Careers

Privacy Policy

Sony Honda Mobility Inc.
Latest Update: October 30, 2024

Sony Honda Mobility Inc. and its affiliates (collectively, “we” or “us”) recognize the importance of the personal information of our customers, business partners, and any other stakeholders (collectively, “customers” or “you”). This privacy policy (“Policy”) explains how we collect and process your personal information.

We process your personal information in accordance with applicable laws and this Policy and are committed to protecting your personal information.

Any website you access from our website is independent from us. Our website and services may contain links to other unaffiliated websites or mobile applications. Additionally, other websites or mobile applications may contain links to our services. When you access these third-party sites and services, you leave our site, and we are not responsible for and do not control the content, security, or privacy practices employed by these websites and services. This Policy does not apply to such other websites or mobile applications; please refer to the privacy notices for such third parties for information about how they collect, use, and process your personal information. We do not review or monitor the websites linked to our website or services and are not responsible for the contents, terms of use, or privacy policies related to any other websites or mobile applications. You should check the privacy policies applicable to those websites before you use them.

Who processes your personal information

Sony Honda Mobility Inc. and its affiliates collect and process your personal information.

Please see here for the corporate information of Sony Honda Mobility Inc. including its address and representative persons.

Collection of your information

We collect your information through our business directly from you when you provide it to us, automatically when you visit or use our website and services, from third parties or from other sources. Such information may include the following:

  • Information provided by you
    This may include your name, postal address, telephone number, e-mail address and inquiries, requests, and comments received from you.
  • Information collected automatically
    This may include your IP address, location information, device information, an advertising ID, your browsing history and other online activities and service usage details.
  • Information collected from third parties
    We may receive your personal information, information about how you access and use our website or services (e.g., access frequency, the pages you view, the links you click); information about your browser and information about the device(s) you use to access the website, browser type, analytics data, or use third-party analytics tools, and non-personal information from various third parties (which may include our Group Companies, service providers and business partners) when you have consented for them to disclose it to us or otherwise the disclosure is allowed under applicable laws.
  • Publicly available information

Finally, we may collect data that is not identifiable to you or otherwise associated with you, such as aggregated data, and this is not personal information. To the extent this information is stored or associated with your personal information, we will process it as personal information; otherwise, it is not subject to this Policy.

Our data collecting vehicles which are equipped with cameras and sensors collect driving environment data (“Driving Environment Data”) when driving on public roads. The Driving Environment Data may include images of pedestrians and vehicles with license plates. We take reasonable measures to maintain and use the Driving Environment Data in deidentified form, and not to attempt to reidentify the information except where the applicable laws permit us to do so.

Processing purposes

We may use and process your information for business and commercial purposes in accordance with applicable law for activities, including the following:

  • Sell or provide you with our products and services
  • Enhance the quality of, improve and optimize our products and services
  • Develop, plan and research our products and services
  • Conduct research (including customer surveys) and analysis for product/service improvement and development purposes
  • Conduct marketing and promotional activities, including:
    • Send you materials on our products and services
    • Conduct and communicate with you about contests, sweepstakes, campaigns, events and exhibitions
    • Research, analysis, and other use of your information for marketing purposes (including analysis of attribute information of website users, displaying or sending optimized contents, advertisements or messages which include targeting advertising, and creation of statistical information)
  • Manage billing and payment relating to our business
  • Provide customer support including after-sales services
  • Respond to your requests and inquiries
  • Detect and prevent unlawful activities, breaches of terms and conditions and other unfair practices
  • IR (Investor Relations) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) activities
  • Comply with applicable laws and respond to government and law enforcement requests
  • Fulfill other purposes of which we publish or notify you when we collect your personal information

Disclosure of your information

We do not sell your personal information. However, we may disclose your personal information to third parties including our Group Companies and third party service providers as described in this section.

  • Group Companies
    Your personal information may be shared with Sony Group Corporation, Honda Motor Co., Ltd. and their subsidiaries (collectively, “Group Companies”) for the purposes described in the “Processing purposes” section of this Policy. In such case, we will separately notify or publish the necessary information on the data sharing if it is required under applicable laws through a privacy policy, terms of use, or similar documents for each applicable product or service.
  • Our service providers
    We engage third party service providers to the extent necessary for fulfilling the processing purposes set forth in this Policy. In such case, we require these service providers to properly handle your personal information provided by us through contracts, and we exercise necessary and appropriate supervision over their data processing.
  • Business transfer
    If we sell or transfer a portion of or all our business to a third party, your personal information may be transferred by us to the purchasing or acquiring entity as part of the transaction. If we transfer your personal information to a purchasing or acquiring entity upon such transaction, you will be duly informed of that.
  • Legal purposes
    We may retain, use and/or disclose any of your personal information as required or permitted by law, regulation or order, including to government bodies and law enforcement agencies, to investigate complaints made by or against you, prevent fraud, comply with the law, meet a reasonable request from such bodies or protect or defend ourselves, or others, against illegal, criminal or harmful activities.

Your rights

Depending on applicable data protection and privacy laws, you may be entitled to a variety of legal rights regarding the collection and processing of your personal information. Individual rights may vary depending on the laws of the jurisdiction applicable to you, but may include:

  • Right to know whether, and for what purposes and from what source, we collect and/or process your personal information
  • Right to know with whom we have shared your personal information, for what purpose, and what personal information has been shared
  • Right to access personal information
  • Right to correct, update and delete personal information
  • Right to object to (a) use of personal information and (b) transfer of personal information to third parties
  • Right to request disclosure of records of data transfers
  • Right to appeal against the decisions we make regarding the processing of your personal information; you may exercise this right be replying to the correspondence you receive from us, or by contacting us via https://shm-afeela.com/en/contact/.

For U.S. individuals, please note the following:

  • Exercising Your Rights: When you submit a request to exercise your rights, not all of the rights listed above may be conferred upon you by your state’s privacy regulations.
  • Right to appeal: Residents of certain U.S. States have the right to appeal a decision we made with respect of your privacy rights. To appeal a decision, please contact us via https://shm-afeela.com/en/contact/ with details of your original request and appeal.

Additionally, if you reside in the United States in the state of California, please visit our Notice to California Consumers for additional information about your rights.

If you would like to exercise your rights set out in this section, please contact us at https://shm-afeela.com/en/contact/. We will respond to your request in accordance with applicable laws. Note, however, that we may request certain reasonable additional information (that may include personal information) to help us authenticate your identity, your request, and/or to clarify or understand the scope of such requests.

You also have choices about how we communicate with you and how we process certain personal information about you. You may opt-out of receiving marketing or other communications from us at any time by following the opt-out link or unsubscribe information in correspondence you receive from us. If you opt-out of receiving email from us or otherwise modify the nature or frequency of promotional communications, it may take some time for us to process your request and you may continue to receive promotional communications from us during that period. You will continue to receive administrative messages regarding our services, or transactions you have entered with us, even after opting out of promotional communications.

Note our websites do not take any action in response to “do not track” signals that may be transmitted by some web browsers. Third-party advertising networks are not permitted to collect information about our users.

International Data Transfers

Your personal information may be transferred to countries or regions outside your country that do not provide the same level of data protection as that in your country (such as U.S. and Japan). We will take all reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is transferred securely and in a manner that complies with applicable data protection laws and this Policy, including entering into an appropriate contract with a data recipient.

Security measures

We have implemented necessary and appropriate security measures to safeguard your personal information which include: establishing internal regulations to prevent loss, alteration or leakage of personal information we collect; appointment of a responsible person in each department that handles personal information; taking security measures in accordance with our internal regulations; providing privacy education to our employees; taking controls to prevent theft and loss of devices that handle personal information; implementing access controls; supervising and monitoring service providers which process personal information for us.

Retention periods

We may retain your personal information collected under this Policy only as long as it is necessary for us to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Policy. Your information will be further retained as long as required by applicable laws or to the extent we have a legitimate and lawful purpose to do so.

Cookies and similar technologies

The technologies used on our website to collect usage information, including device identifiers, may include:

Cookies: A “cookie” is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store on your device to remember information about you, such as your language preference. Cookies that are set by us are called first-party cookies. Our website may also use third-party cookies, which are cookies set by an organization other than us, and these are typically used to support our advertising and marketing efforts. We cannot control the storage or access to these cookies. You should review the privacy and cookie policies of these services to find out how these third parties use cookies and where your cookie data is stored and processed. For more information about cookies, including how you can control their use, please review “Cookie Policy”.

Web Beacons. A “web beacon” (also known as image tag, pixel tag, clear GIF or web bug) is a small piece of code used to collect advertising data, such as counting page views, promotion views or advertising responses. Web beacons or similar technologies may be used for various purposes, including to count visitors to our website and to monitor how users navigate our website.

Embedded Scripts. An “embedded script” is programming code that is designed to collect information about your interactions with our website, such as the links you click on. The code is temporarily downloaded onto your device from our server or a third-party service provider, is active only while you are connected to our website, and is deactivated or deleted thereafter.

Our website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics uses cookies to help the website analyze how users use the website. You may opt-out of the use of cookies by Google Analytics at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/. For more information regarding how Google collects, uses and shares your information please visit http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

Contact information

If you have any questions or comments about our privacy practices or about this Policy, or you wish to exercise your rights described in this Policy, please contact us through the link below.

https://shm-afeela.com/en/contact/

Changes to this Policy

We reserve the right to change this Policy at any time, without prior notice to you, and any changes of this Policy will be notified to you or published on our website.

Addendum: Notice to California Consumers


If you reside in the United States in the state of California, we are required by California law to provide you with additional information about how we use and disclose your information, and you may have additional rights with regard to how we use your information. We have included this California-specific information below.

CA Personal Information

Consistent with the "Collection of your information" section above, we collect certain categories and specific pieces of information about individuals that are considered "Personal Information" in California ("CA Personal Information"). Specifically, we may collect the following types of CA Personal Information:

  • Identifiers: name, address, telephone number, email address, age, date of birth, IP address;
  • Commercial information: products or services purchased, obtained or considered, other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies, payment information, transaction history;
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information: computer and connection information, advertising ID, browsing history, traffic to and from websites, ad data and other standard weblog information, and other online activity usage details;
  • Financial Information: payment and billing information;
  • Geolocation information: physical location information through the use of our website, services and/or products; and
  • Inferences from the information we collect.

We do not knowingly collect CA Personal Information of individuals under 16 years of age.

Sources

We collect certain categories of CA Personal Information directly from you and other third parties as described in the "Collection of your information" section above. The categories of third parties from whom we collect CA Personal Information include the following:

  • Third-parties, including our service providers, business partners and third-party application providers;
  • Advertising networks; and
  • Other companies and organizations, such as market research firms and data aggregators.

Purposes of use

We use CA Personal Information for the following purposes:

  • Business purposes, including:
    • To sell and provide our products and services;
    • To enhance the quality and functionality of our products and services;
    • To develop, plan, and research our products and services;
    • To conduct research and analysis for our products and to ensure service improvement;
    • To process your registration on our website, or entry into a competition, prize draw or contest;
    • To send you information about changes to our terms or policies and other transactional messages;
    • To process your payment and fulfil your purchased product or service;
    • To provide you with access to our content and services;
    • To provide you with customer support;
    • To send you information you have requested;
    • To ensure the security of our sites and apps, by detecting and preventing unauthorized or malicious activities;
    • To ensure compliance with our policies and applicable laws.
  • Commercial purposes, including:
    • Advertising, marketing, and public relations (including direct marketing);
    • To tailor our content, advertisements and offers for you;
    • To permit your participation in contests, sweepstakes and other promotions, for marketing purposes;
    • To contact you with special offers and other information we believe will be of interest to you;
    • To invite you to participate in surveys and provide feedback to us;
    • To better understand your needs and interests; and
    • To improve our marketing and promotional efforts.

Retention of CA Personal Information

We typically retain CA Personal Information for no longer than for the period necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy and as otherwise needed to address tax, corporate, compliance, litigation, and other legal rights and obligations.

California Consumer Rights

Subject to certain exceptions, as a California resident, you have the right to request: (i) deletion of your CA Personal Information; (ii) correction of inaccurate CA Personal Information; (iii) the right to know/ access the categories of CA Personal Information that we collect about you, including the specific pieces of CA Personal Information; (iv) the categories of CA Personal Information disclosed for a business purpose; and (v) information about the categories of CA Personal Information about you that we have shared and the categories of third parties to whom the CA Personal Information was shared.

  • Exercising your rights. If you are a California resident and wish to request the exercise of your rights as detailed above or have questions regarding the CA Personal Information collected or shared with third parties, please contact us through https://shm-afeela.com/en/contact/ or by email at Privacy-Contact@sony-honda-mobility.com.
  • Exercising other California consumer rights. Should you wish to request the exercise of your other rights as detailed above with regard to your CA Personal Information, we will not discriminate against you by offering you different pricing or products, or by providing you with a different level or quality of products, based solely upon this request. You also have the option of designating an authorized agent to exercise your rights on your behalf. For authorized agents submitting requests on behalf of California residents, please contact us as described above, with any evidence you have that you have been authorized by a California consumer to submit a request on their behalf.
  • Global Privacy Control. In addition, we have configured our cookie management tool to honor opt-out preference signals sent by Global Privacy Control ("GPC") within the browser used to access our website, services and/or products. Due to technical limitations, the GPC signal is only honored within the particular browser.

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

We “sell” and “share” your CA Personal Information through the use of certain third party tools, including those relating to analytics and advertising. Specifically, we make available certain of your online identifiers and other persistent online identifiers with advertising, analytics and marketing partners that may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of your CA Personal Information, as defined under California law. We don’t sell or share the CA Personal Information of any California resident who is 16 years or younger.

California residents have the right to opt-out of the selling or sharing of their CA Personal Information, as such term is defined under California Privacy Law. This includes the right to opt-out of analytical/performance, functional, and targeting cookies. To exercise this right, click here.

Financial Incentives

If we engage in a financial incentive program, we will provide you with separate notice and obtain your consent.

Shine the Light

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, known as the “Shine the Light” law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us a list of what CA Personal Information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes in the preceding calendar year and the names and addresses of those third parties. Requests may be made only once per year per person, must be sent to Privacy-Contact@sony-honda-mobility.com, and are free of charge.