Your privacy is critically important to us. At Free Expressions we have a few fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.
• In our blogging products, 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.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals: (Note, we’ve decided to make this privacy policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you, and if you want we’d appreciate a link to Free Expressions somewhere on your site. We spent a lot of money and time on the below, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.)

It is Free Expressions’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Free Expressions 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. Free Expressions’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Free Expressions’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Free Expressions may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Free Expressions also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on Free Expressions blogs. Free Expressions only discloses 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 Free Expressions’s websites choose to interact with Free Expressions in ways that require Free Expressions to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Free Expressions gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. Those who engage in transactions with Free Expressions are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Free Expressions collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Free Expressions. Free Expressions does not 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

Free Expressions may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. Free Expressions may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Free Expressions does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Free Expressions discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Free Expressions’s behalf or to provide services available at Free Expressions’s 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 Free Expressions’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Free Expressions will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Free Expressions discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Free Expressions believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Free Expressions, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Free Expressions website and have supplied your email address, Free Expressions 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 with Free Expressions and our products. We primarily use our various product 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. Free Expressions takes 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. Free Expressions uses cookies to help Free Expressions identify and track visitors, their usage of Free Expressions website, and their website access preferences. Free Expressions visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Free Expressions’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Free Expressions’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

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 Free Expressions and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Free Expressions may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Free Expressions’s sole discretion. Free Expressions encourages visitors to frequently 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.