How we handle your data

Who is writing this

This page belongs to Affinity Search Partners, a recruiting firm for IT and information systems roles. We place contractors, people on contract-to-hire terms, permanent staff and technology leaders with employers in Middle Tennessee and across the United States. Our office address is 5123 Virginia Way, Suite A23, Brentwood, TN 37027.

What follows covers two things: this website, and the business email we send in the course of our work. It explains what we hold about the people we approach, why we hold it, and what you can do about it.

Why you may have heard from us

Our work is introducing employers to technical people and technical people to employers. To do that we write to people whose jobs have something to do with hiring, technology teams or technology careers. We use a work email address, and now and then we telephone an office line or post a letter to a business address.

We only make an approach when we have a reason to think the subject could matter to the person's work. When someone tells us they are not interested, that is the end of it.

The information we keep

Most of what we hold is the kind of thing found on a business card or a professional profile:

• Your name, job title and employer.
• A work email address, an office phone number, and the address of a professional networking profile, where we have been able to find them.
• Facts about the company you work for, such as its size, industry, location and technology.
• Public business activity, for example roles the company is advertising, news about it, and things posted publicly in a professional setting.
• The result of a technical check that tells us whether an email address will accept mail, run before we send anything.
• Any messages exchanged with you and the notes we make about those conversations.

Visiting this website adds very little. There is no cookie and no analytics script on this site. The company that hosts it keeps the ordinary technical logs that any web server keeps. The typeface is loaded from a font service, and when a page loads that service sees the IP address of the device you are using.

We neither request nor keep sensitive information: nothing about health, religion, politics, ethnicity, sexual orientation, union membership or anything of that kind.

Where it comes from

Business contact information reaches us from three directions. Some of it is public: employer websites, job listings, news reports and professional networking profiles. Some of it comes from commercial providers of business data, which supply work contact details and company facts to firms like ours. The rest comes from you, when you answer an email, fill in the form on our main website or speak with us.

How we use it

We use what we hold to decide whether an approach makes sense, and to make that approach at your place of work. Before an email goes out we check that the address is live so we are not sending mail into the void. When you reply we use your details to answer you and, if you ask for it, to talk about or deliver our services. We also keep a list of everyone who has asked not to be contacted, and we use it to make sure we honor that request. Beyond that, we use the information only as needed to protect our systems and to meet the obligations the law puts on us.

Nothing in our email tracks you. We do not know whether a message was opened, and we do not try to find out.

How to make us stop

Answer any of our emails, in any words you choose, and we will stop. If we have telephoned, say so to the person on the line. There is no form to fill in and no link to hunt for.

We act promptly and in every case within ten business days of hearing from you. So that the request holds, your name and address stay on the list of people we must not contact. That list is checked against every source we use, so the same details cannot come back in through a different door.

Who else sees it

We do not sell business contact information, nor rent it out, nor pass it to other companies so they can market to you or aim advertising at you.

A small number of service providers handle information on our behalf: the companies that run our email and mailboxes, the service that checks whether an address accepts mail, the providers of business data described above, and the hosting and storage companies our systems run on. Each of them may use it for that work alone.

We will also disclose information if the law obliges us to, or if doing so is necessary to protect someone's rights or safety. And if the business is ever sold or passed to a successor, the information goes with it, bound by this same page.

For how long

Business contact information stays with us while it is useful to our work, and records are removed once they are out of date. Records tied to a client engagement stay for the life of the engagement and afterwards for as long as our legal and accounting duties call for. The do-not-contact list stays in place as long as we are still approaching businesses at all, because the list only works if it lasts.

Keeping it safe

Only the people who need it can get at what we hold, and we take reasonable measures to protect it. No way of storing or sending information is beyond every risk, and we do not promise that ours is.

Your choices and rights

You may ask what we hold on you and how we came by it, ask for corrections where something is wrong, and ask for your record to be deleted. We will delete it, with the one exception of the do-not-contact entry, which we keep so that we do not write to you again.

Depending on the state you live in, the law may add rights of its own: to know what is collected, to correct it, to delete it, and to refuse the sale of personal information or its sharing. We do neither, in that sense, so there is nothing to refuse, though you are still free to ask. Exercising a right changes nothing about how we deal with you.

Requests can be made by answering one of our emails, through the form on the contact page of our main website, or by letter to the address below. We may check that the request really comes from the person we contacted, usually by confirming the email address we wrote to. We reply within whatever time limit the relevant statute imposes. A person you have authorized to act for you may make the request instead.

Under 18

Our work is with businesses and the adults who run them. We never knowingly gather information about anyone under 18.

Where we work

Our business is run out of Tennessee, in the United States. The providers we use may handle information in whatever countries their systems sit.

When this page changes

If we change how we handle information, we change this page and move the date at its head.

How to reach us

Write to us at:

Affinity Search Partners
5123 Virginia Way, Suite A23, Brentwood, TN 37027

You can also answer any message we have sent, or go through the contact page of our main website.