Privacy Policy

Introduction

Thank you for choosing to be part of our community at The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) (“company”, “we”, “us”, or “our”). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy. If you have any questions or concerns about our policy, or our practices with regards to your personal information, please contact us at info@smedan.gov.ng.

When you visit our website (“Site”) and use our services, you trust us with your personal information. We take your privacy very seriously. In this privacy notice, we describe our privacy policy. We seek to explain to you in the clearest way possible what information we collect, how we use it and what rights you have in relation to it. We hope you take some time to read through it carefully, as it is important. If there are any terms in this privacy policy that you do not agree with, please discontinue use of our site and our services.

This privacy policy applies to all information collected through our websites (https://smedan.gov.ng/), our program application, and/or any related services, marketing or events (we refer to them collectively in this privacy policy as the “Services“).

Collection of Information

We collect information you provide directly to us. For example, we collect information when you sign up/register to receive information about our services, create an account or profile, apply for our programs or services, use interactive features of our services, participate in our surveys, or communicate with us via third-party social media sites.

We may collect personally identifiable information (PII), such as but not limited to: name, email address, phone number, business details, address. We may also collect non-personal information that does not identify you directly, such as: browser type and version, operating system, referring website, pages you view on our Site, the time and date of your visit and other diagnostic data.

We use your information to communicate with you, to update you on services and benefits, to better understand who uses our site and the pages they access so as to be able to improve the site and to help us understand your needs & interests and provide you with better services as well as for the purpose of fulfilling your requests to us.

Our Use of Your Personal Data

We use personal information collected for a variety of business purposes described below. We process your personal information for these purposes in reliance on our legitimate business interests (“Business Purposes“), in order to enter into or perform a contract with you (“Contractual“), with your consent (“Consent“), and/or for compliance with our legal obligations (“Legal Reasons“). We indicate the specific processing grounds we rely on next to each purpose listed below.

We use the information we collect or receive:

•To send you marketing materials [for Business Purposes and/or with your Consent]. We and/or our third-party partners may use the personal information you send to us for our marketing communication purposes, if this is in accordance with your marketing preferences. You can opt-out of our marketing emails at any time (see the “Your Privacy Rights“ below).

•To send administrative information to you [for Business Purposes, Legal Reasons and/or possibly Contractual]. We may use your personal information to send you service and new feature information and/or information about changes to our terms, conditions, and policies.

•Fulfill and manage your onboarding/engagement [for Contractual reasons]. We may use your information in order for us to provide you with a service.

•To respond to legal requests and prevent harm [for Legal Reasons]. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.

•For other Business Purposes. We may use your information for other Business Purposes with your consent, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our services and to evaluate and improve our Sites, services, marketing and your experience.

Who We Share Your Personal Data With

We only share and disclose your information in the following situations:

•Compliance with Laws. We may disclose your information where we are legally required to do so in order to comply with applicable law, governmental requests, a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena (including in response to public authorities to meet national security or law enforcement requirements).

•Vital Interests and Legal Rights. We may disclose your information where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding potential violations of our policies, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person and illegal activities, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.

•Vendors, Consultants and Other Third–Party Service Providers. We may share your data with third party vendors, service providers, contractors or agents who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. Examples include: data analysis, email delivery, hosting services, customer service and marketing efforts. Unless described in this Policy, we do not share, sell, rent or trade any of your information with third parties for their promotional purposes.

•Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy policy. Affiliates include any subsidiaries, governmental bodies, joint partners or other organization that we control or that are under common control with us.

•With your Consent. We may disclose your personal information for any other purpose with your consent.

Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies

We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to access or store information. Specific information about how we use such technologies and how you can refuse certain cookies is set out in our Cookie Policy

Our Retention/Storage of Your Personal Data

Our data retention periods are based on business needs and legal requirements. We store the information we collect about you for as long as is necessary for the purposes for which we originally collected it, or as needed to provide the services to you unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by applicable law.

You may request that we delete your information but note that we may retain certain information as reasonably needed to comply with the law, meet regulatory requirements, or for legitimate purposes. We may also retain cached or archived copies of information about you for a certain period.

We have implemented appropriate technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, please also remember that we cannot guarantee that the internet itself is 100% secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Sites is at your own risk. You should only access the services within a secure environment.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Right of access – you have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you.

• Right of rectification – you have a right to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete.

• Right to be forgotten – in certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records.

• Right to restriction of processing – where certain conditions apply to have a right to restrict the processing.

• Right of portability – you have the right to have the data we hold about you transferred to another organization.

• Right to object – you have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing.

• Right to object to automated processing, including profiling – you also have the right to be subject to the legal effects of automated processing or profiling.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Revised” date and the updated version will be effective as soon as it is accessible. If we make changes to this privacy policy, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this privacy policy frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please email us at info@smedan.gov.ng.