PRIVACY POLICY

Last Updated : 21July 2023

 
At Fossil Group, Inc., together with its affiliates and subsidiaries (collectively “Fossil”, “Fossil Group”, “we”, “us” or “our”), we value your data protection rights. In this Privacy Policy for the United States, we provide you with both a brief summary (in the box below) and an in-depth explanation (starting with Section 1 below) of how we handle Personal Information. 

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. You should not use the Fossil websites (our “websites”) if you have any objections to our Privacy Policy. If you have a question about how your Personal Information is being used, you can contact us through the methods provided in the “Who are we and how can you contact us / Contact Details” section (Section 12) at the end of this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy describes:

• Personal Information we collect in our stores, on our websites, through our call-centers or through our repair centers, and the purposes for which we use it;
• Personal Information we collect in order to determine your suitability for employment if you apply for a job with us;
• Personal Information we transfer to third parties;
• for how long we retain your Personal Information;
• how we keep your Personal Information safe; and
• rights you have and how you can execute such rights.

“Personal Information” is information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly to identify you. Examples of Personal Information include your name, email address, IP address, and mailing address.

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to Personal Information we collect through any of our Apps or wearable technology devices. Please refer to the Privacy Policies of our Apps for privacy information related to our wearable apps and devices.

For information on how we use cookies and similar technologies please visit our Cookie Policy.

Brief Summary:

1. What Personal Information Do We Collect and How Do We Use It?

In order to provide you with our services and the full range of features, we and our service providers may collect and use your Personal Information (such as your name, email address and IP address) for the following purposes: 

• when you create an online customer account, to manage your account, to provide access to your shopping cart, to display purchased, reserved and registered products, or to present other products presumably of interest to you, to verify your identity if you forgot your password and to process your product reviews;
• when you choose to provide us further information, such as date of birth, address, personal settings, a wish list and your gender, to enable us to personalize both your profile and our recommendations for you;
• when you order goods online, we additionally need your address, telephone number and payment information, to process your purchase, send you confirmation or back-in-stock notification and scan transactions for fraudulent activity;
• when you place products in your shopping cart, but have not checked out these products, we use your email address to send you an abandoned cart reminder if you previously provided your email address to us;
• when you book a Virtual Shopping appointment with us, we ask for your name, telephone number, email address and shopping preferences to offer you a remote shopping experience. Additionally - to facilitate purchasing - you can leave a shipping address;
• when you order goods to be picked-up in one of our stores by someone other than you, we need contact details such as name and email address of the pickup person;
• when you purchase a product in a Fossil retail store and request an e-receipt, to process your request;
• when you participate in loyalty programs, recommend our products to others, redeem a gift card, or when we offer you discounts and bonuses etc. we use this information in addition to purchase-related information to determine whether you are eligible for additional discounts and special offers;
• when you share any pictures/materials with us for publication on social media for such publication;
• when you enter a sweepstake, contest/competition, or promotion sponsored by us to administer and promote the sweepstakes, contest/competition or promotion;
• when you return or exchange a product or when you send us your product for warranty or repair service, to process the request and any communication in connection with it;
• when you contact us to answer your requests, provide customer support and handle your inquiry; and/or
• when you use our live chat functionality, the Customer Service Bot (for additional information, go to Section 1.7 of this Policy), to assist you with your account, orders, website navigation and other inquires.

In principle (unless we have a legal or other legitimate reason to maintain it), we delete information related to you:

• upon your request;
• after expiry of the relevant legal retention period; and/or
• once we do not have any business purpose for retaining the Personal Information anymore.

In addition to those just described, we want to explain certain of our processing activities to you in more detail:

1.1 RECRUITING PROCESS
We process your Personal Information in order to determine your suitability for employment if you apply for a job with us. For the application process, we collect the information from your application and the information included in your CV/resume and cover letter, which may include contact details, academic background, job history, skills and competencies, as well as the IP address from the device you are applying from etc. Your Personal Information will not be kept for longer than is legally allowed, or as required by applicable law.

1.2 VIDEO SURVEILLANCE
We process Personal Information gained from video surveillance in some of our stores and campuses for purposes allowed by law including: security, loss and fraud prevention reasons. We share this Personal Information in the cases described in Section 3. The duration of the Personal Information storage depends on the governing national law unless storage is otherwise permitted (see Section 4).

1.3 INTEREST BASED ADVERTISING

We may contact you for direct marketing purposes via email, mail, and/or other electronic communication methods (e.g., social media) unless you have opted-out from receiving direct marketing messages. For certain types of direct marketing methods (e.g., text messaging), we will obtain your explicit consent prior to sending you direct marketing messages. To select which marketing information may be of interest to you, we:

• use publicly available information (e.g. from your social media profiles);
• analyze your account information and how you use our services including our website, ads on third party websites and our newsletter;
• use information of your redemption of a gift card, participation in a sweepstake, contest, competition, or survey;
• use information collected by our service providers or partners (e.g. Google);and/or
• use information collected when you request an e-receipt in our stores or fill out an onboarding form.

1.4 CROSS-DEVICE TARGETING

In order to save your preferences, analyze your usage of our websites, provide interest-based advertising to you and deliver tailored ads across multiple devices, we try to link the different devices you are using to you. Technically, we are storing cookies on all the devices you are using and link those cookies within our internal database. For information about our use of Cookies and similar technologies please see our Cookie Policy.

1.5 LOG FILES, COOKIES AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES
Every time you visit our website, our system stores Personal Information related to your browser, its version, the operating system of your computer, your IP address, date, length and time of your visit, the website you accessed before and the sites you visit following links on the Fossil page. We use this information for our legitimate security interest and we delete log files without undue delay. For information about our use of Cookies and similar technologies please see our Cookie Policy.

1.6 WEBSITE AND APP TRACKING VIA CONTENTSQUARE
Our websites and apps use technology provided by a third-party service provider, Content Square, Inc. (“ContentSquare”), to track mouse movements, clicks and mobile interactions. The tracking data is securely sent to ContentSquare servers, where it is aggregated and prepared for analysis. ContentSquare then provides us with actionable insights and recommendations, which help us to improve our website and app experiences and better market our products.

1.7 WEBSITE INTERACTIONS

Our websites use technology to monitor how you interact with our websites. This may include, without limitation, which links you click on, information that you type into our online forms, and your interaction with the Customer Service Bot and the translation service provided thereon (which is governed by this Privacy Policy). We utilize session replay technology during these interactions to monitor and record mouse clicks and movements, keystrokes, and pages and content viewed by you. We use this information to better understand our website visitors, to fulfill or meet the reason you provided the information, to contact you in relation to our websites, to respond to an inquiry, to screen for potential risk or fraud, or otherwise meet the needs of our websites and website visitors.

1.8 YOUR REVIEWS AND SHARED CONTENT
When you post a product and/or seller review, upload an image or other material to our website, and/or when you share content with us on third party websites, such as social networks, we may publish and use this information on our website and third party websites. Information shared with third party websites is not necessarily under our control and we do not control and do not assume responsibility for the use of that information by such third party websites. Please refer to the applicable third party’s privacy policies for more information about how your Personal Information is handled by them.

2. WHERE DO WE GET PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM?

Most of the Personal Information we process, we received from you or your actions, be it because you entered the Personal Information during the registration process, placed an order, applied for a job vacancy or because we track your usage of our website, or newsletter, etc. However, we also may receive information about you from other sources, such as, other Fossil Group companies, and, if publicly available, from third party websites. In some cases we receive Personal Information about you from our service providers and partners, e.g., from Facebook, Google, etc. 

3. WHEN DO WE SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION?
We will share your Personal Information in the following cases:

3.1 LEGAL OBLIGATION AND INTERNAL PURPOSES
We disclose your Personal Information

• in order to comply with relevant laws, regulatory requirements and/or to respond to lawful requests, court orders, and legal processes, including requests to meet national security or law enforcement requirements;
• in order to protect and defend the rights or property of us or third parties; and/or
• in an emergency, in order to protect the safety of our employees, or any person. 

3.2 JOINT PROCESSING WITHIN FOSSIL GROUP
Your information may be combined with other Personal Information that Fossil Group companies have obtained about you that might be covered by other Fossil Group Privacy Policies (e.g., wearable data, goods you have purchased on a different Fossil Group company website or from a Fossil Group store in another country, repair transactions). We may also make your Personal Information available to Fossil Group companies for analytic purposes, or if you apply for a job with us (for information about Fossil Group companies click here www.fossilgroup.com). We base this joint processing on an intra-group agreement, allocating the responsibilities of the respective group entities. According to this agreement, each Fossil Group company will be responsible for the Personal Information processing related to its own business operations and will remain responsible for the Personal Information jointly processed with others. For you as our customer, this means that the Fossil entity you are in touch with will answer your privacy requests. If you are not sure about the entity responsible in your case, please contact privacy@fossil.com.

3.3 LINKS TO THIRD-PARTY WEBSITES AND SERVICES
On some pages, you may share Personal Information with third parties, such as social networks like Facebook. In these instances, you are agreeing to the Personal Information being shared and the shared Personal Information being subject to the privacy policies of the third parties. We do not control and do not assume any responsibility for the use of Personal Information by such third parties. For more information about the third party’s purpose and scope of their use of Personal Information in connection with sharing features, please visit the privacy policies of such third parties.

3.4 THIRD PARTY ADVERTISING
We use third-party service providers to display advertisements across the internet. These advertising service providers may collect information about your visits to our website and your interaction with our products and services, as well as your visits to other websites. Such information does not include your name, address, but may contain browser-related information. This Privacy Policy does not cover these third-party service providers. Please contact them directly for more information on their use of your Personal Information and refer to their privacy policies.

3.5 PUBLIC DISCLOSURE
Any Personal Information that you include in the text of a product review may be made public in the product review section of our product pages. We may also make your wishlist public on our website when you enable this function.

3.6 SHARING WITH THIRD PARTIES
We involve other companies for the provision of services, who are allowed to use Personal Information only on our behalf and must not use it for their own purposes, unless permitted by law. 

The following is a list of categories of services and functions along with example recipients:

• to enable the functionality of our online application portals (e.g. IBM);
• to provide customer care services (e.g., Salesforce, 8x8, Transcosmos);
• to provide a virtual shopping experience (e.g., Squarespace);
• providing hosting and general IT services (e.g., Amazon Web Services and Google);
• using data cleansing and enrichment techniques (e.g., Acxiom Corporation);
• for functional, social, analytical technologies and technologies enabling behavioral marketing (for more details, please refer to our Cookie Policy and Sections 1.3-1.7, above);
• for social media services (e.g., Facebook or Google);
• providing payment services (e.g., PayPal, Klarna, CyberSource);
• for transport and logistics services (e.g. FedEx);
• for direct marketing campaigns (e.g. Oracle, Google, Facebook); and/or
• to administer sweepstakes, contests and competitions (e.g. Salesforce).

3.7 TRANSFER OF ASSETS

We may transfer your Personal Information to a third party in the event of a transfer of all or some of our assets to a third party.

4. FOR HOW LONG DO WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION?
We will retain your Personal Information as long as necessary to provide you with functionality and services as described above under Section 1, as long as reasonably necessary to further our legitimate interests or as long as we are required or allowed to by law. Examples include: to support a transaction with you, the defense against, or the establishment of legal claims and legal obligations (e.g., tax law, or the principle of accountability, which requires us to demonstrate that our processing complies with applicable data protection laws). In order to verify whether you opted out or in to marketing activities, for example, we store your respective choice (e.g., via a cookie or a declaration).

5. HOW DO WE KEEP YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION SAFE?
We have implemented commercially reasonable physical, organizational, contractual and technological security measures with a view to protecting your Personal Information and other information from loss or theft, unauthorized collection, use and disclosure.

Despite the measures outlined above, no method of information transmission or information storage is 100% secure or error-free, so we unfortunately cannot guarantee absolute security. You must also do your part by keeping your password safe.

6. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIVACY CHOICES?

6.1 OPT-OUT OF DIRECT MARKETING
With regard to Personal Information that you have provided or that has been collected under this Privacy Policy, you may opt-out of uses for direct marketing purposes, such as correspondence from us about our products and promotions. Please consider that if you exercise your opt-out choices, it may take some time for your opt-out choices to be fully effective.

6.2 ACCESS TO, DELETION AND RECTIFICATION OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
If you have an account on this website, you have the ability to view and/or change the Personal Information you provided to us within the ‘’My Account’’ section of the website and/or using the contact details in Section 12 below. You may access information we hold about you, request a correction where Personal Information is incorrect and/or a deletion of your Personal Information, unless we have to keep your Personal Information for legal or other legitimate reasons. We encourage you to address any concerns you may have regarding our use of your Personal Information by using the contact details provided below.

In order to protect your Personal Information from unauthorized access, change, or deletion, we will require you to verify your identity before we process your request to access, correct, or delete. If we cannot verify your identity, we will not be able to honor your request.

You may also submit a right request through an authorized agent. If you do so, the agent must present signed written permission to act on your behalf and you may also be required to independently verify your identity with us. Authorized agent requests can be submitted to privacy@fossil.com. Please note that, at this time, our website does not scan for universal opt-out mechanisms.

6.3 OPT-OUT OF SALE OR SHARING AND/OR PROFILING
If you are a resident of Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, or California, you are granted the right to opt-out of the sale of your Personal Information, which entails the exchange of this data for monetary consideration to a third party, as dictated by respective state laws. Notably, California extends this right further to include the option of opting out of the sharing of Personal Information with third parties.

When you use the opt-out link at the bottom of our website under the name ‘’Your Privacy Choices”, we will cease  (i) sales of your Personal Information, as guided by the aforementioned states, and, (ii) in the case of California residents, sharing of your Personal Information. 

Additionally, the privacy laws of Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia provide consumers with the right to opt-out of processing Personal Information for profiling purposes in limited situations. Please note that Fossil does not engage in automated processing of Personal Data in furtherance of, or in relation to, decisions that produce legal or similarly-significant effects to you. For this reason, we do not offer a direct mechanism for opting out of such profiling. Nonetheless, Fossil remains committed to upholding the highest standards of data privacy and encourages our consumers to understand and exercise their rights as provided under relevant privacy laws. For any assistance or to exercise your opt-out rights, please contact us at privacy@fossil.com.

6.4 CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) provides California residents with specific rights regarding their Personal Information. If you are a California resident, you have the right to request the disclosure of:

• the categories of personal information we collected about you;
• the categories of sources from which the personal information is collected;
• the business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling personal information;
• the categories of third parties with/to whom we share/sell Personal Information; and 
• the specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.

You have the right to request deletion of any Personal Information that we have collected, subject to certain exceptions defined in CCPA.

To exercise your access and deletion rights described above, you have to submit a verifiable request to us by (i) sending us an email at privacy@fossil.com or (ii) calling us at +1 (800) 449-3056. The verifiable request must contain sufficient information to allow us to verify you and to properly understand and respond to your inquiry. As part of our verification process, we will send you an email with a link to verify your email address. Following this, we will ask you one further verification question. Once the verification process is complete, we will send you emails with login credentials to our secure privacy portal for you to access, download or instruct us to delete your Personal Information. 

We will respond to your verifiable request within 45 days of receipt. If we require more time (up to 90 days) we will provide you with notice and explanation of the reason.

We may not be able to fulfil your deletion request in part or completely if retaining the information is necessary for us and/or our service providers to:

• complete the transaction for which we collected the Personal Information, provide a good or service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our contract with you;
• detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities;
• debug products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality;
• exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law;
• comply with the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 1546 et. seq.);
• engage in public or peer-reviewed scientific, historical, or statistical research in the public interest that adheres to all other applicable ethics and privacy laws, when the information's deletion may likely render impossible or seriously impair the research's achievement, if you previously provided informed consent;
• enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us;
• comply with a legal obligation; and/or
• make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.

Furthermore, you have the right to request that in case we sell/share your Personal Information, or disclose it for a business purpose, we disclose to you:

• the categories of Personal Information that we collected about you;
• the categories of Personal Information that we sold/shared about you and the categories of third parties to whom the Personal Information was sold/shared, by category or categories of Personal Information for each third party to whom the Personal Information was sold/shared; and
• the categories of Personal Information that we disclosed about you for a business purpose.

In case we have sold/shared your Personal Information, you have the right, at any time, to direct us not to sell/share your Personal Information. You may opt out of the sale/share of your Personal Information by completing the webform here. You may also submit your request to opt-out by sending us an email at privacy@fossil.com or by calling us at +1 (800) 449-3056.

Please note that the opt-out request on this website will stop the sale or sharing of your information by Fossil Group tied to the email address submitted with the request. However, some interactions you have with us are not connected to your email address. For instance, we sell or share certain Personal Information through the use of cookies, tags and/or pixels provided by third parties, which are not connected to your email address. If you wish to opt-out of sales or sharing of your data, please use our cookie management feature. Keep in mind that an opt-out will only apply to the browser you are currently using. If you interact with us using multiple browsers or devices, you will need to submit separate requests from each of those browsers and devices to disable all sales/share connected to cookies not linked to your email address. Furthermore, if you delete your cookies or reinstall your browser on this device, you will need to resubmit the request.  

You may use an authorized agent to submit a request to access, delete and to opt-out on your behalf if you provide the authorized agent written permission to do so and verify your own identity directly with us. “Authorized agent” means a natural person or a business entity registered with the Secretary of State that a consumer has authorized to act on their behalf. We may deny a request from an authorized agent who does not submit proof that they have been authorized by you to act on your behalf, unless you have provided the authorized agent with power of attorney, pursuant to Probate Code sections 4000 to 4465.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from California residents between the ages of 13 and 16.  Likewise, we do not collect or process Sensitive Personal Information to infer characteristics about you. We only collect and process Sensitive Personal Information in accordance with the permissible purposes stated under Section 7027(m) of CPRA. Given this, we do not provide a “Notice to Limit” link on our website.

In the preceding 12 months, we have collected the following categories of Personal Information about California residents:

• identifiers such as real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, social security number, driver's license number, passport number, and/or other similar identifiers;
• personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)) such as signature, social security number, physical characteristics or description, address, telephone number, passport number, driver's license or state identification card number, insurance policy number, education, employment, employment history, bank account number, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information, medical information, or health insurance information;
• protected classification characteristics under California or federal law, such as age (40 years or older) and/or sex (gender);
• commercial information such as products or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies;
• internet or other similar network activity such as browsing history, search history, information on a consumer's interaction with a website, application, or advertisement;
• audio / visual data such as audio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, or similar information (e.g., recordings of calls with customer care); and
• inferences drawn from other personal information such as a profile reflecting a person's preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.

We have collected the Personal Information directly from you, e.g., during your account registration, your purchases and/or through your usage of our website and from consumer data resellers, from employment applications you submit to us, through transactions in our stores and interactions with our customer care and/or warranty and repair services. We may use or disclose the Personal Information we collect for "business purposes" or "commercial purposes" such as security, debugging/repair, performing services on behalf of the business or service provider, advance a person’s commercial or economic interests, quality, safety maintenance and verification of a service or device, enabling or effecting a commercial transaction etc.

In the preceding 12 months, we have sold and/or sahred the following categories of Personal Information:

We do not discriminate against you because you exercised any of your rights, including, but not limited to:

• denying goods or services to you, charging different prices or rates for goods or services, including through the use of discounts or other benefits or imposing penalties;
• providing a different level or quality of goods or services to you;
• suggesting that you will receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services;
• rejecting or affecting your job application process negatively if you are a job applicant;
• imposing internal procedures against you if you are an employee; and/or
• terminating or affecting negatively the contract we have if you are an independent contractor.

However, we may charge you a different price or rate, or provide a different level or quality of goods or services, if that difference is reasonably related to the value provided to you by your Personal Information (e.g., your identifiers). In addition, we may offer financial incentives, including payments to you as compensation, for the collection of Personal Information, the sale of Personal Information, or the deletion of Personal Information. We may also offer a different price, rate, level, or quality of goods or services to you if that price or difference is directly related to the value provided to you by your Personal Information. We may enter you into a financial incentive program only if you give us prior consent which clearly describes the material terms of the financial incentive program, and which may be revoked at any time. We shall not use financial incentive practices that are unjust, unreasonable, coercive, and/or usurious in nature.

6.5 APPEALING AGANIST A DECISION TAKEN IN RESPONSE TO YOUR RIGHTS
In cases where you submit a request to exercise one or more of your data subject rights and that request is denied by us, we will inform you about our justification for such denial within 45 days of receipt of your request. You may object to our decision by emailing us at privacy@fossil.com within a reasonable period of time after receiving that decision from us. In that email, please explain why you may disagree with our decision. Within 45 days of receipt of your objection, we will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken, accompanied by our justification.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to appeal a decision we make relating to requests to exercise your rights under applicable local law. To appeal a decision, please send your request to privacy@fossil.com. For Virginia and Colorado residents, your right to take your appeal to your state’s Attorney General (AG) is reserved. For Colorado residents, follow this link to fill out a form on the Colorado AG’s website. For Virginia residents, follow this link to contact the Virginia AG.

 7. DO NOT TRACK SIGNALS

We do not currently have the technology to automatically respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals sent by web browsers, mobile devices, or other mechanisms.

8. PERSONAL INFORMATION STORAGE IN THE U.S.
Personal Information we collect will be primarily stored in the United States with Fossil Group member companies and our service providers, see examples in the list in Section 3.6. To the extent permitted by applicable law, we also use and transfer Personal Information in and to other countries and territories. Your information may thus be subject to U.S. and foreign laws and accessible to U.S. and foreign governments, courts, law enforcement and regulatory agencies.

9. AGE REQUIREMENT AND CHILDREN'S ONLINE PRIVACY PROTECTION ACT ("COPPA")
We do not knowingly collect, maintain or use Personal Information about children under 16. Persons under the age of 16 may not use our website without supervision from a responsible adult. We will never request Personal Information from a child under 16 without verifiable parental consent. If we become aware that a child under 16 has sent Personal Information without prior parental consent, we will remove his or her Personal Information from our records.

10. WHAT HAPPENS IF WE CHANGE THIS PRIVACY NOTICE?
This Privacy Policy is effective as of the date provided above, and may be updated from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting a prominent notice on our website or by sending you an email. 

11. LINKS TO AND FROM OTHER WEBSITES
Whenever we provide links to other websites on our website, this is in the interest of our users and should be understood as a courtesy. Some pages to which we link and pages that link to our websites are not under our control. In such cases, we are neither responsible for the content of these pages nor for compliance with the applicable data protection regulations of those providers. We recommend that you carefully read the privacy statements of these third parties to learn how your Personal Information is stored, used or shared.

12. WHO ARE WE AND HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US?
Please address any questions, concerns, inquiries, complaints, and/or requests regarding our practices concerning Personal Information to Fossil at:

Fossil Group
Attention: Compliance Manager
Address: 901 S. Central Expressway
Richardson, TX 75080, USA

Telephone Number: +1 (800) 449-3056

You can also get in touch with our data protection team and the responsible data protection officer we designated in every case required by law per email using privacy@fossil.com.

This website is provided by Fossil Group, Inc., 901 S. Central Expressway, Richardson, TX 75080, USA, email: privacy@fossil.com.