Privacy policy

At the same time that we are committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs, we recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information collected about you, our customers and prospects. In adopting this customer privacy policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using information with your reasonable expectations of privacy.

We do not collect personally identifying information about individuals, except when specifically and knowingly provided by such individuals. We collect user-submitted personal information, including name, e-mail address, and birth date, in order to verify new accounts and send notifications regarding the Service. We also collect additional data that is included in Member profiles, including without limitation: occupation, interests, school affiliations, gender, and location. This additional data may be available to other Members and/or the general public for viewing. All Member accounts are password-protected. We go to great lengths to protect the account information that you have provided us. Access to this information is limited to only persons who need it in order to perform their task, such as site administrators and webmasters. However, please note that we do not guarantee account security. Hardware or software failure, unauthorized use, and other factors may lead to a security breach. For example: Our hosting provider makes copies of this information regularly for backup purposes, and we have no direct control over those copies.

Web servers serving this Site automatically collect information about which pages each user visits, which browser they use, and the domain name and/or IP address of visitors. This is used for internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors and for traffic audits. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers. Any personally identifiable information provided by you as part of an advertiser promotion online (i.e. online coupons) may be provided directly to advertisers.

We may place a cookie on the browser of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain any personally identifying information. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as delivery of ads, so we can customize delivery of information without compromising privacy. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don't see the same ad too many times in a single session. We also may include a file called a web beacon in our pages. Web beacons, are used in combination with cookies to help people running websites to understand the behaviour of their visitors. A web beacon is typically a transparent graphic image (usually 1 pixel x 1 pixel) that is placed on webpage. The use of a web beacon allows the Site to record the simple actions of the user opening the page that contains the beacon. In general, any file served as part of a web page, including an ad banner, can act as a web beacon.

We also allow ad networks, to serve advertisements within our web pages. Ad networks include third party ad servers, ad agencies, ad technology vendors and research firms. We may also include a web beacon from these ad networks within our pages so the networks may provide auditing, research and reporting for advertisers Because your web browser must request these advertisements and web beacons from the ad network's servers, these companies can view, edit or set their own cookies just as if you had requested a web page from their site. We do not control the privacy policies of our business partners, advertisers, sponsors or other sites to which we provide hyperlinks. We strongly suggest that you review their privacy policies to find out how they treat your personal information.

A user's personally identifiable information (e.g., name, e-mail address) may be used by us for editorial purposes. For example, we may use information provided by you to us as part of an editorial online survey. If we run competitions or contests on the site, you may be required to provide information such as your telephone number and address in order to participate. The exact rules may vary in each case but the specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used. We also may use personally identifiable information for marketing and promotional purposes. We may send you e-mails about our products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies.

Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, user's personally identifiable information will not be transferred to any third party other than our partners providing Internet hosting services or third party list managers unless stated at the time of collection. If you do not wish to receive any e-mail or to have us share such information with another party, you may "opt out" at any time by e-mailing us or contacting us by regular mail.

You should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.

If you are under age you must ask your parents for permission before sending any information about yourself, such as like your name, address, or e-mail address, over the Internet, to us or to anyone else and before making any purchases online. We encourage parents to get involved with their children's online usage and to be aware of the activities in which they are participating. Parents should be aware that if children voluntarily disclose information such as their names or e-mail addresses on various forums or chat areas, such disclosures may result in unsolicited messages from other parties. We do not collect or maintain information on the Service from users whom we actually know to be under 13 years of age.

Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.