Privacy Policy | Lincoln

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information Lincoln collects through this website, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. We have tried to keep it short and plain. It describes only what this website actually does.

1. Who we are

This website is operated by Lincoln Data Consulting, LLC, a limited liability company organized in Georgia, United States, doing business as "Lincoln." In this policy, "Lincoln," "Lincoln Data Consulting," "we," "us," and "our" mean that business.

We are a data consulting firm. We help organizations with data strategy, data services, systems implementation and integration, cloud data migrations, and AI services.

We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy. Under the European Union and United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we are the "controller" of that information.

You can reach us about privacy at legal@lincolndataconsulting.com or by mail at 3615 Cherokee St NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144.

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers our marketing website at lincolndataconsulting.com and lincolndataconsultancy.com (together, the "site"). It covers information you give us through the site and information collected automatically when you visit it.

It does not cover personal information we handle while providing consulting services to a client. That work is governed by our written agreement with that client.

Your use of the site is also governed by our Terms of Service.

3. Information we collect

Information you give us through the contact form

Our "Let's talk" contact form asks for the following information.

Required fields:

First and last name
Email address
Phone number
Company
Job title
A message in your own words, describing your project
A checkbox confirming that you have read this Privacy Policy and agree to our Terms of Service

Optional fields:

Country (the form shows United States unless you change it)
City
Industry, chosen from a list (and, if you choose "Other", your industry in your own words)
A checkbox to choose to receive marketing emails from us

You decide what to write in the message field. Please do not include sensitive information, such as health or financial account details, government ID numbers, passwords, or confidential information about your company or its customers. We do not need that information to respond to you.

If we exchange emails or talk with you after you submit the form, we will also have the contents of those conversations.

Information collected automatically

When you visit the site, some information is collected automatically so the site can work and so we can understand how it is used.

Hosting request data. Our site is hosted by Vercel Inc. ("Vercel"). Like any web host, Vercel receives technical information when your browser requests a page. This includes your IP address, general location derived from your IP address (such as city and country), browser type, and device and system information.
Web Analytics. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views and see which pages are popular. For each page view, Vercel may record the time, the page address, the referring website, filtered query parameters, general location (country, region, and city), browser and version, operating system and version, and device type (mobile, tablet, or desktop).
Speed Insights. We use Vercel Speed Insights to measure how fast our pages load. For each measurement, Vercel records the page address, a performance score (such as how long the page took to display), the part of the page the score relates to, network speed category, browser, device type, operating system, country, and the time the data was received.

Bot protection. Our contact form is protected by Vercel BotID, which runs an invisible check in your browser to tell people from automated bots. The check collects technical signals about your browser and device. For stronger protection, Vercel may have these signals analyzed by its partner Kasada. We use the result only to decide whether to accept a form submission.
Google Analytics, only if you agree to analytics cookies. Google Analytics records the pages you visit, how you arrived at the site, your general location, and device and browser information, using the cookies described in Section 7. It also records how you use the site, such as which services you open, which buttons and links you click, and whether you open and submit our contact form. It never records what you type into the form.

Vercel states that Web Analytics and Speed Insights record data anonymously and do not collect information that would let us reconstruct your browsing session across other websites or identify you personally. Web Analytics does not use cookies. It groups page views into a visit by using a hash (a one-way scrambled value) created from your request, and Vercel discards that value after 24 hours. We see only aggregated statistics, such as page view counts. We cannot see who you are.

You can read Vercel's own descriptions at Vercel Web Analytics Privacy and Compliance and Vercel Speed Insights Privacy and Compliance.

Information we do not collect

We do not set optional cookies, such as Google Analytics cookies, unless you agree to them. See Section 7.
We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or social media tracking tools.
We do not offer user accounts or collect passwords.
We do not take payments or collect payment card information on the site.
We load our fonts from our own site, not from outside font services.

We manage the text and images on the site with a content management system called Sanity. Only our own team signs in to it. We do not use it to collect information about visitors.

4. How we use your information

We use the information you submit through the contact form to:

Read and respond to your inquiry.
Schedule and hold a conversation about services you may be interested in.
Prepare for that conversation, for example by understanding your industry and company.
Keep a record of our communications with you.
Send you marketing emails, but only if you checked the box asking to receive them.

We use automatically collected information to:

Deliver the site to your browser and keep it running.
Protect the site against abuse, attacks, and fraud.
Understand, in aggregate, how visitors use the site and how fast it loads, so we can improve it.

We may also use information when needed to comply with the law, respond to lawful requests from authorities, or establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

We do not use your information to make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects on you.

5. Legal bases for processing (EEA, UK, and Swiss visitors)

If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, data protection law requires us to explain our legal basis for each use of your information.

Responding to your inquiry and discussing possible services: our legitimate interests in responding to people who contact us and developing our business. Where you contact us on your own behalf about entering into a contract with us, we also rely on taking steps at your request before entering into a contract.
Marketing emails: your consent, given by checking the marketing box on the form. You can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect emails we sent before you withdrew it.
Hosting, security, Vercel Web Analytics, and performance measurement: our legitimate interests in running a secure, working website and understanding in aggregate how it is used.
Protecting our contact form from bots and spam (Vercel BotID): our legitimate interests in keeping the form secure and free of abuse.
Google Analytics: your consent, given through our cookie banner or Cookie Preferences. You can withdraw it at any time.
Legal compliance and legal claims: compliance with our legal obligations, and our legitimate interests in establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims.

The privacy checkbox on our form confirms that you have been given this policy. Our legal basis for handling your inquiry is the one listed above, not that checkbox. You can still object to our use of your information or ask us to delete it at any time.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered your interests and rights. You can object to this use at any time (see Section 13).

Fields marked as required on the form are needed for us to respond to you. If you do not provide them, we will not be able to process your form submission. You can still email us directly instead. You are never required to agree to marketing emails.

6. Marketing emails

We send marketing emails only to people who ask for them by checking the marketing box on our contact form. Checking that box is optional. We will not add you to our marketing list just because you submitted the form.

Every marketing email we send will include an unsubscribe link and our postal address. You can also unsubscribe by emailing legal@lincolndataconsulting.com. We will process your request promptly, and in any case within 10 business days.

After you unsubscribe, we keep your email address on a "do not email" list so we can make sure we do not email you again. We may still send you messages that relate directly to a conversation or business relationship you have with us.

7. Cookies, analytics, and tracking signals

Cookies are small files a website stores in your browser. Similar technologies, such as your browser's local storage, work in a similar way. This section explains which ones our site uses. We do not use advertising cookies.

Strictly necessary

Your cookie choice. When you make a choice in our cookie banner or Cookie Preferences, we store it in your browser's local storage under the name "lincolnCookieConsent", together with the date you made it. We need it to respect your choice. It stays until you clear your browser's storage. We will ask you again if we make a material change to how we use cookies.

Bot protection. Vercel BotID, described in Section 3, may store technical data in your browser to check that a form submission comes from a person. We treat this as strictly necessary because it protects our contact form from abuse.

Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, described in Section 3, do not use cookies.

Analytics (only with your consent)

If you agree to analytics cookies, we use Google Analytics, provided by Google LLC, to understand which pages are visited, how people find the site, how they move through it, and which services and pages interest them. Google Analytics sets these cookies:

_ga: tells visitors apart. Expires after 90 days.
_ga_ followed by our Google Analytics measurement ID: keeps track of your visit. Expires after 90 days.

We have turned off Google signals and advertising features in Google Analytics, and we do not use it to identify you. Google describes how it handles this information in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

These cookies are off until you agree. Until then, our site does not load Google Analytics, and nothing is sent to Google.

Your choices

When you first visit, a banner asks whether you accept analytics cookies. Rejecting them is as easy as accepting them. You can change your mind at any time with the "Cookie Preferences" link at the bottom of every page. If you withdraw your consent, we stop Google Analytics and delete its cookies from your browser.

You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, or block analytics scripts with a browser privacy extension or content blocker. The site's main content will still load.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal or a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal. Our site does not change what it does when it receives these signals. We do not sell or share personal information, we do not use it for targeted advertising, and we do not track visitors across other websites. There is therefore nothing for these signals to opt you out of on our site.

We do not allow other companies to collect personal information about your online activities over time and across different websites through our site.

We share personal information only in the following situations.

Service providers. We use other companies to run our business and the site. They may handle your information only to provide services to us. They include Vercel, which hosts the site, provides our analytics and performance measurement, and protects our contact form from bots (with its partner Kasada); Google LLC, which provides Google Analytics if you agree to analytics cookies; and Salesforce, Inc., which receives and stores contact form submissions and, if you ask for them, sends our marketing emails.
Legal reasons. We may disclose information if we believe in good faith that the law, a court order, or a lawful government request requires it, or when it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Lincoln, our clients, or others.
Business transfers. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of all or part of our business, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will require the recipient to protect it in line with this policy.
With your permission. We may share information for another purpose if you ask us to or agree to it.

Vercel also uses some request data (such as IP addresses and derived location) for its own purposes as a hosting provider, such as security and operating its network. Vercel's handling of that data is described in the Vercel Privacy Notice.

We do not sell personal information. We do not "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined in California law. We do not use personal information for targeted advertising or profiling.

We have not sold or shared personal information in the past 12 months.

We do not knowingly collect sensitive personal information through the site. We do not use or disclose any sensitive personal information we might receive for any purpose other than those allowed under California law.

10. How long we keep your information

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy.

Inquiries that do not lead to an engagement: we keep your form submission and related emails for up to 24 months after our last contact with you, then delete them.
Inquiries that lead to an engagement: your contact information becomes part of our client records. We keep it for the length of the engagement and afterward as required by our agreement with the client and by law.
Marketing email list: we keep your name, email address, and email preferences until you unsubscribe or we stop sending marketing emails.
Records of consent and unsubscribes: we keep a record of when you opted in or out for as long as we send you marketing emails and for up to 3 years afterward, so that we can show we followed the law. We keep only your email address on our "do not email" list for as long as needed to honor your request.
Analytics: Vercel discards the daily visitor hash after 24 hours. Vercel keeps aggregated statistics for a period set by our Vercel service plan. These statistics do not identify you.
Google Analytics, if you agree to it: its cookies expire after 90 days. Google keeps the related analytics data for the retention period set in our Google Analytics account, which is no longer than 14 months.

We may keep information longer if the law requires it, or if we need it to resolve a dispute or defend a legal claim.

11. International data transfers

We are based in the United States. Information you submit through the site is processed and stored in the United States. Our service providers may process it in the United States or other countries.

Data protection laws in the United States may differ from those in your country. When we or our service providers transfer personal information from the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, we rely on appropriate safeguards. These include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK and Swiss equivalents) or a service provider's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and its UK and Swiss extensions. Vercel and Google each state that they participate in the Data Privacy Framework and use Standard Contractual Clauses.

You can contact us for more information about these safeguards.

12. How we protect your information

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect personal information. For example, the site is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection, and we limit access to form submissions to people who need it to respond to you.

No website or method of storage is completely secure. We cannot guarantee the security of information you send to us. Please avoid sending sensitive information through the contact form.

13. Your privacy rights

Rights for everyone

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

Tell you what personal information we have about you.
Correct information that is wrong.
Delete your information.
Stop sending you marketing emails.

We will honor these requests unless the law allows or requires us to keep the information.

Rights in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, you have the right to:

Access your personal information and get a copy of it.
Correct inaccurate or incomplete information.
Erase your information in certain situations.
Restrict how we use your information in certain situations.
Receive information you gave us in a portable format, and have it sent to another organization where technically possible.
Object to our use of your information based on legitimate interests, and object at any time to direct marketing.
Withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent.
Complain to a data protection supervisory authority, such as the authority in the country where you live or work. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioner's Office. We would appreciate the chance to address your concern first, so please contact us.

We will respond within one month. We may extend this by up to two more months for complex or numerous requests, and we will tell you if we do.

Rights under US state privacy laws

Several US states, including California, give their residents privacy rights. Depending on where you live and whether the law applies to us, these may include the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it, the right to access it, the right to correct it, the right to delete it, and the right to opt out of sale, sharing, targeted advertising, and certain profiling. As explained in Section 9, we do not sell or share personal information or use it for targeted advertising or profiling.

For California residents, the categories of personal information we have collected in the past 12 months are:

Identifiers, such as your name, email address, phone number, and IP address.
Professional or employment-related information, such as your company, job title, and industry.
Internet or other electronic network activity information, such as pages viewed and device and browser information.
General geolocation information, such as your city and country (from the form or derived from your IP address).
Any other information you choose to include in your message.

We collect this information from you and automatically from your device, for the purposes described in Section 4. We disclose it to the service providers described in Section 8, for business purposes only. We keep it for the periods described in Section 10.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your privacy rights.

How to make a request

To make a request, email legal@lincolndataconsulting.com or write to us at 3615 Cherokee St NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144. Please tell us what you are asking for and include the email address you used on our form.

To protect your information, we will verify your request before acting on it. Usually, we do this by confirming the request from the email address we have on file. We may ask for more information if needed.

You may use an authorized agent to make a request for you. We may ask the agent for proof that you authorized them, and we may ask you to confirm your identity directly with us.

We respond to US state privacy requests within 45 days. We may extend this once by another 45 days when reasonably necessary, and we will tell you if we do.

If we deny your request, we will explain why. If you live in a US state that gives you the right to appeal, you can appeal our decision by replying to our response with the subject line "Privacy Appeal." We will respond to your appeal within the time required by your state's law.

14. Children's privacy

The site is intended for businesses and professionals. It is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16 years old. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

15. Links to other websites

The site may link to other websites, such as those of technology providers we work with. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those websites. Please read their privacy policies.

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If we make material changes, we will post a clear notice on the site before the changes take effect. If the changes affect how we use information we have already collected, we will also contact you by email where we are able to, and we will ask for your consent where the law requires it.

17. Contact us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your information, contact us:

Email: legal@lincolndataconsulting.com
Mail: Lincoln Data Consulting, LLC, 3615 Cherokee St NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144