Privacy policy

Last Updated: 12/23/2024

This Privacy Policy applies to all sites where it is posted. This Privacy Policy applies to all the websites (each, a “website”) and other electronic communication channels operated by Vitalant and its divisions, members, subsidiaries, and affiliates. These include, but are not limited to: Vitalant, Vitalant laboratories and biotherapies, Vitalant Research Institute, Vitalant Foundation, Hemophilia Center of Western Pennsylvania (HCWP), and PlasmaSource.

Your Consent

By using a website or communicating electronically with Vitalant or the entities listed herein, you consent to accept and comply with this Privacy Policy. By providing your telephone number (including cell phone number), your email address, and other contact information, you expressly consent to be contacted by Vitalant or its representative concerning your current or future potential blood donations, follow-up questions, your health information, test results, opportunities to engage with Vitalant, charitable activities, or for any other legitimate purpose, including communications via mail, email, auto-dialer, pre-recorded messages and/or auto-test messaging. However, you may edit your contact and communication preferences at any time in your donor portal account or as described below.

What personal information do we collect?

We collect personal information from you when you log in to the websites, use the donor mobile app, update your personal profile, place an order in our online stores, donate blood, attend a training event, subscribe to email notifications or publications, respond to an online survey, or submit a Webform. This personal information includes your name, job title, birth date, age, email address, mailing address, phone number, services interested in, and, if you are acting on behalf of your employer, the employer’s name. If you donate blood or biotherapy products or materials with Vitalant, a donor health and personal history questionnaire must be completed per applicable federal regulations.

We collect personal information automatically including:

The IP address of the computer you use to access the website./li>
The browser and internet domain used./li>
The operating system used by your browser./li>
The date and time of access to the website./li>
Undeleted cookies/li>
Navigation information, including the site from which you were referred, if any./li>
Pages visited on the website.

We also may collect personal information contained within your communications with us via email, chat functionality, social media, telephone, or otherwise, and in certain cases we may use third-party service providers to do so. Where permitted by applicable law, we may collect and maintain records of calls and chats with our agents, representatives, or employees via message, chat, post, or similar functionality.

If you access the blood donation websites on mobile devices, additional personal information, such as geolocation data, may be collected.

How do we collect personal information?

Directly From You – We collect personal information that you provide to us directly, for example, if you choose to contact us, request information from us, sign up to receive updates, donate blood or biotherapy products, engage in charitable activities, or otherwise utilize our website and services.
From Third Parties – We may collect personal information from third parties, including but not limited to business partners, advertising networks, social networks, data analytics providers, mobile device providers, and Internet or mobile service providers.
Through Online Tracking Technologies – We use cookies and similar technologies to collect personal information automatically as you navigate our website. For additional information regarding our use of these technologies, see below.

How do we use your personal information?

Any of the personal information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

To provide and personalize our website and services, such as processing or fulfilling orders and transactions, providing and personalizing our services, processing payments, providing customer service, maintaining or servicing accounts, verifying customer information, creating and maintaining business records, verifying eligibility, and undertaking or providing similar services.
To improve the website and services we offer, including understanding how users interact with our website and services, gauging user interest in certain services or website functionality, and troubleshooting problems.
To respond to questions and concerns, and to improve customer service.
To process transactions and conduct general business activities. For example, your personal information may be shared with third-party service providers who use it to perform functions on our behalf. These companies or individuals may perform services such as processing orders or payment; sending mail, email, or text messages; or providing marketing or database marketing services, search engine optimization analysis or call center services, among others.
To administer a contest, promotion, survey, or other site feature.
Such general business activities may include use of your personal information:
- To send periodic emails. We may use email addresses you provide to send you information and updates pertaining to our products and services that you use, in addition to sending occasional company news, updates, or related product or service information, etc.
- To schedule blood donations.
- To notify you of important medical information. In the process of collecting, testing, processing or transfusing blood or blood products and biotherapy cellular materials donated by you, we may need to inform you of important medical information that may affect your health, including infectious diseases. We also collect, and may provide as a service to our donors, certain health information such as cholesterol levels. However, it is important that you still see your personal physician for care.
- To identify new or modified needs that can be fulfilled by our organization.
- To comply with law, for regulatory purposes, or for accreditation or compliance purposes.
- To complete an order in our online stores. An email address is required for confirmation and delivery of your order.
For legal, security, or safety reasons, such as protecting our and our users’ safety, property, or rights; complying with legal requirements; enforcing our terms, conditions, and policies; detecting, preventing, and responding to security incidents; and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity.
As part of a corporate transaction, such as in connection with the sale of part or all of our assets or business, the acquisition of part or all of another business or another business’ assets, or another corporate transaction, including bankruptcy.
To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it, including purposes described when you provide the information or give your consent.

How do we disclose your personal information?

We may disclose your personal information with your consent or in the following circumstances:

Affiliates and Subsidiaries – We may disclose personal information within our family of companies for their and our business and marketing purposes, including providing you with information about the services we think may be of interest to you.
Service Providers – We disclose your personal information with the service providers that we use to support our business, including but not limited to, data analytics providers, website hosting providers, and other technology providers. If you are applying for a job with us, this may include service providers such as background check providers and human resource providers.
Business Partners – We may disclose personal information with trusted business partners. For example, we may disclose your personal information with a company whose products or services we think may be of interest to you or who we co-sponsor a promotion or service with.
Legal Obligation or Safety Reasons – We may disclose personal information to a third party when we have a good faith belief that such disclosure of personal information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy or comply with any requirement of law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce or investigate a potential violation of any agreement you have with us, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise respond to fraud, security or technical concerns, (d) support auditing and compliance functions, or (e) protect the rights, property, or safety of Vitalant, its employees and clients, or the public against harm.
Merger or Change of Control – We may disclose personal information to third parties as necessary if we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or any other transaction involving a change of control in our business, including but not limited to, a bankruptcy or similar proceeding. Where legally required, we will give you notice prior to such disclosure.
Other – We may disclose personal information to third parties when explicitly requested by or consented to by you, or for the purposes for which you disclosed the personal information to us as indicated at the time and point of the disclosure (or as was obvious at the time and point of disclosure).

How do we protect your personal information?

We protect the confidentiality of all personal demographic information, medical information and test results obtained during your blood or biotherapy collection. This information will be used for business operations such as recruitment, donation follow-up, and laboratory operations, which includes blood product manufacturing, testing, rare donor identification, research, and charitable activities.

We have implemented commercially reasonable measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure, despite these efforts to store personal information in a secure environment, we cannot guarantee the security of personal information during its transmission or its storage on our systems.

Does Vitalant sell my data or personal information to third parties?

No, we do not sell or trade your personal information to third parties for any cross-marketing or sales purposes. We provide personal information to third parties only when those entities are providing services for us and agree to comply with our Privacy Policy. Personal information will be disclosed in furtherance of the stated business operations and will not be disclosed unless permitted by law (including, but not limited to test result notifications, rare donor identification and regulatory compliance.)

Your Choices and Controls

Depending on the state where you live, you may have the following rights with respect to your personal information:

Access: You may have the right to know what personal information we have collected about you and to access such data.
Data portability: You may have the right to receive a copy of your personal information in a portable and readily usable format.
Deletion: You may have the right to delete your personal information that we have obtained, subject to certain exceptions.
- Please note, if you have donated blood products, FDA regulations prohibit Vitalant from deleting information related to your blood donation. We are required to keep the information associated with your blood donations and related products per FDA guidelines for traceability purposes.
Correction: You may have the right to correct inaccuracies in your personal information.
Opt out of certain processing: You may have the right to opt out of the processing of your personal information for the purposes of targeted advertising. We do not use your personal information for profiling to make decisions that produce a legally or similarly significant impact on you.

How do you exercise your privacy choices and controls?

You will not be discriminated against in any way by virtue of your exercise of the choices listed in this Privacy Policy which means we will not deny goods or services to you, provide different prices or rates for goods or services to you, or provide a different level or quality of goods or services to you.

To opt-out or change your communication preferences, please submit a request to us by one of the following methods:

Calling us toll free at 877-25-VITAL.
Emailing us at donorsupport@vitalant.org
Submitting a request through our Preference Center.

To exercise any of the other privacy choices or controls afforded to you under this applicable law:

Emailing us at PrivacyOfficer@vitalant.org
Calling us at 480-675-5504

Authentication: If we cannot initially verify your identity, we may request additional information to complete the verification process. If you are an authorized agent making a request on behalf of another, we will also need to verify your identity, which may require proof of your written authorization or evidence of a power of attorney.

We endeavor to respond to requests within the time period required by applicable law. If we require more time, we will inform you of the reason and extension period in writing. We will deliver our written response by mail or electronically, at your option.

We cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity and confirm the personal information relates to you. Making an authenticated consumer request does not require you to create an account with us.

We may deny certain requests, or only fulfill some in part, as permitted or required by law. For example, if you request to delete personal information, we may retain personal information that we need to retain for legal purposes. This Privacy Policy is available to consumers with disabilities. To access the Privacy Policy in an alternative downloadable format, please click here.

Appeals: If you are not satisfied with the resolution of your request and you are afforded a right to appeal such decision, you will be notified of our appeal process in our response to your request.

How long is your personal information stored?

Storage of personal information is based on the type of personal information and its use. Record retention is driven by regulatory and legal requirements, and business needs. Criteria we will use to determine how long to retain your personal information include the nature and length of our business relationship with you; our legal rights, obligations, and retention requirements; and if we have an ongoing business purpose for retaining your personal information, such as communicating with you about ongoing or prospective services you requested.

Personal information related to donor or patient demographics, donations of blood products, cellular products/material, associated testing and/or treatment or billing is maintained in accordance with regulatory and legal requirements.

Do we use cookies or similar technologies?

Yes, we use cookies. Cookies are small computer files that are transferred to your computer’s hard drive through your Web browser. Cookies enable the website’s or service provider’s systems to recognize your computer and to capture and remember certain personal information. We use cookies to help us remember and process the items in your shopping cart, understand and save your preferences for future visits and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. Cookies can permit interest-based displays of information, including, in some cases, marketing information. Interest-based information may be provided by the Vitalant website or, if you visit any of the linked third-party websites, those third-party websites. If you have activated “do-not-track” options on your computer, our operating system may not be able to accommodate your request. We cannot control how third-party websites handle do-not-track options. Please read the privacy policies of the third-party websites to understand their response to do-not-track mechanisms.

We use third parties and/or service providers to provide interest-based advertising services. These services may serve advertisements on our behalf that are customized based on predictions about your interests generated from your visits to websites (including our websites) over time and across different websites. The data collected may be associated with your personal information. These advertisements may appear on our websites and on other third-party websites and may be sent to you via email. Interest-based information may be provided by the Vitalant website, or, if you visit any of the linked third-party websites, those third-party websites.

We make certain personal information available to third parties in order to receive targeted advertising-related services, such as when we make browsing information available (e.g., through third-party tags on our digital properties) to carry out, measure, and improve our ad campaigns and reach users with more relevant ads and content and to third-party analytics providers to help us improve our websites and your user experience. These disclosures may be considered a “sale” or “targeted advertising” under some applicable state law. To opt-out of these activities, please see the How do you exercise your privacy choices and controls? section above.

We also utilize a chat feature powered by a third-party to enable live customer service and technical support via our website. When you engage in the live chat enabled by this service provider, we will automatically collect and share certain information (such as personal identifiers, usage information, and message content) with the vendor to provide the customer service and technical support enabled by the live chat tool.

Third Party Links

For any links to third parties on our website, it is important to understand that the third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. The fact that we include information about third-party products or sites is not an endorsement of those products or sites.

In some cases, we offer links to social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and YouTube) that enable you to easily connect with us or share information on social media. Any content you post via these social media pages is subject to the terms of use and privacy policies for those platforms.

California Shine the Light

Under California Civil Code Section 1798.83, individual customers who reside in California and who have an existing business relationship with us may request information about our disclosure of certain categories of personal information to third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes, if any. To make such a request, please contact us at PrivacyOfficer@vitalant.org. Please be aware that not all information sharing is covered by these California privacy rights requirements and only information on covered sharing will be included in our response. This request may be made no more than once per calendar year.

Minors

We do not intentionally collect any personal information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our websites, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years of age or older. If a parent or legal guardian finds that personal information of a child under 13 years of age has been provided to any of the websites, please notify us at PrivacyOfficer@vitalant.org so that we can delete that personal information.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

Please note that we may modify or update this Privacy Policy from time to time, so please review it periodically. If we make material changes to how we treat personal information, we will notify you according to applicable law. Unless otherwise indicated, any changes to this Privacy Policy will apply immediately upon posting to our website. You are responsible for periodically visiting our website and this Privacy Policy to check for any changes.

Contacting Us

If there are any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, you may contact us at the following address: