PINECONE RESEARCH
Updated July 2010

Your information and our business.   PineCone Research provides our clients information about consumer preferences with respect to products and product concepts.  Our clients use this information to decide which products to bring to market, where and at what price.  By participating in our panel, you will be among those whose opinions will impact decisions made by our clients.

Your personal information remains confidential.  In joining our panel, you will be providing to us some personal information about you as well as information about certain other members of your household.  For as long as you remain a panellist, this information is retained in our database and used only as necessary to produce reports and analyses concerning new products and new product concepts throughout your country and around the world on an anonymous basis.  This personal information is never disclosed in an identifiable form in any report we provide to our clients. 

Is our information correct?  You will be giving us certain personal information about yourself including your name, address, e-mail address, telephone number, date of birth, sex, occupation, level of education, and annual income.  In addition, you will be providing us with the dates of birth and sex of your children under the age of majority as well as the sex and year of birth of the other adults in your household.  This is your profile information.  You may update your profile information at any time by logging into the PineCone Research Website.  You also will be requested from time to time to provide additional personal information in conjunction with certain product analyses.  You may also update information at any time by  email at scott@pineconeresearch.ca.  You may also contact us at this telephone number or e-mail address at any time if you would like to see the information we hold about you or to ask us to correct or update this information, or to ask us to delete all personal information that we hold about you on any storage media, or to stop your participation in our panel. 

Do we use cookies? In order to manage our panel and to enhance your experience as a Nielsen panelist, we place cookies on your computer. A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier, sent to your browser from a website’s computers and stored on your computer’s hard drive. The cookie that we use to recognize you as a PineCone Research Panel Member when you return to this site or visit other Nielsen websites employs a technology called “Flash.” The information gathered via this cookie may be associated with other Nielsen cookies that you have on your computer and used to supplement the information that we have about you. This cookie does not contain any personally-identifiable information.  

Additionally, we may allow our panel recruitment partners to use Web beacons and cookies on our registration pages solely for payment verification purposes. We have no access to or control over these cookies. This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by PineCone Research and members of the Nielsen family of companies only and does not cover the use of cookies by any of our partners.  

For information about how to delete the Flash cookie, please click here.  Setting your browser to reject cookies or deleting cookies, however, may interfere with your using some features of other web sites and may impair your ability to participate in activities at this site.

Use of personal information.  We will use the information you and other panellists provide us to help identify future products and services.  We combine the information that you and other panellists give us with data and research tools from other sources.  We use this information to perform research and to prepare reports and analyses concerning consumer preferences in your country and around the world with respect to new products and new product ideas.

We maintain the security of the personal information we hold about you.  We maintain security measures in place in order to attempt to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal information under our control.  We take reasonable precautions to attempt to ensure that data stored in our system is secure.  Please be advised, however, that the internet and other various networking communication media are not entirely secure unless specified as such and your personal information may therefore be subject to interception or loss which is beyond our control.  The information and data exchanged or transmitted by this Website is not encrypted and therefore the security, integrity and privacy of any and all such data and information cannot be guaranteed.  We will maintain and improve our security measures over time in accordance with legal and technological developments.  We may store the personal information we hold about you until such time as the information is no longer necessary for the purposes outlined herein.  We may store this data in your home country, or we may transfer this data to PineCone operations and other organizations that process the data we hold about you on our behalf in other countries, including the U.S.A.  We also may disclose this data to third parties when disclosure is required by law.  (You may contact us at any time to see details of the parties to whom this information has been made available.)  The laws of these other countries regarding the use and transfer of personal data may not be similar to those of your home country.  But you may be assured that any transfer of this data outside your home country will be done in full accordance with applicable law.  This data will be controlled by, and will be accessible electronically only to select members of the administrative staff of Pinecone Research or its affiliates. 

About PineCone Research.  PineCone Research is a business owned by a subsidiary Nielsen, global market research company.  The Nielsen headquarters are at 770 Broadway, New York, New York 10003 U.S.A.

We may change this Policy.  We reserve the right to update and make changes to this Policy.  If we materially change our practices in handling personally identifiable information, we will notify you by posting the changes on the online Policy at least 30 days prior to the implementation of any changes.  In the event there are any changes to (i) the purpose for which and personal information is collected from you, (ii) the use to be made of any of your personal information, or (iii) the disclosure that may be made of your personal information by us, we will ensure that we obtain from you your electronic consent to use your personal information in accordance with such new policies.  This online Policy may be viewed by clicking on the link at the bottom of any page in the PineCone website. 

Any questions?  Please contact Michelle Rosenacker by e-mail at:  Michelle.Rosenacker@nielsen.com