Privacy Policy
Why You Should Read this Privacy Policy
We respects your privacy and believes that individuals need to protect their personal information. For this reason individuals need to be informed about how information they provide to businesses about themselves is used.
Your email address
If you create a login account on this web site you will need to supply an email address. The email address that you provide will be used to send your initial password and later to send a replacement password if you forget yours. This allows us to validate all logins for the site.
If you opt to also receive a newsletter from us, the email you provide will be used for delivery of the newsletter. If you do decide to receive a newsletter from us you can be assured that it will really be from us and not from a "strategic marketing partner".
Your email address will not be displayed by this system to other users, nor will it be sold to another party for them to send you unsolicited email. In the event that we contract with another party to perform a service for us, such as distribution of a newsletter via email, then the email addresses of only those persons who requested the service will need to be provided to the party for that specific purpose.
Other personal information
You may optionally provide other information about yourself during user registration including, but not limited to your name, city, state, country, job title, biography, interests, and home page url. These fields are strictly optional and they will be visible to other users if you enter them. If you do not want this information to be publicly viewable then do not supply it during registration.
Any information you reveal about yourself in comments to articles or forum topics will be publicly viewable. Additionally, each article, forum topic and comment posted to this web site will be accompanied by a link to the author's profile page which displays any publicly viewable information provided during registration.
Information collected for payment
If you make purchases through our web site you will be required to provide your full name, address and telephone number along with your credit card or other payment information. Your name, billing address, phone number, and possibly shipping address will be maintained by us as part of your customer account record. Customer records are not publicly viewable. They are accessible only to authorized web site personnel.
Your credit card or other payment information along with your name, address and telephone number are given to the payment processing company when the transaction is processed.
To help reduce the probability of fraud in credit card transaction,the IP address for of the customer submitting the transaction is recorded and forward to the credit card processor along with the payment information. The IP address, the BIN for the institution issuing the credit card, and customer address are also submitted to a third party processor for pre-payment fraud screening.
Sale of company
If this web site is ever sold to another party, any information you provided to us will be among the assets transferred to the company or companies purchasing the web site.
Cookies and IP addresses
This web site uses a "session" cookie so you do not need to log in every time you visit this web site. The cookie does not contain any personal information by itself. It contains only an identifier string (a unique sequence of seemingly random characters) that is associated with your login for our web site. Please note that all business transactions on our web site will require login regardless of the presence of the "session" cookie.
This web site may also contain a second type of cookie that is used by our marketing affiliates. These cookies will contain data that only identifies our web site so that we may receive credit for referring you to their web site. The affiliate cookies do not contain any personally identifiable information about you.
Most actions that users take on this site cause the IP address of the user's system to be logged. This is done for many reasons. We do this is for problem determination debugging purposes, as well as to analyze traffic on our site to determine effectiveness of promotions. With the exception of the anti-fraud measures taken for payment transactions, the log analysis uses the data in aggregate to help us develop statistics about site usage, trends and usability.