Last updated: September 2024
Astellas Pharma Inc. and its affiliates (“Astellas”) respect your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice ("Notice") explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information about you when you participate in any events such as an internal or external meeting, an interview with your or with a group of people including you, a seminar, webinar, virtual or physical event or conference where you participate (collectively referred to as an “event”) organised by Astellas, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. This Notice supplements our general Privacy Notice which is available here https://www.astellas.com/en/privacy-notice. If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Notice.
You can also find more information about Astellas affiliates who may organize an event and follow this Notice in the following link: at https://www.astellas.com/en/worldwide.
What does Astellas do?
Astellas is a global pharmaceutical business, whose ultimate parent company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Our mission is to improve the lives of patients. For more information about Astellas, including information about our focus therapeutic areas, please see the "About" and the “Therapy Areas” sections of our Website at https://www.astellas.com/en/about.
What personal information does Astellas collect and why?
The personal information that we may collect about you broadly falls into the following categories:
| Type of personal information | Why we collect it |
| We will collect personal information for you such as name, surname, job title & professional qualifications, contact details, information about a healthcare and/or patient organization that you may represent or participate and information relating to business travel and other arrangements as part of our overall organisation and conduct of the event concerned. | We will use such information to track your participation via e.g. attendance sheets, to provide to you services during such event such as hospitality and ensure that we organize an efficient and safe event, to receive from you feedback about the event and to monitor in general the way we conduct the event. |
| We may also collect personal information such as IP addresses and device IDs if we use a mobile application or any online tool as part of the event. Where cookies or other tracking technology are used as part of this information collection, we will process such information in line with our Cookies Policy, which is available here https://www.astellas.com/en/cookies-policy. | We will use such information to provide the technical elements of the event such as a mobile application or WiFi access. |
| We may collect personal information about your dietary needs and disability requirements. | We will use such information to provide you with appropriate information about access to the event, to provide appropriate food / drink to you and to fulfil our legal requirements. Certain of this information may be considered sensitive personal information and so, where required by law, we will obtain your explicit consent before we use it. |
| Astellas may be conducting filming, photography, audio recording and other media recording (the “Recording Activities”) as part of our event. The Recording Activities will entail capturing your personal information, including your name, image, job title, voice, appearance and any information you disclose if you speak publicly at the event, including information about your health status, as well as your opinions during the event in notes, reports and other formats. We may take photos and/or record (audio and/or video) an event or a meeting that Astellas organises in its premises or in third-party premises and to which you may participate. You may appear in the Recording Activities either in close-up photos/recording or in more general audience photo/recording. | The purposes of the Recording Activities is to use the material for external and/or internal distribution in order to increase awareness of Astellas events, train employees on various subjects and communicate initiatives internally and externally. |
Legal basis for processing personal information under this Notice
For the organisation and conduct of the event concerned, we will process your personal data on the basis of our legitimate interest to efficiently and safely organise our event. The legal basis we rely on is your consent if we are going to process any special categories of personal data such as information about your health. If we use cookies in a mobile or online tool or application, we will process such cookie information in line with our Cookie Notice, which is available here https://www.astellas.com/en/cookies-policy. We may have to process your Personal Information if need to meet a legal obligation as above such as when we need to report an adverse event about any of our products or we need to process data for tax, accounting or financial disclosure purposes or if we need to take steps to execute a contract with you or we need to perform a contract with you, for example as a speaker in one of our events (in cases where our processing of your Personal Information is required as part of our contractual relationship with you, failure to provide this type of Personal Information requested may obstruct conclusion of the contract or result in Astellas’ inability to perform contractual obligations).
If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
How does Astellas process Personal Information?
We will process your Personal Information in accordance with this Notice and applying the following principles:
- Fairness: We will process your Personal Information fairly. This means that we are transparent about how we process Personal Information and that we will process it in accordance with applicable law and the information we provide with this Notice or with any other or additional Notice you may have been provided with.
- Purpose limitation: We will process Personal Information for the above-specified, lawful purposes, and will not process it in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes.
- Proportionality: We will process Personal Information in a way that is proportionate to the purposes which the processing is intended to achieve.
- Data accuracy: We take appropriate measures to ensure that the Personal Information that we hold is accurate, complete and, where necessary, kept up to date.
How does Astellas keep your Personal Information secure?
We implement reasonable physical, technical and organizational security measures to protect your Personal Information against loss, misuse, and unauthorized or unlawful access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. This includes limiting access to your Personal Information to those Astellas employees and third-party providers who strictly need to have access to fulfil a legitimate purpose. We use due diligence processes to select third parties who may have access to Personal Information. We may also use encryption of communications via SSL, encryption of information while it is at rest or in transit, firewalls, access controls, separation of duties, and similar security protocols.
Astellas trains its employees on the importance of privacy and how to handle and manage Personal Information appropriately and securely.
The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing of your Personal Information. We are continuously improving our security measures in line with technological developments. It is important that you take also all appropriate actions to protect the Personal Information you submit during an event such as e.g., protecting your passwords if you create an account with Astellas while you participate in an event. If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure, please immediately notify us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
Who does Astellas share Personal Information with?
We may engage third parties to process Personal Information for and on behalf of Astellas to organize an event. We require such data processors to process Personal Information and act strictly on our instructions and to take steps to ensure that Personal Information remains protected. We may disclose your Personal Information to the following categories of recipients:
| Our affiliates and group companies | Disclosure for purposes consistent with this Notice. A list of our current group companies is available at https://www.astellas.com/en/worldwide |
| Third-party service providers and partners | Third parties who provide data processing services to us or who otherwise process personal data for purposes that are described in this Notice or notified to you when we collect your personal data. Such third parties may be processing your Personal Information in the context of the following categories of activities:
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| Consultants | Provision of advisory services by auditors, advisors, accountants, legal counsels and similar agents in connection with the advisory services they provide to us |
| Competent Authorities | Any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, (iii) to respond to regulatory investigations or investigate whistleblowing issues, or (iv) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person |
| Potential buyers (and their agents and advisers) | In connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition or divestiture of any part of our business, partially or fully, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your Personal Information only for the purposes disclosed in this Notice |
International data transfers
Your Personal Information may be transferred to, and processed in, countries other than the country in which you are resident. In particular, Astellas maintains datacenters and servers around the world, including Japan and the United States which are supported by technical staff located in various countries including India. Also, our group companies and third-party service providers and partners operate around the world. This means that when we collect your Personal Information, we may process it in any of these countries, which may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country (and, in some cases, may not be as protective).
We have taken appropriate safeguards to require that your Personal Information will remain protected in accordance with this Notice. These include implementing Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers of personal data between our group companies, which require group companies to protect personal data they process in accordance with applicable data protection laws. You may exercise any of your rights described under the "Your data protection rights" heading below in relation to Personal Information that we transfer to group companies outside the country where you reside. We implement similar appropriate contractual safeguards with our third-party service providers and partners.
Further details can be provided upon request by contacting our Data Protection Officer using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
Data retention
We retain Personal Information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need or legal obligation to do so and according to the Astellas Records Retention Schedule which defines exact time periods for the retention of all Astellas business records. The criteria used to determine Astellas retention periods include: (i) whether there is a legal obligation to which we are subject (e.g. for pharmacovigilance or tax & accounting purposes); (ii) whether we have an ongoing relationship with you and for how long; (iii) whether retention is due to actual or threatened or anticipated litigation or internal and external investigations or legal hold orders); (iv) whether there are any industry codes or best practices in any particular case. In principle, we will not keep your Personal Information for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which we collected it and as outlined in this Notice or as required by law or contract.
Your data protection rights
We respond to requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights, which will depend on the purposes for which we are processing your Personal Information and the applicable laws in your jurisdiction. As a result, where required by applicable laws and subject to limitations which may apply in consideration of exceptions or legal requirements, you may have the following rights depending on the country or state of your residence:
- You can always choose not to give us any Personal Information when we ask you for it. If you decide not to give us your personal information, however, we may not be able to provide you with services that you have requested or you may not be in the position to participate in an event or execute a contract with you in relation to an event.
- If you wish to access, rectify/correct or update your Personal Information, you can do so at any time by contacting us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
- You may be entitled to ask us to delete your Personal Information in certain circumstances, subject to the law in your jurisdiction.
- In addition, you may be entitled under certain circumstances to object to processing of your Personal Information, ask us to restrict processing of your Personal Information to some limited circumstances or request portability of your Personal Information.
- Similarly, if we have collected and processed your Personal Information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your Personal Information conducted in reliance on legal bases other than consent.
- You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your Personal Information. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. (Contact details for data protection authorities in the European Economic Area are available here).
If you wish to exercise any of your data protection rights according to the applicable privacy laws and regulations, please contact us using the specific details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below. To facilitate your exercise of your data protection rights, you can complete a web form to give us the details of your request. For your protection, and to protect the privacy of others, we may need to verify your identity before fulfilling any request.
Updates to this Privacy Notice
We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make. We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes if and where this is required by applicable data protection laws.
You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Privacy Notice.
How to contact us and our Data Protection Officer
To exercise any of your privacy rights, please submit your query here. If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, please contact our data protection officer using the following details: [email protected].