Many of our services offered to you are based upon information obtained from a variety of applications and involve the collection of information about connected products and related services including, for example, location, operating conditions, and operator’s use. Your trust is essential to the success of our technologies and services. Our services leverage connected product data and related service data to provide actionable information that you can use to improve your operations and, ultimately, your profitability. We understand that you want to know how these equipment technologies and services can deliver benefits to you while respecting your information. These Connected Product Data and Related Service Data Information and Principles (“Data Principles”), together with Caterpillar’s Data Governance Statement (available at https://www.caterpillar.com/en/legal-notices/data-governance-statement.html ) explain Caterpillar’s information management guidelines for connected product data and related service data.

1.      We Respect Your Choices
When you make choices about your data preferences, such as through subscription services or hardware configuration, we will respect those choices.

2.      We Protect Your Data
Caterpillar is committed to maintaining and regularly improving the security measures that protect your data. Caterpillar implements organizational, technical, and administrative measures to protect collected data against loss and unauthorized access. If you have reason to believe that your data is no longer secure, please immediately notify us. 

Find out more about our connected solution security strategy and review our principles here.

3.      We Use Your Data to Create Value and Improve Products and Related Services for Our Customers
Our goal at Caterpillar is to provide value to our customers when we use data, for example: to improve safety; reduce cost of ownership; deliver superior services; drive product or service development; check and maintain product health; enhance product and operational performance; generate de-identified, aggregated and statistical data; conduct market research; and offer you new products or services. We recognize that the way data is used differs based on industry, region and your needs and accordingly, we may adopt specific strategies for treatment of data by products or services that reflect these needs.

4.      We are Transparent about How We Collect, Use, Store and Make Available Your Data

Caterpillar’s Data Governance Statement describes our practices for collecting and using connected product data and related service data. For example, we may share your data with our business partners to enable delivery of Caterpillar value added services and products to you, or engage third parties to process data on Caterpillar’s behalf. Regardless of who processes the data, Caterpillar will be responsible for your information.

Your information may also be used in benchmarking reports to allow comparisons across fleets/equipment data within an industry. Benchmarking reports will not include personally identifiable information.

Readily available product data and related service data is directly accessible to you via a free subscription on the VisionLink® platform or via other available means. If you need particular connected product data or related service data that is not readily available (additional data), please detail your request, and Caterpillar will explore the best approach. Certain data sets might require additional means in order to collect and provide.  You can request through your local dealer that we share the data with a third party designated by you. We may charge the third party a reasonable compensation for sharing the data with that third party which may include the cost of the technical means (such as an API) provided to the third party to access the data and, if the request is for data that is not readily available (additional data), the reasonable compensation may also include the direct costs associated with the processing of such data sharing request.

We make connected product data and related service data available in the structured, commonly used and machine-readable formats such as: csv, xls, json, xml.

Estimated volume of product data or related service data depends on the characteristics of operation and capability of the connected product or on the characteristics of a related service; such data volume is commonly in a range of 10KB - 60MB per day.   

Connected product data and related service data is generated continuously during the operation of the connected product or during the use of the related service, however discrete data sets are transmitted periodically.

Data storage location can be both/either on-device and on remote server.

Connected product data and related service data will be available to you in the VisionLink® platform, and to your authorized third parties via ISO 15143 API, for a period generally of 24 months (or as otherwise specified for other available means), although certain large files (such as videos) may be available for a shorter period. Caterpillar stores and retains connected product data and related service data as needed to accomplish the purposes for which it was collected and to meet legal, regulatory, accounting, or reporting requirements, including record retention. Details of retention periods for different product data and related service data are available in our data retention policy.  Retention may extend after the data is disassociated from you or anonymized. The storage period may extend beyond the term of your relationship with Caterpillar.