Privacy Policy

We record visitor activity on our websites and collect personal information to enable us to provide and improve the services offered by our sites and products, and to facilitate communication with members. On websites with community features, we may also use personal information to facilitate communication between members.

No personally identifiable information that we collect will ever be disclosed to any third party without your explicit approval, except as described in this policy, unless required by law.

We collect information that your browser sends us whenever you visit our websites ("Log Data").

This Log Data may include information such as your computer's Internet Protocol ("IP") address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Site that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.

Collection of such data is necessary for us to be able to maintain website security. It may also be used to analyze usage of the site, to fix broken features, and improve visitor experience.

Cookies are small bits of data, which may include a unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a web site and stored on your computer's hard drive. When you load subsequent pages from the same website, your browser sends the same information back to the server from which it came.

No cookies used by our websites contain sensitive information. Some cookies contain numbers that are used internally to identify you.

You may turn on and off the use of some cookies on our websites using forms found on some of our webpages, or on the "Consent" tab in some of our websites' profile editors. Also, you may be able to use your web browser's settings to refuse all cookies, to refuse cookies from specific sites, or to alert you when a cookie is being sent.

Our sites use the following types of cookies:

• Essential Cookies: These cookies are required for the basic operation and security of our websites. For example, in most places where you are able to sign into our websites, a cookie is used to tell the server who you are signed in as in order to give you the proper level of access. Essential cookies cannot be turned off, and blocking them will prevent access to some features of our websites.
• Functionality Cookies: These cookies are necessary to give you access to some features of our websites, but are not essential to its core operations. You can turn them off, but some features will not function fully without them.
• Statistics Cookies: These cookies are used to collect anonymous data to help us understand how visitors interact with our websites. They may be turned off, but doing so will reduce our ability to respond to visitor's needs and interests, and improve how our websites work. Statistics cookies may be set by and sent to third parties such as Google Analytics.
• Social Cookies: These cookies are sometimes set by and sent to social media websites such as Facebook when their functionality is integrated into a website. They may be used by social networks the same way we use the other types of cookies. You can turn them off, but some social features may not function properly without them.
• Marketing Cookies: These cookies are set by and sent to advertising networks such as Google AdSense to tailor advertisements to individual visitors' interests. You can turn them off, but any ads you see on our sites may be more generic and less likely to be of interest to you.

On any of our sites that display user profiles, on the profile editing page, we collect information that may be displayed on public profile pages. The privacy level for each piece of information (eg. public, visible only to signed-in members, visible only to site administrators) is clearly indicated on the editing screen, and you can control the privacy level for many items.

Email addresses are always kept private. On websites where profile pictures are displayed (on profiles, in forums, in blog comments, etc.), your email address may be indirectly used to attempt to load your Gravatar, whether you have one or not. This is done by computing a "secure hash" of your email address, which is an 32 character long string of text, essentially unique to your email address, but which cannot be converted back to your email address without using a ridiculous amount of computing power (ie. if someone wanted to figure out your email address, reverse engineering the hash would be essentially impossible for most people, and even for those who could do it, it would almost certainly be far more difficult than finding it some other way.) Your email address itself is never revealed.

You may edit or remove Profile Information, or change your privacy settings at any time. Changes that you make will be reflected immediately on our websites. However, any public profile information that has been accessed by third parties may continue to be stored by them.

Emails we send you may contain special links to enable us to determine who has opened our emails (by seeing who loaded any images in the email) and who has clicked any links in the email. This data may be used to help us send less emails to people who do not appear to be interested in particular topics, and to improve the quality of our communications.

You may opt out of open and click tracking on the "Consent" tab of some of our websites' profile editors. If you do, emails sent to you will still contain tracking links, but we will not store any data obtained from them in systems used to analyze click data. The information will still be stored temporarily in log files, and will only be used in the extremely rare event that it is necessary for security purposes.

Some of our websites offer you the opportunity to post information such as blog comments, forum posts, etc. The content you post may be publicly displayed, possibly along with your name and photograph or Gravatar and a link to your profile page, on our websites.

You may request all information about you that we have stored by using our contact form.

You may request the correction of any inaccurate information.

You may request the deletion of any or all information we have about you. You will be able to delete most of this yourself using the profile/account editor on many of our sites. To have any other information deleted, use our contact form.

If you are located in the European Union, you have the right to complain to your country's data protection authority if you believe your rights have been infringed.

The security of your Personal Information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. While we use industry standard methods such as encryption and access controls to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

We use analytics tools and other third party technologies, such as Google Analytics and DoubleClick Cookies, to collect non-personal information in the form of various usage and user metrics when you use our online Sites and/or Services. These tools and technologies collect and analyze certain types of information, including cookies, IP addresses, device and software identifiers, referring and exit URLs, onsite behavior and usage information, feature use metrics and statistics, usage and purchase history, MAC Address, mobile unique device ID, and other similar information.

The third party analytics companies who collect information on our Sites and/or Services and other online products and/or services may combine the information collected with other information they have independently collected from other websites and/or other online or mobile products and services relating to your activities across their network of websites as well as online and/or mobile products and services. Many of these companies collect and use information under their own privacy policies.

In addition to our use of technologies as described herein, we may permit certain third party companies to help us tailor advertising that we think may be of interest to you based on your use of our sites and/or services and to otherwise collect and use data about your use of our sites and/or services. For more information about this practice, please see the "Third Party Advertising Technologies" section below.

How to opt out of Google advertising. How to opt out of Google Analytics. How to opt out of Facebook tracking.

Google has additional information available about their Remarketing Privacy Guidelines, and Restrictions.

You may view a list of other third party service providers who collect information, and/or opt-out of such collection of information about you, by visiting http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ or http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.

In addition to using cookies and related technologies as described above, we also may permit certain third party companies to help us tailor advertising that we think may be of interest to users and to collect and use other data about user activities on our Sites and/or Services (e.g., to allow them to tailor ads on third party services). These companies may deliver ads that might also place cookies and otherwise track user behavior. These companies may use information about user behavior in order to provide customized advertisements across various services and products. In the course of providing these services, products or placing advertisements, these third party companies may place or recognize a unique cookie on your computer, and may record information to these cookies based upon your activities on any of our Sites and/or Services and on third party websites. Each of these companies uses this cookie information according to their own privacy and security policies. If you wish to not have this information used for the purpose of serving you targeted ads, you may opt-out as indicated in this Policy. Please note this does not opt you out of being delivered advertising. You will continue to receive generic ads.

We do not have a specific data retention period. Log Data is deleted occasionally when it is old enough that we no longer expect it to be useful for auditing any issues that it is used for. Profile Information and any content that you submit is generally retained until you delete it or request that it be deleted.

We are located in the United States of America, as are our webservers. Data collected by third parties (such as third party cookies) may be transmitted to and stored in other countries.

We do not knowingly seek or collect Personal Information from anyone under the age of 13.

This Privacy Policy is effective as of the date displayed above, and will remain in effect except with respect to any changes in its provisions in the future, which will be in effect immediately after being posted on this page.