Privacy Policy

What This Privacy Policy Covers

We at SMS want you to feel safe online. For that reason, we follow a privacy policy that applies to all of the services, products and websites offered by the website, or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies. In line with that policy, we want to let you know how we treat personal information that we collect and receive from members of the website.
Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, email address or phone number.
The term, “website,” as used in this Privacy Policy, refers to either SMS, or the SMS website.
This Privacy Policy covers the following: (i) The information we collect and use, including how we generally use that information; (ii) What we share and disclose, why and to whom; (iii) What "cookies" and "web beacons" are, and how we use them; (iv) How to update and delete your account information; (v) How you will be notified of changes to our Privacy Policy; and (vi) How and whom to contact if you have question or suggestions regarding our Privacy Policy.
The Privacy Policy applies only to the website. While other websites may be displayed as search results or links from within the website, those sites are owned and operated by others, and they invariably have different privacy policies. When linking from the website to other sites, if you have privacy concerns, we urge you to review the privacy policies of those sites.

It’s also important to note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to information that you post, yourself, in public areas of the website. For example, if you choose to let other people see your name, and your answers to the other questions posted on the website, or if you post information or comments on a discussion board, that information will be made public. Your messages and other information you make available in public areas of the website will be seen by people and organizations not related to or controlled by SMS, and may be used by others to contact you.
 

Information Collection and Use

We collect personal information from you whenever you interact in the website, such as when you: (i) register with the website; (ii) output, results and statistics derived from your game participation and/or in other activities offered by the website; (iii) use our products or services; (iv) enter promotions or sweepstakes; and (v) visit web pages on the website or on the websites of certain of our partners; (vi) We automatically receive and record information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, website cookie information and the pages you request; or, (vii) When you register, we ask for information such as your name, email address, birth date, gender and ZIP code.
Use of such information includes, but is not limited to the following: (i) We may combine information about you that we have with information we accumulate from other website users and/or which we obtain from business partners or other companies; or, (ii) To customize the advertising and content you see; (iii) Fulfill your requests for products and services: (iv) Improve our services and/or contact you; and (v) Conduct research and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.
In general, we provide access to your personal information only to the website's employees and contractors who we believe need that access in order to do their jobs and to provide products or services to you.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

Registered Member information is displayed to people in order to facilitate member interaction in the website's social networking community.
We do not rent, sell or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you request, when we have your permission or under the following circumstances: (i) We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with the website under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help the website communicate with you about offers from the website and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information; (ii) We may sometimes share aggregate non-personal information with third parties such as the media, advertisers, government agencies and other commercial entities. This aggregate information is typically in the form of statistics, such as numbers of website members who live in a particular state or fall within a particular age group or gender. Such aggregate information is gathered from individual website members’ information but is not traceable to any specific identifiable website member; (iii) We respond to subpoenas, court orders or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims; (iv) We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of the website terms of use or as otherwise required or permitted by law; (v) If the website is acquired by or merged with or into another company, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Our Advertisers

We do not share your personal information with our advertisers. However, the advertising we display is targeted to users of particular services and content. So if you view or click on a targeted ad, the advertiser (or other companies affiliated with the advertiser) may assume that you meet the targeting criteria.

Cookies and Web Beacons

The website, like many websites, use cookies to prepare customized Web pages for you. A cookie is a file containing a string of code that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive, to be kept there for later use. With cookies in place, whenever you use your Web browser to connect to the website, our systems are able to recognize you. This enables the website to present you with custom Web pages. So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page, you see a welcome page with your name on it and information that relates to where you live and products or services that reflect your interests.
In addition to the website's cookies, when you visit the website your computer may receive cookies from our advertisers and from other sites displayed as search results or links. The cookies inserted by those third parties are not covered by the website's Privacy Policy, but rather, by the policies of those advertisers and outside websites.
You can set up your browser to reject cookies or tell you when a cookie has been sent. However, cookies allow you to take full advantage of the website's interactive features, and we hope you will leave them turned on.
The website also uses web beacons (also known as action tags or single pixel gifs) to access the website's cookies inside and outside our Web pages and in connection with the website products and services. A web beacon is a transparent image placed on a web page that sends a signal when a person visits that page. This enables us to assess the popularity and effectiveness of the material posted on the website. We may also use web beacons in connection with e-mails sent to Registered Members, to let us know whether and when the e-mail was opened. No personal information is transmitted through web beacons.

Third-party Ad Serving

The website contracts with third party companies to help us make sure that our content and advertising are relevant and effective, and to analyze how visitors use our site. To do this, we use Web beacons and cookies provided by our marketing company on this site. The type of information we collect includes, for example, the pages you visited at the website. This information helps us learn things like what pages are most attractive to our visitors, which products are most interesting and what kind of offers our visitors like to see. Although our third party marketing partners manage the information coming from the website on our behalf, we control how that data may and may not be used. If you do not want to help us learn how to improve our site, products, offers and marketing strategy, we ask that you do not make use of website and the services and content it offers.
The ads on the website pages are delivered to you by third parties specializing agencies and other corporate entities. Information about your visit to the website, such as number of times you have viewed an ad, is used to serve ads to you whenever you visit the website.
The website utilizes third party advertising companies to serve a portion of the ads on the website. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information about your visit to the website in order to provide relevant offers.
You can find out more information about this practice and your choices concerning this practice at:
http://networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.

Your Ability to Update and Delete Your Account Information and Preferences
You can update your website account information, at any time, by going to the website's home page, where you will find the appropriate link for editing your profile as well as for accounting setting.
New categories of marketing communications may be added to the account settings page from time to time. Registered Members who visit this page can opt out of receiving future marketing communications from these new categories or they can unsubscribe by following instructions contained in the messages they receive.
We reserve the right to send you certain important communications relating to the website services, such as service announcements and administrative messages, throughout the term of your personal website account, without offering you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving these important communications.
You can terminate your website account at any time by sending a request by way of referring back to the website's home page where you will find a feedback form link.

How to unsubscribe from Mind360's email list?

To unsubscribe from our mailing list, please go to My Details and uncheck the 'I agree to receive MIND360 notifications'. if you are not a MIND360 user, please click here.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may be changed from time to time. We will notify you about significant changes by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your website account or by placing a prominent notice on the website.

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions about our Privacy Policy, please refer back to the website home page and refer to the feedback form link.

Privacy Policy Update

Privacy Policy last update: December 2008