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Privacy Policy

Summary

In short, we collect information for the following purposes:

  • To display publicly, because that’s the whole point of a public forum

  • To help us understand how the site is being used, so that we can make it better for you

  • To assist with moderation, because nobody wants the site to be filled with spam and abuse

  • If you opt in, to send you updates about what Linus Media Group Inc is up to

 

We do not use information that we store to target advertisements, although advertisements may be targeted to you based on information collected by our advertisement partners on other websites.

 

We also do not share your information with third party companies, except where necessary to provide the services, as explained in section (3).

1. Definitions

This Privacy Policy covers how Linus Media Group Inc (“we” or “us”) collects information when you interact with websites, apps or other products (collectively, the “services”) that we operate, except those Services which provide a separate Privacy Policy.

For the purpose of this document, “Staff Member” refers to any employee of Linus Media Group Inc, and its subsidiaries or related companies, as well as any authorized forum moderator or administrator.

2. Information We Collect

Information You Provide

  • Information provided to create your account, including your email address and username, is required to be able to provide you with the services associated with an account. For example, we require an email address so that we can send password reset emails.
    This information may be shared with third parties when you register your account to check it against a database of known spammers; if your account later posts spam we may share this with the third party so that they can update their database.
    If you give us consent to do so, we may also use your email address to send marketing emails, such as notifying you of a new service or YouTube channel.
    You can update your username and email address in your account settings.

     

  • Information that you submit while using the services, such as forum posts, profile information, attachments and personal messages are displayed on the site. All information that you submit, except personal messages or where explicitly stated, may be publicly displayed on the site, and will be associated with your username. As the information is displayed publicly, we cannot control what third parties do with the information. In particular, you must only submit personal information if you accept that it may become permanently shared with the public.
    Personal messages are visible to the participants of the conversation. They may also be accessed by a Staff Member if they have a reason to do so, such as if the post is reported by one of the participants.
    You can edit content that you have submitted by clicking the edit button associated with that content. We would prefer that content is not deleted, so that it can help other people in future, but if you would like your own content deleted you can request it by clicking the report button associated with that content.

  • Information provided when purchasing goods or services from us, such as your legal name and billing address, may be shared with third party payment processors such as PayPal to facilitate your transaction, and will be used according to the privacy policy of that payment provider. We also store this information to provide you with the goods or services if required, and to simplify the checkout process for you in future.

Information We Collect Automatically

  • Information about the requests that you make, such as the requested URL and the referring URL, including query strings but excluding request bodies. This information is only accessible to authorized staff members, and is used for troubleshooting, identifying abuse and improving the site. Unless we need to keep an excerpt of the data to debug an issue further or to help us track down or eliminate abuse of the services, we delete these logs within 30 days.

  • Information about your browser, such as IP addresses and user agent strings. If you are not logged into the site, this information is held in the same way as the information about requests that you make. For logged in members, we additionally store information about the IP addresses and browsers that you use for the purpose of identifying users who are violating our Terms of Service, such as by creating additional accounts after having been banned from the site.

  • Location information, derived from your IP address, may be used to personalise your experience, such as by allowing us to pre-fill the country field during the checkout process.

  • Information from Cookies, such as the account that you are currently logged into or your timezone, is used to personalise your experience on the site. You can get more information about the cookies that we use, and how to opt out, in our Cookie Policy.

Information We Receive From Other Sources

  • Information received when you sign in with a third party service is specified by the third party when you connect your account, but may include your email address and name. Your email address is used as described in information provided to create your account, while your name, if available to us, is used to automatically fill in the username field.

3. Information We Share

We do not sell, trade or rent your information to any third parties. However, in order to provide our services we have to share some of that information with third parties.

  • Cloudflare processes requests to our services before they reach our servers, to block malicious traffic and cache common resources to improve load times. As a result, Cloudflare has access to everything that is sent to our services, and this information is used in accordance with their Privacy Policy. At the time that this policy was last updated, they collect some information about the requests that you make in order to provide a better service, but they state that they will never sell your personal information, or use it for marketing.

  • IPS, Inc provides a spam protection service, to which we may send your email address and/or IP address when you register for our services to check whether they are associated with known spammers. This information is held according to their Privacy Policy.

 

We may also share information with subsidiaries or related companies of Linus Media Group Inc, in accordance with this privacy policy.

 

If you consent, some information may also be disclosed to third party services that you connect with your forum account. The information that will be shared with the third party service will be clearly displayed on the consent dialog.

 

We reserve the right to share information that we collect with the appropriate law enforcement agencies, if we in good faith believe we are under legal obligation to do so or if we have reason to believe that failing to do so would endanger life or risk serious bodily harm. We may also share limited information, such as IP addresses, timestamps and post content, with the abuse contact associated with an IP address, or another party that we reasonably believe should be notified, in the event of abuse of our services or violations of local or Canadian law.

4. Third Party Content

This site may contain embedded content from other services, including (without limitation) YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. We do not share data with these services, but they may collect additional information about you, such as the videos that you watch which are embedded on this site but provided by their service. The data that they collect is governed by their respective privacy policies, and is not covered by this policy.

 

We use Google Analytics to help us analyse the use of our services, so that we can make them better. This information is stored in accordance with Google’s Privacy Policy. You can opt out of tracking by Google Analytics by installing their opt-out browser add-on.

 

To protect against spam, we may use Google’s reCAPTCHA to check whether you are a bot. Google may store cookies and usage data, in accordance with their Privacy Policy.

5. Children Under 13

To protect children under the age of 13 against the accidental sharing of personal information, we require visitors and members to be at least 13 years old in order to access or use our services, either as a guest or as a member.

6. Governing Laws

We are based in Canada, and your data is stored on our server in Canada, in accordance with Canadian data protection laws.

7. Deleting Your Information

If you would like an individual post removed, you can report it and a member of staff can remove it for you.

If you would like all information associated with your account removed, please contact a member of staff and they will sort it out for you. When your account is deleted, you can elect to leave the content that you have submitted publicly listed on the site, but dissociated from any account.

 

Before requesting the removal of your information, please consider whether the information may be useful to other visitors in future.

8. Requesting Your Information

If you would like to request all of the information associated with your account for data portability, please contact a staff member on the forum.

 

The privacy policy was last updated January 30, 2019.

 

Third Parties

Spam Defense
The IPS Spam Defense Service passes the email address and IP address of the registering member to the service to determine the likelihood a registering account is a spam source.
reCAPTCHA V2
This site uses a CAPTCHA to ensure humans are performing certain actions. The CAPTCHA provider may set a session cookie and get information about your internet browser and device accessing this website.
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