This Privacy Notice describes our handling of Personal Information in connection with your activities in our locations or your use of our websites, mobile applications, or the services we provide.  By visiting our locations, websites, or mobile applications or using our services, you hereby consent to these terms.  

“Personal Information” refers to information that identifies you or that can be reasonably linked to you as an individual. We encourage you to read this Privacy Notice which describes how we collect, use, share, and protect your Personal Information, and the choices you have regarding your Personal Information. 

1.  Personal Information Collected and How We Collect It

Types of Personal Information that we may collect:

• Name and contact information such as postal address, email address, and phone number
• Digital information, including your device IDs, browsing history, referring URL, browser, operating system, and other activity on our websites or mobile apps (such as your activity on our site, including text entered and mouse movements)
• Your transaction information, including purchases of products and services
• Payment card number and other payment information
• Your Account Number or Loyalty Program ID

In certain situations, we may also collect things like:

• Driver's license number (for example, if you return a product)
• Location information (such as when you ask us to tell you about nearby stores or use our digital properties)
• Demographic and preference information (to help find products or services that may be of interest to you)
• Survey responses, chat sessions, and feedback (regarding products/services purchased, customer service interactions, and your customer experience)
• Advertising interactions (such as cookie IDs, device advertising IDs, which ad was served, and the URLs where the ads are served when you interact with our emails or online/mobile ads)
• Voice and CCTV recordings (for example, for quality assurance when contacting our call centers, or when visiting locations that use security cameras)
• School affiliation (based on program participation)
• Photos or graphic images and files (if you receive product deliveries or request certain services from us)
• Employer name and business contact information (if your company has a business relationship with us)
• Your postal mail (if you participate in that program with us)

We receive Personal Information from the following:

• Information You Provide Us Directly.  We collect Personal Information from you directly, for example, in connection with a purchase (in-person or via our websites or mobile apps), a service, a promotion/event, a customer service request, a survey, or an application for a membership program. When using our mobile apps, we may also ask you to grant us access to the camera, photo library, or microphone on your mobile device to enable certain features such as scanning bar codes and speech-enabled search.
• Information Collected Through Automated Technologies.  We and our third party service providers may use cookies, tags, web beacons and other technologies on our web properties and mobile applications to track and collect some Personal Information made available through your activity on our sites/apps, such as shopping/search activity and other interactions with our online services. We also use cookies to enable core site functionality, to analyze website usage so that we can measure and improve services and performance, and to serve ads that are relevant to your interests.  Cookies “remember” your device/browser when you return to a website and make your experience more user-friendly and allow us to better understand how our websites are used to improve the experience.

If you use a mobile device, your device may share location information (when you enable location services) with our websites, mobile applications, services, or our service providers. For example, precise geo-location can be used to help you find our nearby locations.

• Information We Receive from Other Parties.  We may obtain information about you from other sources for purposes such as prospecting, marketing, fraud detection, and/or enhancing the information you have provided, such as validating address formats.

Our sites and mobile applications may allow you to sign-in to our digital property using a social media network login and we may also include other social media features, such as a “share this” button. In these cases, we may receive information from the social media network, including your profile information, picture, user ID associated with your social media account, and other information you permit the social media network to share with third parties. The data we receive from these social media networks is dependent upon their policies and your privacy settings on that third party site. You should always review and, if necessary, adjust your privacy settings on these websites and services before utilizing these features.

Minors

Our programs, websites and mobile applications are not directed toward minors under 16 years of age.  We do not knowingly collect, share, or sell the Personal Information of minors.

2.  How We Use Personal Information

Personal Information may be used for the following purposes:

• To Provide and Improve our Products and Services.  We use Personal Information to process your orders, purchases, refunds/exchanges, and requests for products, services, or information.  We may also use your Personal Information to create and maintain your accounts, to enable order shipment tracking notifications, to provide customer service, to administer our credit card programs, to personalize your shopping experience, to identify your preferences, to provide you services across multiple devices, to improve the functioning and performance of our digital properties, to enable certain mobile app functionality (such as using your location to help you find our nearby locations), and to expand our product/service offerings.
• Marketing and Advertising.  We use Personal Information to communicate and/or administer promotions, contests, sweepstakes, surveys, and rewards programs and to make you aware of our products and services. We may use your Personal Information to better predict your product/service preferences or interests. We may also use your activity on websites/applications to serve you personalized advertising in order to show you content that is more likely to be of interest to you. (See section 4 below for additional information regarding our Marketing activities.)
• Other Uses.  We use Personal Information for other reasons, including conducting sales research and analysis; preventing or mitigating fraud and credit risk; and complying with legal matters, investigations, and applicable laws and regulations.

3.  How We Share Personal Information

We may share your Personal Information within our family of companies for purposes such as preference management, marketing, customer service functions, and improved user experiences.

We may also share your Personal Information outside our family of companies (for example, with third parties such as service providers, data processors, contractors, etc.) for various purposes such as:

• Providing the Products or Services you Requested: To process transactions or provide products or services on our behalf. Examples include fulfilling orders for products or services, delivering packages, sending communications, analyzing data, processing payments, transmitting content, managing credit risk, and providing customer service. We may also share your Personal Information with our business partners when you take part in certain programs.
• Marketing Purposes: To assess, develop, administer, and notify you of promotions and offers for products or services that may be of interest to you.
• Corporate Transactions: In connection with a merger, acquisition or sale involving all or a portion of our company. 
• Other Reasons: Such as to satisfy applicable law, regulations, legal processes, or valid governmental requests; enhance data and digital properties; enforce the terms of use applicable to our services; detect, prevent, or mitigate fraud, security, or technical issues; and protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of our company, our customers or the public as required or permitted by law.
• With Your Consent: In circumstances other than those described above.

4.  How We Use Personal Information for Marketing

a. Digital Marketing

Interest Based Advertising

We participate in interest-based advertising, (sometimes called IBA or online behavioral advertising) to present you with online ads for our products and services that we believe may be of interest to you. We may partner with third party advertising companies to infer your preferences or interests and to show you ads tailored to your individual interests. As a result, you may see our ads on other websites based on your prior web browsing activities (for instance, an ad from us may be displayed to you on another website if you recently browsed for office supplies).

We sometimes allow third party companies to collect certain information when you visit our websites or use our mobile applications. This information is used to serve ads for products or services. These companies use this information (such as click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over, hardware/software information, cookie and session ID, static IP address) during your visits to many websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you.

We may also utilize third party services that allow us to associate your activity on our site with your activity on other sites in order to provide advertising to you on other websites and online platforms.

We may associate the various devices you utilize (such as, smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers where you may be logged into our online properties) while interacting with us on our websites and mobile apps, and combine that information with other information we have, such as your interaction with our locations and services. We use this data to provide you with more relevant ads and to provide you with a consistent online and mobile shopping experience across devices.

Cross-Context Behavioral Advertising

Our advertising may be based on your activity or search behavior obtained from other businesses, websites, applications, or services. We may merge this with data collected from our own websites and mobile apps.

Contextual and Look Alike Advertising

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising used to show relevant digital content.  Because these ads are based on the site visited, not your behavior on that site, you will still see “contextual” ads even if you opt out of interest-based ads. For example, you still may see an ad for one of our ink & toner brands while looking at paper products online on another site because it has been inferred that users of that site may be small business owners.

Unlike interest-based ads which are based on your specific-activity, these ads are presented to anyone visiting a particular site.  We analyze data to help us learn about general trends, habits, or characteristics from a group of consumers who all act similarly online and/or offline. By doing this, we can find and serve many others who “look like” those already in the group and thereby present what we believe will be relevant and beneficial product offers and information.

Social Media Advertising

Some of our sites use Facebook’s Advanced Matching feature which is a service they offer to advertisers. Through this service, we may securely send information to Facebook (e.g., email address) to identify a matched user on their platform.  This allows us to show our ads to customers that are also Facebook users.  Once a customer engages with an ad (i.e., clicks), the sites then use digital technologies, like cookies, to follow a customer’s journey from Facebook, through the ad, and then to activity on our site.  This strategy is used so that we can better target and measure the effectiveness of our advertising on Facebook’s platform.

We may also display ads to you through other social media platforms. These ads are sent to groups of people who share similar traits or interests. For example, we may advertise to certain social media users who have expressed an interest in shopping for office supplies, office furniture, cleaning supplies, etc. See the privacy policies of each social media platform for additional information about these types of ads.

b. Email Marketing

We may use your email address to deliver marketing information, product recommendations, and non-transactional communications about us via email.

c. Direct Mail Marketing

We may use your mailing address to deliver notices of new services/partnerships, offers/coupons, printed catalogs, etc. about us or our products or services via direct mail.