measures designed to protect against unauthorized access, misuse, loss, disclosure, alteration and destruction of personal information we maintain. Unfortunately, data transmission over the Internet cannot be guaranteed as completely secure. Therefore, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of personal information. In the event that we are required to notify you about a situation involving your data, we may do so by email or telephone to the extent permitted by law.
Our Service are not intended for children, and we do not collect personal information from them. We define “children” as anyone under 18 years old. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child without verification of parental consent, we will delete the information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child, please contact us via the contact information noted below.
If you have any questions or comments about this Policy, please contact Area at hi@area.us or call (855) 680-2387.