INTRODUCTION
TAIS Performance Systems Inc. ("TPSI", "we") has the highest regard for your personal and TAIS data. We will never sell, give, or otherwise make available to anyone your data, other than the person or small group of professionals responsible for your TAIS and for managing and using your TAIS results. This is your data, and you have ultimate control over its use.
We have tried to make the following statement clear, using every day language. We will be happy to clarify any points, however; simply email us at: support@epstais.com
TPSI reserves the right to modify this Privacy Statement at any time, as we improve our Privacy policy and practice, or as may be required to maintain compliance with regional statutes or regulatory bodies. Nonetheless, the current Privacy Statement in force will always be accessible on the TPSI website, and can also always be found at:
https://epstais.com/policy/privacy.html
OVERVIEW AND DEFINITIONS
TPSI contracts with various professional entities to administer the TAIS Inventory ("TAIS"), a psychometric assessment tool, on their behalf. We shall refer to such entities here as TAIS Distributors ("TDs"). TDs' services can include organizational development, team building, and personal or team coaching in sports, as well as pre-employment search/recruitment or job placement. TDs may be external contractors working with organizations seeking such services, or they might be internal HR or other professionals who have integrated TAIS into their work within the organization. You have been asked to take TAIS either by a TD, or possibly by an organization which has contracted with an external TD and which should be known to you.
In administering TAIS for TDs, TPSI collects and stores data from persons ("subjects", "you") that they elect to provide. This includes subject responses to TAIS items ("TAIS data"), and may also include personal and personally identifiable information ("personal data"). After a subject has completed their TAIS, the stored TAIS data is processed, and psychometric results are further added to the body of stored TAIS data. Taken together, a subject's TAIS data, and any personal data also provided, form the "subject data".
This document describes the personal and TAIS subject data which is requested of you, why we gather this information and how it is used, how access to your data is controlled, what actions you may take regarding it, and other aspects regarding TPSI's handling of subject data. Please note throughout that the TD for your TAIS, and any organization that the TD works for or with, will have their own policies addressing privacy, use, and management of subject data. Such policies should be made available to you, separately.
WHAT SUBJECT DATA IS GATHERED
TPSI presents an information-collection form, prior to administering TAIS, to collect personal information from you on behalf of the TD who arranged for that. This includes your name, email address, and common contact information; details such as your age or age range and your gender; demographic indications such as your general occupation or profession and your current job or position. Free-form text fields are provided so that you may state a reason for taking TAIS, or to provide additional information, perhaps as requested by your TD.
The only information fields which TPSI currently requires to be completed are your first name, your last name (surname), and a valid email address. All other fields are optional; however, a TD may well instruct subjects in advance as to what information fields are necessary for their work. However, no truly private or deeply personal information is requested, nor should you provide any. Any such private information that you or your TD feel it necessary to record should be communicated separately from you taking TAIS.
In submitting the pre-TAIS information form, please do not provide any name or email address which is not your own, unless you have direct, specific instructions from your TD to do so. Doing so without our foreknowledge, or without your TD's foreknowledge is a felony in many jurisdictions. If you are reluctant to provide your name and/or email address to TPSI, please contact your TD about it, before you take TAIS. The TD can provide an anonymous/random code to use for your first and last name, and/or an alternate email address for us to use in sending out a confirmation email. If your actual name or email address is hidden from us in this manner, the given code or address is the only information that TPSI will have to identify your TAIS; we will not be privy to your actual name and/or email address. Again: Please do not attempt to obscure or anonymize your TAIS on your own; always consult with your TD to do so, in advance of taking TAIS. Failure to follow this advice will most likely result in you losing access to your TAIS, and the ability to exercise the other options outlined below, since we or your TD will then be unable to satisfactorily identify you. If you do so with the assistance of your TD, you will at least have access at a later point in time by working directly with them.
As part of TAIS itself, 144 TAIS items are presented for which a response is gathered. Items are in the form of a statement, and the response recorded indicates the extent to which you think the statement applies to you. The possible item responses are Always, Frequently, Sometimes, Rarely, and Never. Upon completion, TAIS responses may not be altered, even by the TAIS subject.
After completion, your TAIS responses may be processed against the TPSI-proprietary psychometric model, and these TAIS results stored by TPSI. No subsequent addition to your TAIS data is performed. As with the TAIS responses, once TAIS results are compiled they may not be subsequently altered, even by us. In extreme cases, such as where the TPSI system has been deemed to have been misused, we may choose to mark the subject data as invalid, and thus made inaccessible and/or tagged for subsequent deletion.
All subject data is gathered over secure, HTTPS connections, employing high-grade encryption. It is stored on and accessed from our secure servers, which are in turn maintained within highly secured datacenters.
WHY WE GATHER SUBJECT DATA AND HOW IT IS USED
TPSI gathers your subject (TAIS and personal) data on behalf of your TD, who works either directly for you, or else for or within an organization with which you are somehow involved. TAIS data and results are normalized and provided to your TD for analysis; the results are also used in reporting the TD can use for that purpose. For personal data, in some usage scenarios, taking TAIS provides the first opportunity to have your contact information recorded, as may be necessary or helpful for subsequent interaction with your TD.
Your name is requested merely as an expedient to identifying your TAIS results among possibly many others, and to easily communicated your TAIS results and reporting to your TD. It is also is used to label your TAIS in a data management interface used by TDs, in our invoicing to them where your TAIS is included, and the like.
The name and email address you provide are also used by TPSI for the purpose of sending you an immediate confirmation, once your TAIS is completed and stored successfully. Other than this communication, TPSI will not send you further email; nor will TPSI add you to a marketing or other contact email list. There is no email list of TAIS subjects that we maintain, hence there is no such list for you to opt in or opt out of.
Any other personal data that you provide is also made available to your TD, on the presumption that it will benefit their service to you. As noted above, your TD might well specify in advance what particular information is needed from you.
As noted above, your subject data also includes TAIS data: the collection of your responses to the 144 TAIS items, along with any numeric results compiled. TAIS data forms the basis for individual reporting that TDs can use to provide their services. Please note that none of the actual responses made to the 144 TAIS items are provided to the associated TD, either in total or with respect to any subset of the items. TDs are only given access to the psychometric results compiled by TPSI.
As a quality control measure, and for the sake of internal TAIS research and development, TPSI reserves the right to use subjects' TAIS data as part of a larger aggregation of data, while such data is in its possession. Such activity is conducted in the complete absence of any personal information associated with the specific TAISes used. TPSI also permits TDs to do likewise with the TAIS data of subjects under their control. Such aggregate data may continue to exist even if the contributing TAISes are later deleted from the TPSI system. Your name and any personally identifiable information is never used in any research and development conducted by TPSI.
SUBJECT DATA MODIFICATION
After you complete your TAIS, your TD has the opportunity to modify the personal and demographic information that you supplied. This ability is extended to TDs to allow for better service to their clients. Typical cases might be: to swap first and last names for a TAIS (say, if they were entered in the incorrect order); to correct a misspelling; to obscure a subject's actual name with a code that the TD will use to label the TAIS, going forward; or, to supply demographic information, such as your profession or organizational role, if such tagging is helpful.
During the process of taking TAIS, if you think that you've responded inaccurately to any given TAIS item, you can use the Previous button to move backwards one or more items. (You will need to re-respond to all items that you navigate back to, or through, in this way.) Once your TAIS is completed and submitted, however, your TAIS responses will not be modifiable in any way. If you think that you might have responded inaccurately to one or more TAIS items, please contact your TD to discuss the matter. Please do not retake TAIS unless your TD instructs you to do so.
Beyond the storage of TAIS responses, storing TAIS results is the only possible addition that TPSI will make to a given subject's TAIS data. This action finalizes a subject's TAIS results, and no further modification to them is permitted.
NON-SUBJECT DATA COLLECTION AND USAGE
TPSI collects certain information such as with web browser "cookies" and in certain server logging. This information is collected minimally and has a very limited lifespan or is highly transient in nature. Such information is only used to simplify our TAIS service, and to help ensure that TAIS subjects have a satisfactory, error-free experience. As such, this type of data is not stored with subject data. TPSI does not share cookie data with any third parties -- not even TDs. Given these factors, and the following disclosures of our minimal use of such technologies, TPSI does not deem this type of data to be subject data.
TPSI uses what are commonly known as web browser cookies, to a limited extent. Cookies are small bits of data that your web browser will store on your computer somehow, on our behalf. TPSI sets such cookies only to (a) uniquely identify your TAIS web session among others simultaneously in progress; and (b) keep track of your progress through TAIS, including which TAIS item response was last successfully received. These cookies are in place only during your TAIS web session, and only retrievable from your browser by TPSI as part of maintaining your web session.
As part of its web-based service, certain logging of all HTTP/HTTPS requests is performed. The information logged includes an IP address and "agent string" for the computer making the request, as provided by users' web browsers and/or their ISPs. This information is saved for a limited time, for the benefit of service performance measurements, and for the security of TPSI's systems. It is not linked with any specific TAIS session.
"Web analytics" data for your TAIS session is not gathered by TPSI; not with cookies, logging, or by way of any other technical mechanism.
ACCESS TO SUBJECT DATA
After TAISes are completed, subject data is accessible to TPSI personnel and to TDs, in limited fashion, consisting of TAIS reporting and certain data management functions. Minimal access to subject data, e.g., handling of subject reports, may be delegated to administrative assistants at either the TD or client-organization level; however, TPSI will only work with such persons that have been identified and cleared by the TD.
Direct, system-level access to data is available only to TPSI, on a highly restricted basis. Within TPSI, subject data access is available only on a need-to-know basis; access to data under one TD does not imply access to any other. Through our contracts with them, this standard of access is required of TDs: Only persons requiring certain subject data (usually, specific TAIS results), in order to provide contracted TD services, may have access to the data.
Access mechanisms include a secure web interface, and the inclusion of TAIS report-only URLs in notification emails. For instance, TDs may access subjects' TAIS results by following unique URLs for pre-designated reporting, which are generated and sent to them via email upon completion of TAIS by one of their subjects. Such reporting is also available on an ad-hoc basis to TDs through the restricted website.
Access to TAIS results can be extended to TAIS subjects. This is handled either automatically through TPSI, or else manually through the TD. TPSI can automatically include one or more report URLs in the subject's notification email that is sent upon completion of TAIS, if that has been pre-arranged and authorized by the TD, and if TAIS results are immediately available. Or, TDs may, at their professional discretion, supply subjects with access to TAIS reports.
Please note that TDs are typically under contract to an organization, which may stipulate controlled or delayed access that you may have to your TAIS results. (You have certain rights, and actions you may take, in this area; please see below.) Because of this, in almost every case, TPSI will not provide TAIS reporting directly to subjects -- unless our doing so has been explicitly arranged for by the TD, in advance of your taking TAIS.
All requests for such access by a TAIS subject would best be made directly with the TD; however, if necessary, TPSI will assist with the lines of communication between the two parties. There may also be extenuating or edge-case scenarios involved, which TPSI will evaluate on a case-by-case basis. In these cases, please outline your request and relevant particulars in an email, and send to support@epstais.com. Please note, however, that our ability to provide report access to subjects, in such rare circumstances, is contingent upon being able to conclusively identify you as the actual person that originally took the referenced TAIS.
ACTIONS AVAILABLE TO TAIS SUBJECTS
Regarding their personal data, TAIS subjects may request:
As noted above, regarding TAIS report access, it is most appropriate that TAIS subjects make any of the above requests directly with their TD. However, TPSI can assist where necessary in helping to bridge any communication gaps. Please note that some requests might hamper or even prevent the TD from completing any services regarding the TAIS that are yet in progress.
Regarding actions (1) and (4), above: anonymity is with respect to TPSI. This cannot be so with the TD; in almost every case, there must be a way for the TD to link you, a real person, with your TAIS. Thus, if you wish to log on to take TAIS anonymously, you must first communicate with your TD, and by use a TD-supplied first and last name code.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Please make any further questions or concerns known to us, either in email or via standard post. An initial response will be made within one week.
TAIS Performance Systems Inc.
699 Cardero Street, Suite 502
Vancouver, BC V6G 3H7
Canada
Email: support@epstais.com
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The TAIS Inventory (TAIS) is Copyright © 1974-2020 Grandlark Investments Inc.
TAIS is used under direct, exclusive license to TPSI.