Privacy Policy

Your pri­vacy is crit­i­cally impor­tant to us.

• We won’t ask you for per­sonal infor­ma­tion unless it is absolutely needed. (We don’t like ser­vices that ask you for things like your gen­der or income level for no appar­ent reason.)
• We won’t share your per­sonal infor­ma­tion with any­one except to com­ply with the law, develop this site, or pro­tect our rights.
  This site won’t store per­sonal infor­ma­tion on servers unless required for the on-going oper­a­tion of one of the services.
• We aim to make it as sim­ple as pos­si­ble for you to con­trol what’s vis­i­ble to the pub­lic, seen by search engines, kept pri­vate, and per­ma­nently deleted.

If you have ques­tions about delet­ing or cor­rect­ing your per­sonal data please con­tact our sup­port team. It is our pol­icy to respect your pri­vacy about any infor­ma­tion we may col­lect while oper­at­ing our websites.

Below is our pri­vacy pol­icy which incor­po­rates these goals:

Website Visitors

Like most web­site oper­a­tors, sprks.com col­lects non-personally-identifying infor­ma­tion of the sort that web browsers and servers typ­i­cally make avail­able, such as the browser type, lan­guage pref­er­ence, refer­ring site, and the date and time of each vis­i­tor request. Our pur­pose in col­lect­ing non-personally iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion is to bet­ter under­stand how our vis­i­tors use our web­site. From time to time, sprks.com may release non-personally-identifying infor­ma­tion in the aggre­gate, e.g., by pub­lish­ing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

We also col­lect poten­tially personally-identifying infor­ma­tion like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leav­ing com­ments on this site. We only dis­close logged in user and com­menter IP addresses under the same cir­cum­stances that it uses and dis­closes personally-identifying infor­ma­tion as described below, except that blog com­menter IP addresses are vis­i­ble and dis­closed to the admin­is­tra­tors of the blog where the com­ment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain vis­i­tors to this web­site choose to inter­act with this site in ways that require us to gather personally-identifying infor­ma­tion. The amount and type of infor­ma­tion that we gather depends on the nature of the inter­ac­tion. Those who engage in trans­ac­tions with us may be are asked to pro­vide addi­tional infor­ma­tion, includ­ing as nec­es­sary the per­sonal and finan­cial infor­ma­tion required to process those trans­ac­tions. In each case, we col­lect such infor­ma­tion only inso­far as is nec­es­sary or appro­pri­ate to ful­fill the pur­pose of the visitor’s inter­ac­tion. We won’t dis­close personally-identifying infor­ma­tion other than as described below. And vis­i­tors can always refuse to sup­ply personally-identifying infor­ma­tion, with the caveat that it may pre­vent them from engag­ing in cer­tain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

We may col­lect sta­tis­tics about the behav­ior of vis­i­tors to its web­sites, such as which pages they vis­ited, but these will only be used inter­nally to improve per­for­mance of the site.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

We dis­close poten­tially personally-identifying and personally-identifying infor­ma­tion only to peo­ple that (i) need to know that infor­ma­tion in order to process it on our behalf or to pro­vide ser­vices avail­able at our web­sites, and (ii) that have agreed not to dis­close it to oth­ers. Some of those employ­ees, con­trac­tors and affil­i­ated orga­ni­za­tions may be located out­side of your home coun­try; by using our web­sites, you con­sent to the trans­fer of such infor­ma­tion to them. We won’t rent or sell poten­tially personally-identifying and personally-identifying infor­ma­tion to any­one. Other than to its employ­ees, con­trac­tors and affil­i­ated orga­ni­za­tions, as described above, we may dis­close poten­tially personally-identifying and personally-identifying infor­ma­tion only in response to a court order or other gov­ern­men­tal request, or when we believe in good faith that dis­clo­sure is rea­son­ably nec­es­sary to pro­tect our prop­erty or rights, third par­ties or the pub­lic at large. If you are a reg­is­tered user and have sup­plied your email address, we may occa­sion­ally send you an email to tell you about new fea­tures, solicit your feed­back, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on. We pri­mar­ily use our blogs to com­mu­ni­cate this type of infor­ma­tion, so we expect to keep this type of email to a min­i­mum. If you send us a request (for exam­ple via a sup­port email or via one of our feed­back mech­a­nisms), we reserve the right to pub­lish it in order to help us clar­ify or respond to your request or to help us sup­port other users. We take all mea­sures rea­son­ably nec­es­sary to pro­tect against the unau­tho­rized access, use, alter­ation or destruc­tion of poten­tially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of infor­ma­tion that a web­site stores on a visitor’s com­puter, and that the visitor’s browser pro­vides to the web­site each time the vis­i­tor returns. We use cook­ies to help us iden­tify and track vis­i­tors, their usage of our web­sites, and their web­site access pref­er­ences. Visitors who do not wish to have cook­ies placed on their com­put­ers should set their browsers to refuse cook­ies before using our web­sites, with the draw­back that cer­tain fea­tures of our web­sites may not func­tion prop­erly with­out the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If  our assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that we go out of busi­ness or enter bank­ruptcy, user infor­ma­tion would be one of the assets that is trans­ferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowl­edge that such trans­fers may occur, and that any acquiror may con­tinue to use your per­sonal infor­ma­tion as set forth in this policy.

Ads

Ads appear­ing on any of our web­sites may be deliv­ered to users by adver­tis­ing part­ners, who may set cook­ies. These cook­ies allow the ad server to rec­og­nize your com­puter each time they send you an online adver­tise­ment to com­pile infor­ma­tion about you or oth­ers who use your com­puter. This infor­ma­tion allows ad net­works to, among other things, deliver tar­geted adver­tise­ments that they believe will be of most inter­est to you. This Privacy Policy cov­ers the use of cook­ies by us and does not cover the use of cook­ies by any advertisers.

Comments

Comments and other con­tent sub­mit­ted to our anti-spam ser­vice are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false pos­i­tives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the ser­vice to avoid future false positives.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time, and at our sole dis­cre­tion. We encour­age vis­i­tors to check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your con­tin­ued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will con­sti­tute your accep­tance of such change.

Thanks to Automattic.com for cre­at­ing this pri­vacy pol­icy under the Creative Commons License.

Change log:

11th June 2011: Privacy Policy pub­lished on sprks.com