Alera Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice (“Notice”) lets you know the types of information we collect about you offline or online, including when you visit Alera’s websites (e.g., https://aleragroup.com, or see a full list of our websites here, collectively, our “Website” or “Websites”), and our practices for using, disclosing, and sharing that information.

This Notice was last updated on March 27, 2024.

Introduction

This Notice applies to information we collect on our Websites, in emails or other communications between you and Alera, information you may provide to us, or information we collect when you use our services or otherwise interact with us. 

Please read this Notice carefully to understand our practices regarding your information and how we will treat it.  We reserve the right to update or modify this Notice from time to time (see Changes to Our Privacy Notice below).  We encourage you to review this page periodically for the latest information on our privacy practices.  Where applicable data protection laws require us, we will provide appropriate notice, and take any necessary action, should we make any material changes to our practices.

Children Under the Age of 16.  Our Website is not intended for children under the age of 16.  We do not knowingly collect, sell, or share personal information from children under 16.  If you are under the age of 16, do not use or provide any information on our Website, including providing any information about yourself to us.  If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under the age of 16 without parental consent, we will delete that information.  If you believe we have any information from a child under the age of 16, please contact us (see Help below).

Information We Collect About You And How We Collect It

We collect information about you in many ways including, for example, when you visit our Website, contact us, subscribe to receive information from us, visit us, attend one of our events, or create an account with us.  This information may include personal information that can be used to identify you.  Personal information, as used in this Notice, includes sensitive personal information as defined in applicable state regulations (and identified in the table below).  Personal information does not include publicly available information from government records, or either deidentified or aggregated consumer information.

In particular, the table below describes our practices within the last twelve months.  The first column describes the categories of personal information we may collect about you. The second column describes the processing purposes that are applicable to each category of personal information. The third column describes the categories of recipients that receive the personal information.  In the fourth column, we provide for each category of information, the applicable retention period. 

We collect personal information directly from you and from our service providers.  We may also collect information from public sources and records and from third parties (such as, for example, content providers, social media platforms, and for our business-to-business marketing efforts, we receive business contact information from list services).

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose other than to:  (i) provide the goods or services; (ii) to prevent, detect, and investigate security incidents; (iii) to resist malicious, deceptive, fraudulent or illegal actions directed at Alera, including to prosecute those responsible for such actions; (iv) to ensure the physical safety of persons; (v) short-term transient use (e.g., non-personalized advertising shown as part of a consumer’s current interaction with the business, where that personal information is not disclosed to a third party and is not used to build a profile about the consumer or otherwise alter the consumer’s experience outside the current interaction of the business); (vi) to perform services on behalf of the business (e.g., maintaining or servicing accounts, providing customer service, processing or fulfilling orders and transactions, verifying customer information, processing payments, providing financing, providing analytic services, providing storage); (vii) to verify or maintain the quality or safety of a service or device that is owned, manufactured, or controlled by Alera, or to improve, upgrade or enhance such service or device; or (viii) for purposes that do not infer characteristics about a consumer.

Automatic Data Collection.  We collect certain information by automated means when you visit our Website or view our advertisements, or use our services, which helps us measure traffic patterns on our Website and to understand how users navigate our Website.  We collect this information through various means, including, for example, cookies and IP addresses.  We may also use analytics to create reports to tell us, for example, how many users visited our Website, what pages have been accessed, and from what geographic regions users visited our Website. 

How you can control cookies.  Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies.  However, if you prefer not to store cookies on your device, you can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, set your browser to refuse cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser, delete cookies after visiting our site, or browse our site using your browser’s anonymous usage setting.  Additionally, you can manage our cookie usage by accessing our Cookie Banner link. 

Social Media.  We may receive Internet or other similar activity when you visit our social media pages.  For example, we used LinkedIn analytics in connection with the operation of our LinkedIn page in order to obtain anonymized statistical data about visitors to our LinkedIn page.  For this purpose, LinkedIn places a cookie on your device when you visit our LinkedIn page at www.linkedin.com/company/aleragroup/.  Each cookie contains a unique identifier code that remains active for a period described in the LinkedIn cookie table https://www.linkedin.com/legal/l/cookie-table unless it is deleted before the end of this period.  LinkedIn receives, records, and processes the information stored in the cookie, including demographic information from any LinkedIn profile you may have, to provide us with anonymized metrics to help us measure the effectiveness of our LinkedIn page for marketing purposes.  For more information on the privacy practices of LinkedIn, please visit the LinkedIn Privacy Policy at Privacy (linkedin.com). 

When you interact with our social media pages, we receive basic engagement metrics and use this information to improve our pages and enhance our content and marketing efforts.  If you interact with these pages by, for example, posting comments or liking or sharing posts, any personal information that you post in these interactions or provide when registering for such social media, can be viewed and used by others. We do not control the use or storage of the information that is collected and processed by social media websites and we are not responsible for the content or use of these websites. These websites have their own privacy notices and/or terms of use, which we suggest you review if you visit any of these social media websites, including Facebook and X. 

General Ways We Use This Information

Alera Group may also use information that we collect about you or that you provide to us for one of the following purposes:

• To improve customer service.  Your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs.
• To improve our Website and advertise our services. Through our use of automatic data collection mechanisms, we are able to understand how our Website is being used, to measure the effectiveness of our Website, to customize content and advertising, and to use and analyze target markets.
• To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it, including when you fill out a form requesting information from us.
• To personalize your Website experience and to deliver content and product and service information and offerings relevant to your interests or location, including providing such information or offer via email.
• To register you to attend an event or online seminar, which may include helping us to plan, coordinate, and host such events, and analyzing your interests in and interactions with the event.
• If you visit our offices, we may register you as a visitor.
• Alera may receive information about you from other sources, including from third parties. For example, we may receive information about recently licensed insurance agents for marketing purposes.  We may also receive/use general demographic information about you to market products or services that may be of interest to you based on your demographics.  We may combine this information with other information provided by you which helps us to update and expand our records, identify new customers, and tailor our advertising and marketing communications.
• To notify you about changes to our Website or any products or services we offer or provide through it.
• To help maintain the safety, security, and integrity of our Website, products and services, and databases.
• To respond to law enforcement requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.
• To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide consent.
• To evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of our assets (“transaction”), whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which personal information held by us about our Website users or customers is among the assets being transferred, which may occur prior to consummation of such transaction.

If you are submitting information on behalf of a third party (for example, registering a fellow employee for an online seminar or conference), Alera expects that you have received appropriate consent, according to applicable privacy laws, before transferring any personal information to Alera.

How We Disclose Your Information

We may disclose aggregated information about users, and information that does not identify an individual, without restriction.  In addition to the Categories of Recipients identified in the table above, we may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients in a manner that does not constitute a sale or sharing of information:

• To you or other parties at your direction or through your intentional action.
• To our service providers.
• To recipients for the purpose of managing your rights.
• For Corporate Transactions.  Alera may also disclose your information to a buyer or other successor in the event of a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Alera’s assets, where personal information held by Alera about you is among the assets transferred.
• Other Reasons.  We may share your information to: (a) satisfy applicable law, regulations, legal process or valid governmental request; (b) enforce the terms of use applicable to our services, defend against legal claims or demands, or to exercise our legal rights, (c) detect, prevent or mitigate fraud or security or technical issues; or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of our company, our customers or the public as required or permitted by law.

Links to Other Sites

Occasionally, we may provide links to other websites for your convenience and information.  These websites operate independently from us and are not under our control.  We suggest that you review the privacy notices or terms of use for these websites if you visit any linked website.  We are not responsible for the content of these sites, any products or services that may be offered through these sites, or any other use of the linked websites.

Security

We employ security measures designed to protect against unauthorized access of personal information we collect.  However, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.

Changes to the Privacy Notice

Alera reserves the right to change this Notice.  If we decide to make changes, we will post the updated notice on our Website so you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and how we disclose it.  The date this Notice was last revised is identified at the top of the page.  We encourage you to review our Privacy Notice to stay informed. Where required by applicable data protection laws, we will notify you of any material changes to this Notice and obtain your consent, if required.

Regional Privacy Rights

Certain state regulations may provide you with additional rights regarding our use of your personal information.  To learn more about these rights, see Additional Regional Notices.

Help

If you need help or have questions regarding this Notice, please visit our Contact Us page, email us at privacy@aleragroup.com, including a subject line “Privacy Request,” call (866) 226-8343, or contact us by regular mail addressed to:

3 Parkway North
Suite 500
Deerfield, IL  60015
Attn: Chief Privacy Officer

Additional Regional Notices

This portion of the Privacy Notice supplements the information contained in our Notice above to describe the rights we provide to consumers, which are, for clarity, residents of certain states that have privacy regulations that are applicable to us.  For residents of states without privacy regulations, or where your state regulation does not cover all of the following rights or choices, we will consider requests regarding such rights but will apply our discretion in how we process such requests.  For states that have passed privacy regulations, but are not yet in effect, we will also consider applying those state law rights prior to the effective date of such laws but will do so in our discretion.

As permitted by applicable privacy regulations, certain requests that you submit to us are subject to an identity verification process (“verifiable consumer request”) as described below in the Exercising Your Rights section.  We will not fulfill such requests unless you have provided sufficient information for us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we have collected personal information.

Your Rights and Choices

The applicable privacy regulations may provide the following rights regarding your personal information:

Right to Know – Categories Request

You have the right to request, twice in a 12-month period, that Alera disclose the following information about the personal information we have collected about you during the past 12 months:

• The categories of personal information we collected about you.
• The categories of sources from which we collected the personal information.
• Our business or commercial purpose for which we collected, sold, or shared the personal information.
• The categories of third parties with whom we sold or shared the personal information, by category or categories of personal information for each category of third parties to whom the personal information was sold or shared.
• The categories of personal information about you that we disclosed for a business purpose, and the categories of persons to whom we disclosed that information for a business purpose. 

Right to Know – Specific Pieces

You have the right to request a transportable copy of the specific pieces of personal information we collected about you in the 12-month period preceding your request. Please note that personal information is retained by us for various time periods, so there may be certain information that we have collected about you that we do not retain for a 12-month period and thus, it would not be able to be included in our response to you. Also, under your applicable state’s law, you may be limited to a certain number of “right to know” requests in any 12-month period.

Right to Delete

You have the right to request that Alera delete certain personal information that we collected from you.  Please understand that we cannot delete personal information in those situations where our retention is required for our own internal business purposes or otherwise permitted by relevant U.S. privacy laws (such as fraud prevention or legal compliance).  When we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request, we will delete your personal information from our records, unless an exception applies. 

Right to Correct Information

You have the right to request that we correct any inaccuracies that you find in your personal information maintained by us.  Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request, we will use commercially reasonable efforts to correct any inaccurate information and we will instruct our service providers or any contractors to correct such information. We will also inform you whether or not we have complied with your request, including any basis for denial of the request.

Sensitive Personal Information

Depending on your state of residence, you may have had to provide consent for us to process sensitive personal information, as that term is defined under your applicable state’s law.  Subject to certain exceptions, you may have the right to revoke such consent.  You can make such a request using the methods described below in Exercising Your Rights.

Exercising Your Rights

To exercise your rights as described above, please submit a verifiable consumer request to us by either:

• Calling (866) 224-8343
• Email: privacy@aleragroup.com  with the subject line “Privacy Request.”

Only you, or a person registered with the appropriate governmental authority that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your personal information.  You may also make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child.  If you submit a request on behalf of another person, we may require proof of authorization and verification of identity directly from the person for whom you are submitting a request.

To help protect your privacy and maintain security, we take steps to verify your identity before granting you access to your personal information or considering your deletion or correction request.  The verifiable consumer request must:

• Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or an authorized representative, which may include (i) your name and email address if we have collected your information for marketing purposes or (ii) your name, email address, home postal address, and certain account information, depending on your request, if we have collected information for providing you with our products or services.
• Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.

We cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the personal information relates to you. 

Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us.  However, we do consider requests made through your password protected account sufficiently verified when the request relates to personal information associated with that specific account.

We will only use personal information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request.

Response Timing

• We will confirm receipt of your request within ten (10) business days.  If you do not receive confirmation within the 10-day timeframe, please contact us by calling (866) 224-8343 or by emailing us at privacy@aleragroup.com  with the subject line “Privacy Request. 

We endeavor to respond to a verifiable consumer within 45 days of its receipt.  If we require more time (up to 45 days), we will inform you of the reason and the extension period.

We do not charge a fee to process or respond to your verifiable consumer request unless it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded.  If we determine that the request warrants a fee, we will tell you why we made that decision and provide you with a cost estimate before completing your request.

Appeal Rights

You may have a right to appeal any denial of your request.  Please email us at privacy@aleragroup.com, including a subject line “Privacy Appeal Request,” call (866) 226-8343, or contact us by regular mail addressed to:

3 Parkway North
Suite 500
Deerfield, IL  60015
Attn: Chief Privacy Officer

Personal Information Opt-Out Rights

Non-Cookie Personal Information.  We do not disclose your non-cookie personal information to a third party unless you direct us to, for instance, if you complete a form.  The form will describe the information collected, the purpose for the collection, and how the information will be disclosed.  If you do not agree to the disclosing of such information, you should not complete and submit the form as the form’s submission will act as an “opt-in” for the disclosing of such information.

Cookie Personal Information. If you would like to submit a request to opt-out of our processing of your cookie information, you need to exercise your request on our cookie management tool (e.g., our cookie banner). You can also click on our “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link in the footer of our homepage.  Then, activate your choices through use of the toggle. 

Global Privacy Control (“GPC”).  Some privacy laws require us to process GPC signals, which may also be referred to as opt-out preference signals or opt-out mechanisms.  GPC is a signal sent by a platform, technology, or mechanism, enabled by individuals on their devices or browsers that communicate the individual’s choice to opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal data.  To use GPC, you can download an internet browser or plugin to use on your current internet browser and follow the settings to enable GOC. We receive and process GPC signals on our Website.  We process GPC signals in a frictionless manner, which means that we do not: (i) charge a fee for use of our service if you have enabled GPC, (ii) change your experience with our Website if you use GPC, or (iii) display a notification, pop-up, text, graphic, animation, sound, video, or any interstitial in response to the GPC.

Non-Discrimination

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your rights under the various state regulations.  For example, we will not deny you goods or services, charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or other benefits, or imposing penalties, provide you with a different level or quality of goods or services, or suggest that you may receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services.

Help

If you need help with unsubscribing or have questions regarding this Notice, please visit our Contact Us Page, email us at privacy@aleragroup.com, including a subject line “Privacy Request,” call (866) 226-8343, or contact us by regular mail addressed to:

3 Parkway North
Suite 500
Deerfield, IL  60015
Attn: Chief Privacy Officer