Privacy Policy

Updated: October 1, 2023

At the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, the protection of your personal information is a priority. This page explains the kinds of information that are collected when you visit this site, and how that information can be used. In addition to the information on this page, McMaster University also has a Terms of Use & Privacy Policy and an official Statement on Collection of Personal Information and Protection of Privacy.

If you have any questions, please contact Jared Lenover.

Google Analytics and Advertising

The sites on the degroote.mcmaster.ca and business.mcmaster.ca domains, including this one, and some other sites associated with the DeGroote School of Business, use Google Analytics. Some information, such as the pages you visit, your IP address (which implies location), and other browsing-related data, is sent to Google. Google may set and read cookies in your browser.

Examples of Information Collected: When you visit our website, Google Analytics automatically collects certain information about your device, browsing actions, and patterns, including (but not limited to):

IP address
Geographic location
Device type
Operating system
Browser type
Referring website
Pages visited
Duration of visit
Interaction with website features

Learn more: How Google uses information from sites or apps that use [Google] services

Use of Information: We utilize the collected analytics data for the following purposes, including (but not limited to):

To analyze and understand how visitors interact with our website
To improve our website’s performance, features, and content
To personalize and enhance the user experience
To track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and initiatives
To generate reports on website activity and usage trends
To comply with legal obligations and enforce our policies

The analytics data collected by Google Analytics is shared with Google in accordance with their Privacy Policy. Google may also share this data with third parties if required by law or to assist in data processing. Google provides a tool for opting out of Google Analytics in case you don’t want to participate.

Google also provides aggregate data about our visitors’ demographics and interests using cookies, Device Advertising IDs, and the Google Signals feature. This helps us understand our audience better — which helps us provide better content and to advertise more effectively.

Google advertising cookies on your computer allow us to link data from Google Analytics and Google Adwords. This allows us to show more specific advertising to groups of people who have taken certain actions on our website (or groups of people who are similar). This is called remarketing. These ads may be displayed in search results or on other sites across the internet.

We also use the Google Signals feature of Google Analytics. It provides aggregated, anonymized insights into visitor behaviour across different devices. Google associates visitor information from our sites with information from signed-in Google account users who have consented to this kind of association for ad personalization. Google may use information like user location, search history, YouTube history, and data from sites that partner with Google in the process. You can see your Google Activity data on Google’s My Activity page.

You can opt-out of seeing personalized Google ads using your Google account settings. You can also control some of the information Google uses to show you ads.

There are other tools you can use to opt-out of the collection and use of information for ad targeting. For example, visit the Digital Advertising Alliance Consumer Choice website for more information and one such tool. European web visitors may find the Your Online Choices website helpful.

Conversion and Third Party Tracking

We also use tracking methods to help us understand how people interact with pages after they arrive from specific sites or ads. For example, we can collect data about what people do on our sites after they click an advertisement or promoted post on a social media platform. It can also help us tailor content for people who have visited our site before.

Third parties, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn may use cookies, web beacons, and other storage technologies to collect or receive information about visitors from our sites and other sources on the internet. They use that information to provide measurement services, track conversions, and to serve ads based on a person’s interests, past behaviour, previously visited pages, or other demographic information. There are tools you can use to opt-out of the collection and use of information for ad targeting. For example, visit the Digital Advertising Alliance Consumer Choice website for more information and one such tool. (European web visitors may find the Your Online Choices website helpful.)

More information:

Google reCAPTCHA

Some of our sites use the Google reCAPTCHA service (including v3) to avoid spam form submissions. The service works by collecting hardware and software information, such as device and application data, and sending it to Google for analysis. The information collected in connection with your use of the service is used for improving reCAPTCHA and for general security purposes. It is not used for personalized advertising by Google.

Your use of reCAPTCHA v3 through this site is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Sharing Tools

Some of our sites use social media sharing tools, like the Monarch plugin. The Monarch plugin records some information (including your IP address, the date and time, the item you’re sharing, and what sharing button you chose) when you share a page or article using its buttons.

Questions and Polls

We post questions you can answer using buttons on a specific page or links in an email. The results are shown publicly on the site. When you answer, we collect and store your IP address. We use the IP addresses to help discourage people from answering questions more than once.

Other Cookies

We may also set and read cookies in your browser for administrative purposes. For example, we may use a cookie to see if you’ve already taken a specific action on the site. We don’t store personally identifiable information in those cookies.

Comment Monitoring

Akismet is the most powerful anti-spam service for the web. Akismet works by checking all your comments against a constantly-growing global spam database to remove irrelevant, malicious content before it gets published and damages your site’s credibility. Akismet gets increasingly effective over time: the more it learns, the more it protects. Its algorithms are continuously learning from content marked as spam across websites, so it more accurately detects and removes spam from sites in the future.

When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet’s core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. Akismet uses short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases. For more information, please visit the Automattic Privacy Notice.

Changes to the Policy

We reserve the right to update or modify this Policy at any time. Any changes will be effective upon posting the revised Policy on our website.

Contact Information

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Policy or the analytics data collected by our website, please contact Jared Lenover.

By using our website, you acknowledge and consent to the collection, use, and processing of your analytics data as described in this Policy.