Privacy Policy

1. Introductory Statement

Thank you for visiting Spanatix.com, an Spanatix, Inc. (“Spanatix”) website. Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy, we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used at this Spanatix site.

By accepting this Privacy Policy and our Terms and Conditions of Use (“Terms of Use”), you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in the manner described in this privacy policy. This privacy policy is incorporated into and subject to the Terms of Use. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use or visit our website.

Spanatix, Inc. (“Spanatix”, “we”, “us”), which owns and operates the spanatix.com web site (our “Site”), has created this privacy policy as part of our commitment to helping our users better understand what information we collect about them and what we may do with that information. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for our Site.

We understand the concerns that you may have about your privacy and respect your right to protect your personal information while online. As part of the normal operation of our Site, we collect and, in some cases, may disclose information about you. Accordingly, by submitting photographs, stories, and/or any personal information or editorial material, you thereby waive any privacy expectations you have with respect to our use of your likeness or personal or editorial information provided to us in connection with the Site. If you do not wish to have such pictures or information that you provided viewed by or disclosed to other users, do not use our Site.

2. A Special Note About Minors

Minors under the age 18 are not eligible to use our Site without the consent of their parent or guardian. We ask that minors (under the age of 18) not submit any personal information to us. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under the age of 18.

3. Information We Collect

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you with a smooth, efficient and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features and to customize our Site to make your experience better.

We collect two types of information: personally identifiable information (PII) and non-personally identifiable information (Non-PII), which is also referred to as aggregate and anonymous data. We collect this information in a variety of ways through the features provided on our Sites, such as registration, when you communicate or otherwise interact with us, contests or promotions, or when you purchase a product or service through our Site. Providing us with PII is your choice, and you can always choose not to provide certain information, but then you may not be able to take advantage of some of the Site’s features.

(a) Personally Identifiable Information

PII is data used to identify, contact or locate a person, including name, address, telephone number, email address, fax number, credit card information, and information about your interests in and use of various products, programs, and services.

(b) Non-Personally Identifiable Information

Non-PII is information that is anonymous or not linked to a particular person such as your Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, type of web browser, operating system, site entry/exit pages, date/time stamp, clickstream data, and the domain name of your Internet Service Provider.

(c) User Profiles

You agree that we may feature your public profile information in, among other places, editorials and newsletters that we may periodically post elsewhere on the Site or send out to our users. Your non-public profile information including real name, email address, postal address and telephone number are confidential and will not be posted by us in your profile or used in any editorial or newsletter feature. The Terms of Use prohibit you from including such information in your profile. Your profile is available for view on our Site, by both registered users and anonymous visitors who view our Site. Users’ profiles include a description, photos, likes and dislikes, individual essays, and other information helpful in rating and communicating with that user. Your viewable profile does not include any identifying information about you, except the photo(s) you choose to submit and the username you chose upon registering.

(d) Use of Cookies

We use data collection and persistence devices such as “cookies” on certain pages of our Site for practical purposes. “Cookies” are small files placed in memory and/or disk on your computer that assist us in providing customized services and better functionality as you move from page to page within our Site. Cookies make the personalization of your Internet experiences possible. Cookies, by themselves, do not tell us your e-mail address or other personally identifiable information unless you choose to provide this information to us by, for example, registering at one of our sites. However, once you choose to furnish the Site with personally identifiable information, this information may be linked to the data stored in the cookie. For example, without the use of cookie files, it would be virtually impossible for us to remember your username and password as you click from page to page and you would need to log-in over and over again as you interact with pages of site that need to know who you are what actions you have taken in previous pages of a session. We also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a cookie. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits; however, many aspects of our Site may not work properly without them.

Web Beacons and Web Bugs

Generally, a web beacon consists of a small string of software code that represents a graphic image request on a Web page in an email message. There may or may not be a visible graphic image associated with the web beacon and often the image is designed to blend into the background of a Web page or email. Web beacons can be used for many purposes – including site traffic reporting, unique visitor counts, advertising auditing and reporting, and personalization. The web beacons on our Site collect only Non-PII or anonymous data. We may use web beacons to do the following: count users who have visited specific pages or access certain cookies; monitor traffic and conversion patterns through our various product and other offerings on our Site; personalize your experience when you visit our Site, including the advertising content you see; and determine whether or not messages were opened, links were clicked or notifications/offers were acted upon.

4. Information You Provide About Yourself While Using our Site

We provide areas on our Site where you can post information about yourself and others and communicate with others or upload content such as photographs and editorial material. Such postings are governed by our Terms of Use. In addition, such postings may appear on other websites or when searches are executed on the subject of your posting. Also, whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information on publicly viewable web pages, that information will be publicly available and can be collected and used by others. For example, if you post your email address, you may receive unsolicited messages. We cannot control who reads your posting or what other users may do with the information you voluntarily post, so we encourage you to exercise discretion and caution with respect to your personal information.

5. Our Use of Your Information

We use information in the files we maintain about you, and the other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site, to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our Terms of Use. At times, we may review the data of multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes.

You agree that we may use PII to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze Site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize our Site’s content, layout, and services. These uses improve our Site and may better tailor it to meet your needs.

You agree that we may use your information to contact you and to deliver information to you regarding your account, administrative notices, newsletters and/or alerts for which you have opted-in and may cancel at any time, product offerings and communications relevant to your use of the Site. We collect all email addresses that you provide to us, and communicate with you via email in accordance with your preferences. When creating a user profile, you select the notifications that you wish to receive from us. For users that pay for our subscription service, we occasionally notify those users by email about account renewal dates, cancellations, changes in service or other operational concerns fundamental to the delivery of a high quality paid experience. We do not share your email address with any other users of our Site, including paid subscribers. While we may maintain a copy of your email address if you send us an unsolicited email inquiry, we will not alter the email notifications that you have selected.

If you do not wish to receive all of these communications, you may opt out of the receipt of certain communications when creating or editing your user profile or by clicking “unsubscribe” in any email communications from us. By accepting this Privacy Policy and not changing your notification preferences, you expressly agree to receive this information. To edit this information you can, at any time, log-in to your account and go to the “Edit Account Settings” section of the profile where each key type of personal information and opt-in is clearly displayed and easy to change. You can also learn more about opting out of these communications by reading the Frequently Asked Questions section of our online Help area.

We use your email address to deliver important service-related announcements. Example service-related announcements include: email verification during registration, requests for password reset, important security or server maintenance updates, software updates, upgrades, and new releases, or policy changes. These service-related announcements are considered a fundamental part of our web service, and users cannot opt-out of these email announcements.

In order to improve the experience for our users, we will offer you the ability to sign up for optional email communications, such as regular updates from our corporate website, or email alerts and newsletters for specific web guides. These communications are enhancements to our service and are entirely optional. We will ask for your consent before sending you promotional communications, and will make it easy for you to unsubscribe from these communications, either through the emails or though your member profile page.

Some of our features, such as the group blog and forum, allow you to communicate with other members by posting public messages. Please be aware that what you write in these public messages can be viewed, collected or used by anyone who visits our website. We are not responsible for any personally identifiable information that you submit or permit others to submit through public messages.

If you have consented to receive promotional materials (e.g., newsletters) or notifications from Spanatix, Spanatix may periodically use your email address to send you such materials related to the Spanatix Site, as applicable. If you want to stop receiving such materials from Spanatix, you can change your profile settings under “Account Settings,” or follow the unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of each email.

Spanatix employees, agents and contractors must have a business reason to obtain access to your PII. Spanatix may share your PII with those who help us manage or provide Site information activities (for example, message board administration, order fulfillment, statistical analyses, data processing), or with outside contractors, agents or sponsors who help us with the administration, judging and prize fulfillment aspects of contests, promotions and sweepstakes.

These outside contractors, agents or sponsors may temporarily store some information on their servers, but they may only use your PII to provide Spanatix with a specific service and not for any other purpose. Spanatix may also provide your PII to a third party in those instances where you have chosen to receive certain information and have been notified that the fulfillment of such a request requires the sharing of your PII. Spanatix also may share your PII with Affiliated Companies if it has a business reason to do so.

Spanatix sometimes may offer content (e.g., contests, sweepstakes, or promotions) that is sponsored by or co-branded with identified third parties. By virtue of these relationships, the third parties may obtain personally identifiable information that visitors voluntarily submit to participate in the site activity. Spanatix has no control over these third parties' use of this information. Spanatix will notify you at the time of requesting personally identifiable information if these third parties will obtain such information.

Spanatix may use a third party to present or serve the advertisements that you may see at its Web pages. These third party ad servers may use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies to help present such advertisements, and to help measure and research the advertisements' effectiveness. The use of these technologies by these third party ad servers is subject to their own privacy policies and is not covered by our privacy policy.

When a user who is located in the European Union chooses to post Profile Information that will be publicly disclosed, that user is responsible for ensuring that such information conforms to all local data protection laws. Spanatix is not responsible under the EU local data protection laws for user-posted information.

6. Our Disclosure of Your Information

Due to the regulatory environment in which we operate, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other PII will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this privacy policy. By way of example (without limiting any of the foregoing), we may be required to disclose information to the government, law enforcement agencies or third parties. Under certain circumstances, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your information that they collect from our Site. Accordingly, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not guarantee, and you should not expect, that your PII or private communications will always remain private.

As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any PII about you to any third party. However, the following describes some of the ways that your PII may be used or disclosed.

Financial Information

Under some circumstances we may require certain additional information, including but not limited to your credit card billing information. We use this financial information, including your name, address, and other information to bill you for use of our subscription services and products. By purchasing a subscription, making a purchase, or engaging in any other kind of activity or transaction that uses financial information on the Site, you consent to our providing of your financial information to our service providers and to such third parties as we determine necessary to support and process your activities and transactions, as well as to your credit card issuer for their purposes. These third parties may include the credit card companies and banking institutions used to process and support your transaction or activity. By purchasing, or registering for, or making reservations for products or services of third parties offered on the Site, or by participating in programs offered on the Site that are administered by third parties and that require you to submit financial information in order to use them, you also consent to our providing your financial information to those third parties. Any of these various third parties may be authorized to use your financial information in accordance with our contractual arrangements with such third parties and in accordance with their own privacy policies, over which we have no control, and you agree that we are not responsible or liable for any of their actions or omissions. Additionally, you agree that we may use and disclose all information submitted to such third parties in the same manner in which we are entitled to use and disclose any other information that you submit to us.

Advertisers

We may aggregate (gather up data across multiple users’ accounts) PII and disclose such information in a non-personally identifiable manner to advertisers and other third parties for marketing and promotional purposes. However, in these situations, we would not disclose to these entities any information that could be used to identify you personally. We do not disclose PII, such as your name, email address, password, credit card number and bank account number, are never disclosed to marketing advertisers.

We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may employ cookies and web beacons (also known as action tags) to measure advertising effectiveness and to better manage the advertising on our Site. For example, the companies typically gather data about consumers who view their ads. That data is anonymous - linked only to a numbered cookie on a user’s computer. Networks collect and analyze this data to make a variety of inferences about each consumer’s interests and preferences. The result is a profile that attempts to predict the individual consumer’s tastes, needs, and purchasing habits. That profile enables the advertising companies’ computers to make split-second decisions about how to deliver ads directly targeted to the consumer’s specific interests. This is called online preference marketing.

Some advertisers also track and analyze anonymous usage and browsing patterns of the visitors to our Site. All data collected by these third parties on behalf of our Site is owned and used by us, but is licensed to the third party for the purposes of creating behavioral information segments. We use this information to help provide our advertisers with more targeted advertising opportunities, which means that users see advertising that is most likely to interest them and advertisers send their messages to people who are most likely to be receptive, improving both the viewer’s experience and the effectiveness of the ads. In addition, the third parties can sell the behavioral information segments to other third parties for use in ads on other web sites.

Other Corporate Entities

We may share much of our data, including PII about you, with our parent, subsidiary and other affiliated companies (each an “Affiliate”), if any, that are committed to serving your online needs and related services, throughout the world. To the extent that these entities have access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. Our Affiliates will follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this document, to the extent allowed by applicable law. It is possible that we or one or more of our Affiliates, or any combination of such, could merge with or be acquired by another business entity. In connection with the due diligence review involving such a potential transaction, we may share some or all of your PII with potential acquirers, merger partners or investors, and their agents (including professionals). We would require that these third parties sign non-disclosure agreements and would endeavor to disclose as little PII as possible. Should such a combination then in fact occur, you should expect that we would share some or all of your information in order to continue to provide the Site.

Legal Requests

We cooperate with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement and other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with any investigation of fraud, potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Use, intellectual property infringements, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability or is necessary to exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you in response to subpoenas, court orders, legal process, governmental investigative demands or where we believe, in our sole discretion, disclosure is necessary to comply with the law.

7. Your Use of Other Users Information

Our Site also includes access to instant messaging and chat rooms. As a user you have access to users’ user names, and you might gain access to other contact information of other users through the regular use of the Site. By accepting this privacy policy, you agree that, with respect to other users’ PII that you obtain through the Site, we hereby grant to you a license to use such information only for: (a) communications related to the Site that are not unsolicited commercial messages, and (b) any other purpose to which such user expressly agrees after complete disclosure of the purpose. In all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves from your database. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this privacy policy, may you disclose PII about another user to any third party without our consent and the consent of such other user after adequate disclosure. We and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add a Site user to your mail list (email or physical mail) without their express consent after adequate disclosure of your intentions.

8. Accessing, Reviewing and Changing Your Profile

Following registration, you can review and update the information you submitted during registration by logging-in and going to the “Edit Account Settings” section of your profile. You are always free to change your password and email address, name, address, city, state, zip code, country, phone number, profile, likes and dislikes (keywords), desired date profile, personal descriptions/essays, and saved search criteria. If you change any of the foregoing information, we may retain a record of your old information.

Upon your notification, we will remove your profile from our active databases as soon as reasonably possible in accordance with our policy and applicable law. To hide or remove your profile so that others cannot view it, log-in to your profile and go to the “Edit Account Settings” section of your profile (this section is clearly labeled in the left-hand navigation bar that is part of all profile pages).

We will retain in our files information you have requested be removed from our active databases for certain purposes, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our terms and conditions. Further, such prior information may never be completely removed from our databases due to technical and legal constraints, including stored ‘back up’ systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your PII will be completely removed from our databases in response to any request you may submit.

9. Control of Your Password

You are responsible for all actions taken with your login information and password, including fees. Therefore we do not recommend that you disclose your Site password or login information to any third party. If you choose to share this information with any third party, you are responsible for all actions taken with your login information and password. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your PII and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised in any way, you should immediately change your password.

10. Other Information Collectors

Except as otherwise expressly described in this privacy policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are on our Site or on other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. To the extent that we use third party advertisers or have third party e-commerce partners, they adhere to their own privacy policies. Since we do not control the privacy policies of any third parties, you should investigate their policies before you disclose your personal information to them.

Third party applications (such as widgets) created by third party developers may also be available through the Spanatix Site. Third party applications are small bits of software, often with interactivity, that can be installed into users’ profiles or shared with other users. However, Spanatix does not control the third party developers, and cannot dictate their actions. When a user engages with a third party application, that user is interacting with the third party developer, not with Spanatix. Spanatix encourages users not to provide PII to the third party’s application unless the user knows the party with whom it is interacting.

11. Security

We treat data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. To safeguard the confidentiality and security of your PII, we use industry standard practices and technologies including but not limited to “firewalls”, encrypted transmission via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and strong data encryption of sensitive personal and/or financial information when it is stored to disk.

12. Notice

We may change this privacy policy from time to time based on changes in the law, your comments, or our need to accurately reflect our data collection and disclosure practices. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending you a notice via email or by placing a prominent notice on our Site. If we notify you by email, we may include a message in that email that you will be deemed to have consented to any changes in the privacy policy if you do not object within a certain amount of time of our sending the email notification. We may also require you to agree to any changes in the privacy policy in a manner similar to the way you have agreed to the terms and conditions of this current edition of our privacy policy.

13. How to Contact Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our information-handling practices, please contact us by email or postal mail as follows:

Privacy Officer

Spanatix, Inc.

650 5^th St. Ste. #509

San Francisco, CA 94107

privacy@spanatix.com