Privacy Policy

The Association of International Petroleum Negotiators (“AIEN”, “we”, “us” or “our”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect and use your personal data and which rights and options you have in this respect.

Who is responsible for your personal data?

AIEN is a not-for-profit membership association organized under the laws of Texas with its office at 11111 Katy Freeway, Suite 615, Houston, Texas 77079. AIEN is the controller of any personal data provided by you in connection with AIEN’s provision of services or communications to you in your region. We may be contacted at the address above or by email at aipn@aien.org.

AIEN reviews its privacy practices on an ongoing basis, and as such it may change this Privacy Policy from time to time.

Which personal data do we collect?

The personal data we collect may include:

• Your IP address, and information regarding the hardware and software on which you access AIEN’s website;
• Details concerning your browsing history of AIEN’s website, including the date and time of logins to AIEN’s website;
• Contact information, such as your name, job title, postal address, including your home address, where you have provided this to us, business address, telephone number, mobile phone number, fax number and email address;
• Individual demographic information, such data used for reviewing and approving membership applications and renewals, including type of employment, company type, job duties, years of industry experience, birth year, expected date of graduation, and historical academic information;
• Online activity as it relates to your membership or related to a transaction, including membership join date, annual membership renewal records, committee memberships or other group interest subscriptions, event registrations, and model contract downloads or other digital download receipts;
• Information collected from AIEN’s email software on mailing list subscribers, such as records of email campaigns sent, emails opened, and URL links clicked, and any email campaigns blocked by subscriber’s incoming email server;
• Payment data, such as data necessary for processing payments and fraud prevention, including credit/debit card numbers, security code numbers and other related billing information;
• Further business information necessarily processed in a project or client contractual relationship with AIEN or voluntarily provided by you, such as instructions given, payments made, requests and projects;
• Your username and password for the AIEN website or other password-protected platforms or services, where you have one;
• Information collected from publicly available resources, integrity databases and credit agencies;
• Details of memberships of a professional or trade association or union, such as bar memberships for the purpose of administering continuing education credits;
• If legally required for compliance purposes;
• Special categories of personal data (in connection with the registration for and provision of access to an event or seminar, we may ask for information about your health for the purpose of identifying and being considerate of any disabilities or special dietary requirements you may have – any use of such information is based on your consent, and if you do not provide any such information about disabilities or special dietary requirements, we will not be able to take any respective precautions); and/or
• Other personal data regarding your preferences where it is relevant to the services that we provide.

How do we collect your personal data?

We may collect personal data about you in a number of circumstances, including

• When you or your organization become a member, a sponsor of AIEN, or purchase a product offered by AIEN;
• When you or your organization browse, make an enquiry or otherwise interact on our website;
• When you attend a seminar or another AIEN event or sign up to receive personal data from us, including training; or
• When you or your organization offer to provide or provide services to us.

In some circumstances, we collect personal data about you from a third party source. For example, we may collect personal data from your organization, other organizations with whom you have dealings, government agencies, a credit reporting agency, an information or service provider or from a publicly available record.

AIEN collects and processes your personal data in accordance with applicable laws.

Are you required to provide personal data?

As a general principle, you will provide us with your personal data entirely voluntarily; there are generally no detrimental effects for you if you choose not to consent or to provide personal data. However, there are circumstances in which AIEN cannot take action without certain of your personal data, for example, because this personal data is required to process your instructions or orders, provide you with access to a web offering or newsletter or to carry out membership, vendor, or employment required compliance screening. In these cases, it will unfortunately not be possible for us to provide you with what you request without the relevant personal data and we will notify you accordingly.

For which purposes will we use your personal data?

We may use your personal data for the following purposes only ("Permitted Purposes"):

• Providing AIEN offerings or other services or things you may have requested, including online or technology services or solutions as instructed or requested by you or your organization;
• Providing items for which you opt into receiving or for which you request or sign-up (e.g., via your membership with AIEN, or by signing attendance sheets or mailing list sign-up sheets at AIEN events), such as AIEN’s mailings and newsletters;
• To provide training or networking event registration lists for check-in, and to create attendee contact lists for the purpose of enabling contact between event attendees in a professional capacity;
• Providing members of AIEN with access to and use of online accounts (i.e., via member login credentials);
• Providing non-member users with access in order to register for an AIEN event, make an online purchase, or to obtain attendee-only access to presentation material(s) from an AIEN event previously attended;
• Managing and administering your or your organization’s business relationship with AIEN, including processing payments, accounting, auditing, billing and collection, support services;
• Compliance with our legal obligations (such as record keeping obligations), compliance screening or recording obligations (e.g. under antitrust laws, export laws, trade sanction and embargo laws), which may include automated checks of your contact data or other information you provide about your identity against applicable sanctioned-party lists and contacting you to confirm your identity in case of a potential match or recording interaction with you which may be relevant for compliance purposes;
• To analyze and improve our services and communications to you;
• Protecting the security of and managing access to our premises, IT and communication systems, online platforms, websites and other systems, preventing and detecting security threats, fraud or other criminal or malicious activities;
• For insurance purposes;
• For monitoring and assessing compliance with our policies and standards;
• To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations and requests anywhere in the world;
• To comply with court orders and exercises and/or defend our legal rights; and
• For any purpose related and/or ancillary to any of the above or any other purpose for which your personal data was provided to us.
• Communicating with you through various channels to keep you up to date on the latest AIEN events, conferences, services, products and technologies (including newsletters and other information), and relevant deadlines, such as for annual dues renewal deadlines;
• Customer surveys, marketing campaigns, market analysis, sweepstakes, contests or other promotional activities or events;
• Collecting information about your preferences to create a user profile to personalize and foster the quality of our communication and interaction with you (for example, by way of newsletter tracking or website analytics); or
• Verifying (and in some cases, collecting and storing) your personal information, such as member ID, name, address, telephone number, email address, credit card number and other basic information about a user for the primary purpose of completing a transaction, including, but not limited to, sending a user transactional communications, when users transact with AIEN through its website, by telephone, email or facsimile.

With regard to marketing-related communication, we will - where legally required - only provide you with such information after you have opted in or have elected to become an AIEN member, thereby establishing a business relationship and a “legitimate interest” with AIEN for our service and benefits, and provide you the opportunity to opt out at any time (by sending an email to unsubscribe@aien.org), if you do not want to receive further marketing-related communication from us. We will not use your personal data for taking any automated decisions affecting you or creating profiles other than described above.

Depending on for which of the above Permitted Purposes we use your personal data, we may process your personal data on one or more of the following legal grounds:

• Because processing is necessary for the performance of a member instruction or other engagement with you or your organization;
• To comply with our legal obligations (e.g. records for tax purposes); or
• Because processing is necessary for purposes of our legitimate interest or those of any third party recipients that receive your personal data, provided that such interests are not overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms.

In addition, the processing may be based on your consent where you have expressly given that to us.

With whom will we share your personal data?

We may share your personal data in the following circumstances:

• We may share your personal data within AIEN on a confidential basis where required for the purpose of providing our member services or other products or services and for administrative, billing and other business purposes;
• If you are a member of AIEN, unless you decline disclosure of such information during your member application or renewal process, we may disclose your personal data to:
  • other members via the online membership directory (for purposes of enabling contact between members in a professional capacity); and/or
• If you are a registrant of an AIEN event, unless you decline disclosure of such information, we may disclose your registration details to:
  • Other event registrants in attendee contact lists for the purpose of enabling contact between event attendees in a professional capacity; and/or
  • Other sponsoring organizations in which AIEN co-hosts or co-sponsors an event, conference or other activity to which you or your organization are a registrant, sponsor, host or co-host; If you are a registrant for an AIEN event, we may disclose basic registration data, such as your name, job title and company name to local organizers for the purpose of administering the event locally only (e.g., creation of name badges, check-in lists and where applicable, lists required for venue security purposes).
• We may disclose your contact details on a confidential basis to third parties for the purposes of collecting your feedback on AIEN’s service and membership provision, to help us measure our performance and to improve and promote our services;
• We may also instruct service providers within or outside of AIEN, domestically or abroad, e.g. shared service centers, to process personal data for the Permitted Purposes on our behalf and in accordance with our instructions only; and
• We may also use aggregated personal data and statistics for the purpose of monitoring website usage in order to help us develop our website and our services.

Otherwise, we will only disclose your personal data when you direct us or give us permission, when we are required by applicable law or regulations or judicial or official request to do so, or as required to investigate actual or suspected fraudulent or criminal activities.

Note that broad disclosure of personally identifiable information in the AIEN membership directory is strictly prohibited by AIEN, including disclosure of the entire list of names or multiple names from the membership directory as a whole, or individual records, as a source of contacts for unsolicited offers by the individual members of goods or services (including training courses, consulting business solicitation, brokering asset sales) via e-mail or other methods of contacts by members or nonmembers. Such abuses of the membership directory may lead to sanctions of an offending member by AIEN including but not limited to temporarily or permanently removing the offending member’s access to the membership directory, or terminating the offending member’s membership in the AIEN.

Personal data about other people which you provide to us

If you provide personal data to us about someone else (such as one of your directors or employees, or someone with whom you have business dealings) you must ensure that you are entitled under applicable law to disclose that personal data to us and that, without our taking any further steps, we may collect, use and disclose that personal data as described in this Privacy Policy. In particular, you must ensure the individual concerned is aware of the various matters detailed in this Privacy Policy, as those matters relate to that individual, including our identity, how to contact us, our purposes of collection, our personal data disclosure practices (including disclosure to overseas recipients), the individual's right to obtain access to the personal data and make complaints about the handling of the personal data, and the consequences if the personal data is not provided (such as our inability to provide services).

Keeping personal data about you secure

We will take appropriate technical and organizational measures to keep your personal data confidential and secure in accordance with our internal procedures covering the storage, disclosure of and access to personal data. Personal data may be kept on our personal data technology systems, those of our contractors or in paper files.

Although AIEN takes reasonable measures to ensure the security of the personal data you may choose to provide AIEN from loss or misuse, unfortunately the transmission of data through the Internet cannot be guaranteed to be 100% secure. Neither AIEN, nor its affiliates, nor any of their respective employees, officers or agents or the provider of the internet services on behalf of AIEN (nor any other person involving the management or establishment of AIEN’s website) can give any representation or warranty as to the absolute security of the data transmitted using the AIEN website and cannot give any guarantee that such data will not be compromised by bad actors.  If you choose to provide data to or allow collection of data by AIEN or any of its affiliates or any of their respective officers, directors or employees, agents, or independent contractors, then you do so understanding the aforementioned risk.

Transferring your personal data abroad

AIEN is a globally active not-for-profit organization working through our staff and volunteer membership to offer networking events, educational programs and conferences and model contracts. However, AIEN’s only offices are located in Houston, Texas, USA, and all of our employees and administrative services are based at that office.  Therefore, by providing us with personal data, you acknowledge and agree that you are choosing to transmit that data to our offices in Houston and that any such transfer of data shall be by you (and not AIEN) as a result of your decision to provide us with such data.

Personal Data of Minors

AIEN makes no active effort to collect personal information from children under the age of 18 and does not wish to receive any such information.

Updating personal data about you

If any of the personal data that you have provided to us changes, for example if you change your email address or if you wish to cancel any request you have made of us, or if you become aware we have any inaccurate personal data about you, please let us know by sending an email to membership@aien.org or an AIEN Member may login to the Member area of the AIEN website and update his or her information by selecting “My Profile”, “Manage Individual Profile”. We will not be responsible for any losses arising from any inaccurate, inauthentic, deficient or incomplete Personal Data that you provide to us.

For how long do we retain your personal data?

Your personal data will be deleted when it is no longer reasonably required for the Permitted Purposes or you withdraw your consent (where applicable) and we are not legally required or otherwise permitted to continue storing such data. We will, in particular, retain your personal data where required for AIEN to assert or defend against legal claims until the end of the relevant retention period or until the claims in question have been settled.

Your rights

Subject to certain legal conditions, you have the right to request a copy of the personal data about you which we hold, to have any inaccurate personal data corrected, to request erasure of your personal data (i.e., to invoke, under the GDPR, the “right to be forgotten”) and to object to or restrict our using your personal data. You may also make a complaint if you have a concern about our handling of your personal data.  Subject to certain legal conditions, if data you have provided is subject to GDPR, you also have the right: (1) to receive a copy of your personal data that you have provided AIEN in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit such data to another controller without hindrance from AIEN; and (2) to exempt yourself from automated individual decision-making based on person data you have provided to AIEN.

If you wish to do any of the above please send an email to aipn@aien.org. We may request that you prove your identity by providing us with a copy of a valid means of identification in order for us to comply with our security obligations and to prevent unauthorized disclosure of data. We reserve the right to charge you a reasonable administrative fee for any manifestly unfounded or excessive requests concerning your access to your data, and for any additional copies of the personal data you request from us.

We will consider any requests or complaints which we receive and provide you with a response in a timely manner. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may take your complaint to the relevant privacy regulator. We will provide you with details of your relevant regulator upon request.

Links to Third-Party Websites

AIEN’s website may contain links to other websites that are not maintained or controlled by AIEN.  AIEN is not responsible for the privacy practices (if any) of such other websites, and you are encouraged to review their privacy policies (if any).  The fact that a link to a third-party website exists on AIEN’s does not mean that the third-party site operates under the same or similar privacy practices as set forth in this Privacy Notice.  The policies and procedures AIEN describes here do not apply to third-party websites.  If you access a third party website using a link, then you do so at your own risk.  You acknowledge that your access of any links to social media features on the Website (e.g., links to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) is governed by the terms of use and privacy policies of the companies providing such social media features.

Updates to this Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice was last updated in August 2018. We reserve the right to update and change this Privacy Notice from time to time in order to reflect any changes to the way in which we process your personal data or changing legal requirements. In case of any such changes, we will post the changed Privacy Notice on our website or publish it otherwise. The changes will take effect as soon as they are posted on this website.

How to get in touch with AIEN

We welcome your views about our website and our Privacy Notice. If you would like to contact us with any queries or comments, please send an email to aipn@aien.org or send a letter to AIEN’s Executive Director, AIEN 11111 Katy Freeway, Suite 615, Houston, Texas 77079.

Our use of cookies and other information-gathering technologies

A "cookie" is a small text file which is stored on the user's hard drive or mobile device. Cookies perform a number of functions associated with browsing websites and are used for a variety of different purposes, such as tracing users from page to page on an internet site, thereby enhancing a user's browsing experience. They are generated by web servers when the user enters an internet page and are passed to the user's computer or mobile device and stored for subsequent future access.

We only use cookies in certain areas of the AIEN Website and the purposes for which they are used are detailed below. You are not obliged to accept a cookie and you can modify your browser so that it will not accept cookies. However, if you do so this may affect your browsing experience and render certain web functions unavailable. Session cookies are removed when the browser session ends, and persistent cookies expire after a defined amount of time.

The AIEN Website uses both session and persistent cookies for the following purposes:

• Help to identify each browser session on the server so that the user has an uninterrupted journey through the AIEN Website.
• Help determine that a user is logged in.
• Help load pages efficiently by routing users to the same server consistently.
• For user authentication that allows the user to view restricted-access content without having to login to every restricted-access page over and over.
• To enhance a user’s experience by “remembering” certain information to deliver custom, personalized content and information.
• To store certain information to allow for easier login during the user’s subsequent visits.
• Identify repeat visits from a single user.
• Assist in collecting anonymized information about how visitors use the site, including the number of visitors, where visitors have come from before coming to the site and the pages they visit on the site.
• For AIEN to monitor the effectiveness of any promotional or marketing campaigns.
• Improving the content of the website and conducting various other diagnostics to improve the online experience or AIEN services. For example, AIEN may use cookies to monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of user and pages viewed.
• Analyzing and improving website security.

Google Analytics cookies

AIEN uses certain cookies for analytical purposes to monitor its website performance and how users interact with the site. Google Analytics stores internet protocol ("IP") addresses on its servers in the US. An IP address is a unique number assigned to each device (such as your computer) that allows it to communicate with other devices on a computer network (such as modems, printers or other computers). Neither AIEN nor Google associates your IP address with any information that can identify the user personally.

These cookies enable Google to determine whether you are a return visitor to the site, and to track the pages that you visit during your session.

Effective Date: August 15, 2018