EFFECTIVE DATE: June 5, 2021.

Next Generation Indie Book Awards ("NGIBA", "us", "we") recognizes the importance of protecting the privacy of any personal information we collect. We appreciate that you trust us with your information, and we intend to always keep that trust. This starts with making sure you understand the information we collect, why we collect it and how it is used.

PRIVACY POLICY

Capitalized terms used and not defined in this Privacy Policy have the meanings ascribed to such terms in NGIBA Terms of Use ("Terms").

1. Where This Privacy Policy Applies

This Privacy Policy applies to all of NGIBA Services. By using the Services, you are agreeing to the terms of this Privacy Policy and the accompanying Terms.

This Privacy Policy also applies to the processing of your personal information by third parties with whom NGIBA shares your personal information. This Privacy Policy does not apply to business activities of third parties who collect personal information directly from you.

2. Information We Collect

Information you give us

You choose to give us certain information when using our Services. This includes:

• When you submit a Book to our Awards Program, you provide us with basic information such as your name, address, phone number and email address.
• When you submit a payment to us, you provide us or our payment service provider with information, such as your debit or credit card number or other financial information.
• If you contact us through indiebookawards.com (the "Website"), we collect the information you give us during the interaction. Sometimes, we monitor or record these interactions for training purposes and to ensure a high quality of service.
• When you purchase or are gifted a ticket to one of our Events, you provide us with your name and email address.

Information we receive from others

In addition to the information you provide us directly, we receive information about you from others, including:

• Other Users Other users may provide information about you as they use our Services. For instance, when other users or organizations submit a Book to our Awards Program on your behalf, they may disclose your name, address, phone number and email address.

Information collected when you use our Services

When you use our Services, we collect information about which features you use, how you use them and the devices you use to access our Services. See below for more details:

• Usage Information We collect information about your activity on our Services, for instance how you use them (e.g., date and time you logged in, features you use, searches, clicks and pages which have been shown to you, referring webpage address, advertising that you click on).
• Device information We collect information from and about the device(s) you use to access our Services, including:
  • hardware and software information such as IP address, device ID and type, device-specific settings and characteristics, advertising IDs (such as Google's AAID and Apple's IDFA, both of which are randomly generated numbers that you can reset by going into your device' settings), browser type, version and language, operating system, time zones, identifiers associated with cookies or other technologies that may uniquely identify your device or browser (e.g., IMEI/UDID and MAC address); and
  • information on your wireless and mobile network connection, like your service provider and signal strength.

3. Cookies and Other Similar Data Collection Technologies

We use and may allow others to use cookies and similar technologies (e.g., web beacons, pixels) to recognize you and/or your device(s). We use this information to authenticate you, remember your preferences and settings, analyze site traffic and trends, deliver and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and allow you to use other features.

Some web browsers (including Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) have a "Do Not Track" ("DNT") feature that tells a website that a user does not want to have his or her online activity tracked. If a website that responds to a DNT signal receives a DNT signal, the browser can block that website from collecting certain information about the browser's user. Moreover, not all browsers offer a DNT option and DNT signals are not yet uniform.

4. How We Use Information

To administer our Awards Program and provide our Services to you

• Manage your submissions
• Provide you with customer support and respond to your requests
• Complete your transactions
• Communicate with you about our Services

To ensure a consistent experience across your devices

• Link the various devices you use so that you can enjoy a consistent experience of our Services on all of them. We do this by linking devices and browser data, for example by using partial or full IP address, browser version and similar data about your devices to help identify and link them.

To provide new Services to you

• Notify and provide you with new Services offered by us

To serve you relevant offers and ads

• Administer sweepstakes, contests, discounts or other offers
• Develop, display and track content and advertising tailored to your interests on our Services and other sites
• Communicate with you by email, phone, social media or mobile device about products or Services that we think may interest you

To improve our Services and develop new ones

• Administer focus groups and surveys
• Conduct research and analysis of users' behavior to improve our Services and content
• Develop new features and Services

To prevent, detect and fight fraud or other illegal or unauthorized activities

• Address ongoing or alleged misbehavior on and off-platform
• Perform data analysis to better understand and design countermeasures against these activities
• Retain data related to fraudulent activities to prevent against recurrences

To ensure legal compliance

• Comply with legal requirements
• Assist law enforcement
• Enforce or exercise our rights

To process your information as described above, we rely on the following legal bases:

• Provide our Services to you: Most of the time, the reason we process your information is to perform the contract that you have with us.
• Legitimate interests: We may use your information where we have legitimate interests to do so. For instance, to suggest offers we think might interest you, and to process information for administrative, fraud detection and other legal purposes.
• Consent: From time to time, we may ask for your consent to use your information for certain specific reasons. You may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer at the address provided at the end of this Privacy Policy.

5. How We Share Information

When you submit a Book

• When you submit a Book to our Awards Program, your personal information (including content of the Book that is considered personal information) may be shared with our judges, sponsors, Event participants and others as required for the administration of the Awards Program. We also share your name and details of your Book project in our press releases and marketing channels, including social media.

With our service providers and partners

• We use third parties to help us operate and improve our Services. These third parties assist us with various tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer care, marketing, advertising, payment processing and security operations.
• We share your information with other service providers for them to assist us in processing your information, as service providers, upon our instructions and on our behalf. Assistance provided by other companies may include technical processing operations, such as data hosting and maintenance, customer care, marketing and targeted advertising, finance and accounting assistance, better understanding how our Services are used and users' behavior to improve our Services, securing our data and systems and fighting against spam, abuse, fraud, infringement and other wrongdoings.
• We may also share information with other companies for legitimate business purposes such as corporate audit, analysis and consolidated reporting as well as compliance with applicable laws.
• We may also share information with partners who distribute and assist us in advertising our Services. For instance, we may share limited information on you in hashed, non-human readable form to advertising partners.

For corporate transactions

• We may transfer your information if we are involved, whether in whole or in part, in a merger, sale, acquisition, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, bankruptcy or other change of ownership or control.

When required by law

• We may disclose your information if reasonably necessary: (i) to comply with a legal process, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government / law enforcement investigation or other legal requirements; (ii) to assist in the prevention or detection of crime (subject in each case to applicable law); or (iii) to protect the safety of any person.

To enforce legal rights

• We may also share information: (i) if disclosure would mitigate our liability in an actual or threatened lawsuit; (ii) as necessary to protect our legal rights and legal rights of our users, business partners or other interested parties; (iii) to enforce our agreements with you; and (iv) to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing.
• We may use and share non-personal information (meaning information that, by itself, does not identify who you are such as device information, general demographics, general behavioral data, geolocation in de-identified form), as well as personal information in hashed, non-human readable form, under any of the above circumstances. We may also share this information with other third parties (notably advertisers) to develop and deliver targeted advertising on our Services and on websites or applications of third parties, and to analyze and report on advertising you see. We may combine this information with additional non-personal information or personal information in hashed, non-human readable form collected from other sources.

6. Cross-Border Data Transfers

Sharing of your personal information sometimes involves cross-border data transfers outside of Canada. If your personal information is transferred to another jurisdiction, then it may be accessible to the law enforcement and national security authorities of that jurisdiction.

7. Your Rights

We want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points to remember:

• Applicable privacy laws may give you the right to review the personal information we keep about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be called right of access, right of portability or variations of those terms). You can request a copy of your personal information by contacting our Privacy Officer.
• If you believe that the information we hold about you is inaccurate or that we are no longer entitled to use it and you want to request its rectification, deletion or object to its processing, you can contact our Privacy Officer.
• For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can provide you with a copy of your personal information or rectify your personal information.
• We may reject requests for certain reasons, including if the request is unlawful or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy of another user.
• If you wish to receive information relating to another user, the other user will have to provide us with their written consent before the information is released. Notwithstanding the foregoing, we reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to reject any request for information about another user.
• We may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to the processing of personal information, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our Services to you anymore.
• You can stop all information collection by making a request to our Privacy Officer, from which time we will not collect any additional information about you.
• In certain countries, including in the European Union, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal information. The data protection authority you can lodge a complaint with notably may be that of your habitual residence, where you work or where we are established.

8. How We Protect Your Information

We implement physical, organizational, and technological measures to protect your personal information. As with all technology companies, although we take steps to secure your information, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information will always remain secure.

We may suspend your use of all or part of the Services without notice if we suspect or detect any breach of security. If you believe that your information is no longer secure, please notify our Privacy Officer immediately.

9. How Long We Retain Your Information

We keep your personal information for as long as we need it to provide the Services and as permitted or required by applicable law. We delete or anonymize your information upon deletion of your account, unless:

1. we must keep it to comply with applicable law;
2. we must keep it to evidence our compliance with applicable law;
3. there is an outstanding issue, claim or dispute requiring us to keep the relevant information until it is resolved; or
4. the information must be kept for our legitimate business interests, such as fraud prevention and enhancing users' safety and security.

Although our systems are designed to carry out data deletion processes according to the above guidelines, we cannot promise that all data will be deleted within a specific timeframe.

10. California Privacy Rights

For users who are California residents, the data we collect may fall within the following categories of "personal information," as defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA):

1. Identifiers, such as name and location;
2. Personal information, as defined in the California customer records law, such as contact (including email and telephone number) and financial information;
3. Characteristics of protected classifications under California or federal law (if you choose to provide them), such as age, gender identity and marital status;
4. Commercial information, such as transaction information and purchase history;
5. Internet or network activity information, such as browsing history and interactions with our websites;
6. Geolocation data, such as mobile device location;
7. Audio, electronic, visual and similar information, such as photos and videos;
8. Professional or employment-related information, such as work history and prior employer;
9. Non-public education information; and
10. Inferences drawn from any of the personal information listed above to create a profile or summary about, for example, an individual's preferences and characteristics.

Users who are California residents have the following rights (in addition to the other rights listed in this Privacy Policy):

1. You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you and explain how we have collected, used and shared your personal information over the past 12 months.
2. You have the right to request that we delete your personal information that we collected from you, subject to certain exceptions.
3. You have a right to request a notice disclosing the categories of personal information about you that we have shared with third parties for their direct marketing purposes during the preceding calendar year.

11. Children's Privacy

Our Services are restricted to users who are 13 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 13. If you suspect that personal information of an individual who is under the age of 13 has been provided to us through use of the Services, please contact our Privacy Officer.

12. Privacy Policy Changes

Because we're always looking for new and innovative ways to provide our Services, this policy may change over time. We will notify you before any material changes take effect so that you have time to review the changes.

13. How to Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, you can reach our Privacy Officer:

• by email at info@indiebookawards.com
• by using the form on our contact page
• by leaving a message at 1-403-873-1018‬
• by mail at: Next Generation Indie Book Awards
  7916 NE 173rd Ave. Vancouver, WA 98682 U.S.A