Pak Economist is a Pakistani news website that focuses on economy, current affairs, national & international business, politics, technology, science, and culture. Pak Economist has a focus on data journalism, original reporting, accuracy, credibility, and informed independence.
This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes the information which Pak Economist (“We”, “Us”, “Our” “Services”, “Company”) collects from you when you download, access, or use its Website or Mobile Application(“Sites”) for delivery of information, products, offerings and content via any mobile or internet connected device or otherwise (collectively the “Services”).
Please keep in mind that when you provide information to Us on a third-party site or platform (for example, via Our website, mobile-site or applications like social media login), the information We collect is through those third-party sites linked with Our Sites and is covered by this privacy policy, and the information the third-party site or platform collects is subject to the third-party site or platform’s privacy practices. Privacy choices you have made on the third-party site or platform will not apply to Our use of the information we have collected directly through Our Sites. Please also keep in observance that Our Sites and applications may contain links to other sites not owned or controlled by Us and We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those sites. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of such other sites they may collect your personal information.
Information we collect
This section details the information we may collect about you. Information that We may collect including but may not limited to the following;
A. Account information
If you decide to create an account or enquire about one of our products or services, we’ll ask you to provide us with some specific information, for example:
Basic personal details – such as name, title and date of birth;
Personal contact details – such as home address, delivery address, home phone number, mobile phone number, and email address;
Work details – such as job title, department, company name, company address, work email address and office phone number;
Student or institution details, if you are signing up to a subscription of an educational establishment – such as student status, graduation year, and establishment name;
Log in details – such as username and password;
Payment details – such as your bank account and payment card information.
We may also use your account information, such as your title, name and country, to infer your gender.
Information you provide to Us voluntarily
If you send Us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send Us correspondence about your activities or postings on the Site, We may collect and store such information.
We may collect additional information ( for example, your name, e-mail id, mobile number , location etc.,) at other times, including but not limited to, when you provide feedback(s), modify your content or email preferences, respond to surveys, provide comments, or communicate with Us. Additionally, We may also capture the financial information you provide Us such as investment details or compensation details like Wealth Calculator and Tax Calculator.
Information we obtain from partners and public sources
In some circumstances, we collect information about you from our partners or from publicly available sources to help us better understand our audience and enhance the relevance of our content and marketing. For example, in some cases we obtain the contact details of potential speakers for Pak Economist events from public websites. We also obtain some information from publicly available sources for the purpose of inclusion in our directories.
B. Information we obtain through cookies and similar tools
We may automatically collect limited information from your computer/device when you visit our site, application or service, for example;
IP address
Location/IP address
Device serial number/ID
SMS for OTP
In App permissions for capturing location, storage, network connection and Wi-Fi connection
Android Advertiser ID/ iDFA ID
Pages you view
Your computer/device’s name,
Your operating system,
Browser type and version,
CPU speed,
Connection speed
SSO ID
Reviews and comments provided by you
Your preferences while using the Sites
Your activities and browsing patterns on the Site
Articles and Topics, you have read, followed, shared and saved
People you follow and people following you
Response to a survey,
Any communications with us
Clear GIFs
We may use “clear GIFs” (Web Beacons) to track the online usage patterns of our Users in an anonymous manner, without personally identifying the User. We may also use clear GIFs in HTML-based emails sent to our Users to track which emails are opened by recipients. We use this information to inter-alia deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our Sites or Service to the interests of our users, to measure traffic within our Sites to improve the quality, functionality and interactivity of our Sites and let advertisers know the geographic locations from where our Users come without personally identifying the Users.
C. Inferred Information through usage and log data
We may use this information for conducting internal research on Our users’ demographics (such as age, gender), devices, interests, and behavior to better understand, protect and serve Our users.
We may also collect your Information to track user behavior and preferences for internal analytics and research. We may also use your information:
To evaluate your interest for various genres of content, services, offers;
To perform analytics and conduct customer research, to determine your interest, for identifying content that generate sales and to analyze traffic patterns.
If you choose to post messages on social media accounts, message boards, chat rooms or other message areas or leave feedback, we will collect that information you provide to us. We may retain this information as necessary to resolve disputes, provide customer support and troubleshoot problems and to comply with legal obligations under the applicable laws.
The above information may also be captured by keeping cookies on Our Sites by Our affiliates for the purposes mentioned above.
D. Information we Collect / Obtained from third Parties / Sources
We may receive information about you from other online sources. We may add it to Our account information system and treat it in accordance with this policy. If you provide information to the platform provider or other partner to whom We provide services, your account information including may be passed on to Us. We may obtain updated contact information(s) from third parties in order to correct Our records and fulfill the Services or to communicate with you or share the information with any third party.
Information obtained from Third party Sites
If you link, connect or login to your TIL Services account with a third party services they may send Us information such as your registered e-mail id and public profile information from the service as stated below;
1. Facebook – Email ID and public profile information which may include name, profile picture, age gender etc.
2. Google – Email ID, language preference and age.
3. LinkedIn – Email ID, public information which may include name, profile picture, current position etc.
Demographic and other information
We may reference other sources of demographic and other information in order to provide you with more targeted communications and promotions. We use various third party analytics service providers, among others, to track the user behavior on Our Site. They are used to support display advertising towards helping Us gain understanding of Our users’ Demographics and Interests. The reports are anonymous and cannot be associated with any individual personally identifiable information that you may have shared with Us.
Subscription or Paid service data
When you chose any subscription or paid service, We or Our payment gateway provider may collect your personal information such as address or billing information, including your credit/debit card number and expiration date etc. The subscriptions or paid Services may be on auto renewal mode unless cancelled. If at any point you do not wish to auto-renew your subscription, you may cancel your subscription before the end of the subscription term or contact Us at privacypolicy@pakeconomist.com
PE collects Transactional/ Billing information
Based on your purchase of a subscription or paid service, Our payment gateway partner may collect information, including but not limited to, your credit/debit card details or other bank account details along with your billing address. This information is stored by the payment gateway partner. For instance, the Services will be using third party payment gateway partners to process and facilitate the payment of your subscription fee to the Services for providing you access to the subscription; such payment gateway partners are not controlled by us. When you visit such payment gateways you do so at your own risk. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the privacy statements provided by such payment gateways prior to providing them with information about you or entering into any transactions with them. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for such payment gateways, the content of such payment gateways and their privacy practices, nor do we endorse them.
We may receive financial or transactional information (for e.g., transaction ID, etc.) from third party vendors in case of payments, for reconciliation and validation of transactions and also for the purpose of resolutions of complaints (in case of failed transactions and refunds).
How we use your personal information
We use information to provide, analyse, administer, enhance and personalize our service and marketing efforts, to process your registration, to provide you services, and to communicate with you.
We collect personal information for the following main reasons:
1. To provide our service
We require some of your basic personal information so our services work as you would expect, for example, delivering the newspaper to your correct address, providing access to our digital content, notifying you of changes to our services and dealing with customer services queries. We record customer calls for monitoring and training purposes. Our Customer Care team may need to access your account to assist you with queries.
2. To improve and maintain performance
In order to provide you with the best possible user experience and value, we need to make sure that our products and services work as they should. Using personal information helps us understand how our readers experience our Sites and services, so we can make improvements. This includes contacting customers with market research surveys or for telephone interviews, hosting subscriber focus groups and analysing onsite data to test new and existing events, products and developments for the Pak Economist.
3. To monitor compliance with our policies and terms
We, PE monitor for breaches of our terms and conditions and copyright policies. For example, we reserve the right to inform the subscription holder if, through use of a group subscription, you are using our content in breach of the terms and conditions or copyright policies of our Sites. We also monitor activity on our Sites to detect and prevent invalid traffic.
4. To send you administrative emails
To send you administrative emails about your account, reminders for upcoming events, service changes, or new policies. These updates, changes and notifications are essential for the services that you have selected.
5. To manage your preferences
To manage your privacy preferences and to ensure you only receive communications that you have requested, which may include using your details to suppress you from communications.
6. For Recruitment
If you apply for a role via one of our Sites, we will process your information in order to facilitate the application process.
7. For the purpose of advertising
We rely on advertising revenue in part to support our award-winning journalism. We need to process your information to understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you and others, and to deliver relevant personalised advertising. We use the information you give us, the information we collect about you, and the information we infer, to serve you with the most appropriate advertisements.
8. To provide general location-based services
To provide general location-based services (e.g. the region or country you are in), advertising or search results for our content.
9. To prevent illegal posting
To prevent users from posting illegal, offensive or objectionable comments on our site
10. To offer our services
Communicate with you concerning Our service (for example by email), so that We can send you news about Pak Economist Services, details about new features and content, promotional announcements, and surveys, and to assist you with operational requests such as password reset requests.
Information Use by the Company
The Information supplied by you enables Us to improve Our services and provide you the most user-friendly experience(s). In some cases for e.g. provision of certain service(s) or utility (ies), We may require your contact information as well. All required information is service dependent and Pak Economist may use the above said user Information to, maintain, protect, and improve the Services and for developing new services.
We may also use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages about our Services and/or such additional updates and features about third parties products and services with an option to subscribe / unsubscribe (where feasible). We may, however, use your email address for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of major changes, for customer service purposes, billing, etc.)
Any personally identifiable information provided by you will not be considered as sensitive if it is freely available and / or accessible in the public domain like any comments, messages, blogs, scribbles available on social platforms like Facebook, twitter etc. Any posted/uploaded/conveyed/communication by users on the public sections of the “Site” becomes published content and is not considered personally identifiable information subject to this Privacy Policy. In case you choose to decline to submit personally identifiable information on the Sites, We may not be able to provide certain services on the Sites to you. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you of the same at the time of opening your account. In any case, We will not be liable and or responsible for the denial of certain services to you for lack of you providing the necessary personal information.
When you register with the Application or Services, we contact you from time to time about updating your personal information to provide you features that we believe may benefit/interest you.
Information sharing with legal authorities, affiliates
Pak Economist shares your information with any third parties without obtaining the prior consent of User in the following limited circumstances:
1. When it is requested or required by law or by any court or governmental agency or authority to disclose, for the purpose of verification of identity, or for the prevention, detection, investigation including cyber incidents, or for prosecution and punishment of offences. These disclosures are made in good faith and belief that such disclosure is reasonably necessary for enforcing these Terms or for complying with the applicable laws and regulations.
2. Pak Economist may share such information within its group companies and officers and employees of such group companies for the purpose of processing personal information on its behalf. We also ensure that these recipients of such information agree to process such information based on Our instructions and in compliance with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
Who we share your personal information with
We disclose personal information to facilitate the running of our business or to provide specific services you have requested. Commonly, we will disclose information to:
Service providers
We engage service providers who help to support our business and improve our products. These service providers include, for example, fulfillment providers for delivery of our digital content and marketing; customer service agencies; hosts, organisers and sponsors of our events; organisations that host our Sites, events or databases; and providers of online surveys. We also work with a number of distribution partners to deliver subscriptions. We have contracts in place with suppliers who process data to provide these services and they can only use your personal information under our instruction. For example, if you have a print subscription with us, we will disclose your information (address, contact details) to our distribution partners to facilitate delivery of the newspaper or magazine.
Advertisers
When we present Information to our advertisers — to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our Sites — it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages / content within our Sites. We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Sites. These companies may use Information (excluding your name, address, email address or telephone number or other personally identifiable information) about your visits to this and other Sites or application, in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. We do not provide any personally identifiable information to third party advertisers / ad-servers without your consent.
Institutional customers
If your subscription is provided under a group subscription or trial, we will provide our client with information about your activity on our Site(s) for the purposes of user management, licence administration, content suggestion and billing. We may also make online tools available to our client for these purposes. Information about your activity is provided at a high level and our client cannot track exactly what articles you have read. We may also provide current or prospective clients with activity information about individual subscribers who registered using that entity’s email address. We will always contact individual subscribers before doing so, and will respect any requests not to share this information.
If you take up a gift or trial subscription at the invitation of one of our clients, we will provide them with some information about your use. This may include: your name and email address, whether or not you activated the subscription and, if so, start and expiry dates, recency of use, and the volume of articles read.
Business transfers
We provide personal information to Our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on Our instructions and in compliance with Our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. We may share your activity on our Sites both for processing and for calculation of reward points of your profile with Times Points. This information may be stored by them.
Social media providers
Information will be shared with social media platforms where you log in to our Sites via a social media account, or use components on our Sites provided by social media platforms (e.g. the “Facebook Recommend” function). We also share the information of our customers with social media partners for the following reasons:
1. To prevent existing subscribers from being targeted with subscription offerings on social media platforms;
2. For the purposes of targeted advertising on social media platforms, and to create lookalike audiences for these purposes;
3. To encourage users to get the most out of their subscription
Third-Party Third Party Surveys, Promotional Activities conducted on Site
Surveys, promotional activities, might be conducted on our Site by associated third party directly. We may make your Personal Data available to third party service providers, such as vendors, contractors, agents or sponsors, who help us manage or provide our products and services by, for example: developing or supporting products and features; sending email messages on our behalf; processing payments; fulfilling orders; delivering subscriptions; auditing; processing data or statistics; and serving, customizing or delivering marketing. These third party service providers are required to protect Personal Data entrusted to them and not use it for any other purpose than the specific service they are providing on our behalf.
Your personal information such as name, email, phone number, IP address, country code etc., may be captured by the vendor, in case you provide the details for participation in the Survey, promotional activity. Please note that the personal information may be shared between us and vendors for processing and deriving insights from the survey results, promotional activity.
Links to Third Party Sites / Ad-Servers
Our Sites may include links to third party Sites, applications and ad servers. The collections of your information including applications and/or ad servers are governed by their respective privacy policies, which are beyond our control. Their privacy policy may differ from ours.
You may share your Information regarding your activities on Sites with third party social Sites to populate your social wall that is visible to other people.
Other users
Our Sites are publicly accessible and anyone around the world who accesses our Sites will be able to see anything you post, such as comments about an article. We encourage you to use a pseudonym when commenting on our Sites if you do not wish to be identifiable to other readers.
How long we retain your personal information
We retain the majority of your personal information for as long as your account is active and therefore open; this allows you to continue accessing our content, products and services. We retain the information which We have collected no longer than is necessary and this is determined on a case by case basis.
If you become inactive and are not a subscriber, we may delete elements of the information associated with your account. We will normally warn you if your access is going to be withdrawn and give you the opportunity to retain your account.
We will delete your information as soon as reasonably possible, based on your account activity and in accordance with applicable law(s), whenever you request Us to do so. However, We may archive and/or retain some information for legal purposes.
Data Erasure
We retain your personal information as long as necessary for Us to provide services to you or you ask Us to not retain your data. If you no longer want Us to use your information then you can request that We erase your personal information and close your Pak Economist Services account as soon as possible, based on your account activity and in accordance with applicable law(s).
We may retain some of your personal information as necessary for Our legitimate business interests, such as fraud detection and prevention and enhancing safety. For example, if We suspend the Pak Economist account for fraud or safety reasons, We may retain certain information from that account to prevent that user from opening a new account in the future.
We may retain and use your personal information to the extent necessary to comply with Our legal obligations. For example, we may keep some of your information for tax, legal reporting and auditing obligations.
Information you have shared with others (e.g., Reviews, forum postings) may continue to be publicly visible on the Pak Economist, even after your account is cancelled. However, attribution of such information to you will be removed. Additionally, some copies of your information (e.g., log records) may remain in Our database, but are disassociated from personal identifiers.
Because We maintain copies of personal information to protect from accidental or malicious loss and destruction, residual copies may take a period of time before they are deleted from Our active servers and may remain in Our backup systems.
You can request for deletion of your information by writing to our designated Officers, via in writing or through email signed with the electronic signature.
Please note that if you have multiple accounts with Us, then you will have to raise separate requests for each of the accounts, along with the associated email IDs or phone numbers.
Further, We may retain and use Your personal information to the extent necessary to comply with Our legal obligations. For example, We may keep some of Your information for tax, legal reporting and auditing obligations.
CHILDREN’S PRIVACY
Our Site is not intended for children under 18 years of age. We do not intentionally collect or use any information from children. PE does not knowingly permit any person who is under 18 years of age to register with the services or to provide any other personally identifying information. If PE becomes aware or get notified that any personally identifiable information of persons less than 18 years of age has been collected on the PE Services without verified parental consent, then Pak Economist will take the appropriate steps to delete any such information.
Should a parent or guardian believe that a minor has provided Pak Economist with personal information without their prior consent, please contact Us at privacypolicy@pakeconomist.com to remove this personal information from the Pak Economist site.
SECURITY MEASURES
We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include internal reviews of Our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, including appropriate encryption and physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data. All information gathered is securely stored within the Company controlled database. The database is stored on servers secured behind a firewall on the cloud; access to the servers is password-protected and is strictly limited. However, as effective as Our security measures are, no security system is impenetrable. If you know or have reason to believe that your Pak Economist account credentials have been lost, stolen, altered, or otherwise compromised or in case of any actual or suspected unauthorized use of your account, please contact Us at Privacypolicy@pakeconomist.com.
UPDATES & CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
This policy was reviewed on 14/06/2022.
We may alter PE privacy policy from time to time to incorporate necessary changes in technology, applicable law or any other variant. We reserve the right to amend the terms of this Policy from time to time. Any changes We make will be effective immediately on notice, which We may give by posting the new policy on the Site. Your use of the Sites or Services after such notice will be deemed acceptance of such changes. We may also make reasonable efforts to inform you via electronic mail. In any case, you are advised to review this Policy periodically on the Sites to ensure that you are aware of the latest update.
CONTACT US
If you have questions about this Privacy Notice or how we or our service providers handle your Personal Data, Any complaints, or concerns with regards to the use, processing, deletion and disclosure of Information provided by you or breach of these terms, please contact our Chief Privacy Officer at privacypolicy@pakeconomist.com.
Or you may write to:
Attention: Privacy Policy Officer
Pak Economist
2nd Floor, D Plaza, 119, Multan Road Lahore – (54000)- Punjab – Pakistan
We request you to please provide the following information in your complaint,
1) Identification of the information provided by you;
2) Your telephone number, e-mail address and complete address;
3) A statement in a good-faith belief that the information has been processed incorrectly or disclosed without authorization, as the case may be;
4) Clear statement as to whether the information is personal information or sensitive personal information;
5) A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is 100% accurate, and the information being complained about belongs to you;
6) You may also contact us in case you have any suggestions about the Privacy Policy
Pak Economist / We may reach out to you to confirm or discuss certain details about your complaint and issues raised.