Who we are legal notices

Privacy Notice for California Residents

Who We Are Company Resources Legal Notices Privacy Notice for California Residents

Effective date: January 1, 2020
Last reviewed on: January 1, 2020

This Privacy Notice for California Residents (“Notice”) supplements PPD’s Privacy Policy. This Notice applies solely to consumers who reside in the State of California, and to information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with California consumers or households (“California Personal Information”). PPD provides this Notice to comply with our obligations in our capacity as a “Business” under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”).

This Notice does not apply to information PPD collects, maintains, or discloses in our capacity as a “Service Provider” under CCPA on behalf of our clients, including medical information that we process within the clinical research, patient recruitment, patient concierge, observational research, post-approval pharmacovigilance and medical information services that we perform under contract with our clients. If your information has been submitted to us as part of our performance of those services and you would like to learn more about the handling of that information or exercise any rights you may have under the CCPA, please inquire with the client directly.

As used in this Notice, the term “California Personal Information” does not include:

  • information collected as part of a clinical trial subject to the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, also known as the Common Rule, pursuant to good clinical practice guidelines issued by the International Council for Harmonisation or pursuant to human subject protection requirements of the United States Food and Drug Administration;
  • publicly available information lawfully made available from federal, state, or local government records;
  • deidentified or aggregated consumer information; or
  • other information excluded from the CCPA’s scope, including:
    • health or medical information covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA); and
    • personal information covered by other sector-specific privacy laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA), the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994, and the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and implementing regulations, or the California Financial Information Privacy Act.

California Personal Information we collect

In the twelve (12) months prior to the “Last Reviewed” date of this Notice, we have collected the following categories of California Personal Information:

  • Identifiers such name, email address, telephone number, mailing address, Social Security number, driver’s license number, unique personal identifier, online identifier, or other similar identifiers.
  • Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)), including signature, financial information, medical information, education and employment history, medical information, or health insurance information.
  • Characteristics of protected classifications under California of federal law, such as age, medical condition, physical or mental disability, gender, information relating to pregnancy or childbirth, sexual orientation, or veteran or military status.
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information, such as information concerning individuals’ interactions with our websites, applications, or advertisements.
  • Professional or employment-related information, including current or past job history, professional specialties, affiliations, licenses, and certifications, financial compensation information, and performance evaluations.
  • Inferences drawn from any of the above information to create a profile reflecting a person’s professional preferences, behavior and attitudes.

Sources of California Personal Information

We collect the categories of California Personal Information listed above from the following categories of sources:

  • Directly from you, including when you provide information to us.
  • Indirectly from you, such as when we automatically collect technical and usage information when you use our websites or other online tools.
  • Public sources and data resellers.
  • Third-party websites.

Purposes for which we collect and use California Personal Information

We may use the California Personal Information listed above for the following business and commercial purposes:

  • To respond to your inquiries and provide customer support.
  • To contact you regarding changes or updates to our service offerings.
  • To invite potential investigators to participate in clinical and medical research.
  • To conduct recruiting and candidate evaluation activities and to inform our employment decisions.
  • To provide, support, personalize, and develop our websites, applications, and product or service offerings.
  • To audit our interactions with you, such as counting impressions or verifying the quality and effectiveness of content including ads.
  • To prevent malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, and participating in any prosecution or enforcment of laws or agreements meant to prevent or punish such activity.
  • To maintain the safety, security, and integrity of our websites, applications, other technology assets, and our business, including the detection of security incidents.
  • To debug, identify, or repair errors or effectuate similar functional enhancements in connection with our websites and other applications.
  • To develop, improve, and deliver marketing and advertising.
  • For internal operational uses such as research, analytics, development, audits, and security.
  • For legal and operational compliance purposes, such as monitoring whether our operations are effectively implementing this policy.
  • To evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding.
  • To engage in or enable internal uses consistent with our relationship with you, or compatible with the context in which you provided the information, such as internal research and development.
  • For any other purpose described to you when collecting your California Personal Information before or at the time of collection.

Sharing of California Personal Information

We may share California Personal Information with the following categories of third parties:

  • Our affiliated companies.
  • Our service providers.
  • Our clients.
  • Other third parties to protect our legal rights or comply with legal requirements.
  • Other third parties as required by law, such as to comply with a subpoena or other legal process, when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud, or respond to a government request.
  • Other third parties involved in a merger, sale, joint venture or other transaction involving a transfer of our business or assets.
  • Other third parties with your prior consent.

In the twelve (12) months prior to the “Last Reviewed” date of this Notice, we have disclosed the following categories of California Personal Information, which are described in more detail above, for a business purpose:

  • Identifiers.
  • Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute.
  • Characteristics of protected classifications under California of federal law.
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information.
  • Professional or employment-related information.
  • Inferences drawn from any of the above information.

Sales of California Personal Information

In the twelve (12) months prior to the “Last Reviewed” date of this Notice, PPD has not sold California Personal Information. PPD does not and will not sell California Personal Information.

Your rights and choices with respect to California Personal Information

The CCPA provides California residents with specific rights regarding California Personal Information. This section describes your CCPA rights and explains how to exercise those rights.

Access and data portability rights

You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your California Personal Information over the past 12 months. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request (see the section below on Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights), we will disclose to you:

  • The categories of California Personal Information we collected about you.
  • The categories of sources for the California Personal Information we collected about you.
  • Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling that California Personal Information.
  • The categories of third parties with whom we share that California Personal Information.
  • The specific pieces of California Personal Information we collected about you (also called a data portability request).
  • If we sold or disclosed your California Personal Information for a business purpose, two separate lists disclosing
    • disclosures for a business purpose, identifying the California Personal Information categories disclosed; and
    • sales, identifying the California Personal Information categories sold and that each category of recipient purchased.

Deletion request rights

You have the right to request that PPD delete any of your California Personal Information, subject to certain exceptions. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request (see Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights), we will delete (and direct our service providers to delete) your California Personal Information from our records, unless an exception under CCPA applies.

Exercising access, data portability, and deletion rights

To exercise the access, data portability, and deletion rights described above, please submit a verifiable consumer request to us by either:

Only you, or a person registered with the California Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your California Personal Information. You may also make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child.

You may only make a verifiable consumer request for access or data portability twice within a 12-month period. The verifiable consumer request must:

  • Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected California Personal Information, or an authorized representative.
  • Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.

We cannot respond to your request or provide you with your California Personal Information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the California Personal Information relates to you.

Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us.

We will only use California Personal Information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request.

Any disclosures we provide in response to a request will only cover the 12-month period preceding the request’s receipt. The response we provide will also explain the reasons we cannot comply with a request, if applicable. For data portability requests, we will select a format to provide your California Personal Information that is readily useable and should allow you to transmit the information from one entity to another entity without hindrance.

We do not charge a fee to process or respond to your verifiable consumer request unless it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded. If we determine that the request warrants a fee, we will tell you why we made that decision, and we reserve the right to either refuse to act on your request or charge you a reasonable fee to complete your request if it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded.

Non-discrimination

You have a right to not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your CCPA rights, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights.

Changes to this notice

We reserve the right to amend this Notice at our discretion and at any time. When we make changes to this Notice, we will post the updated notice to our websites and update the notice’s date.