WineMcGee.com Privacy Policy |
WineMcGee.com Privacy Policy |
This privacy policy is a portion of the WineMcGee Terms of Usage Agreement, and is included to help you understand how we collect and use the personal information you share through the WineMcGee Website. By using the WineMcGee Website, you agree to be bound by this Agreement regardless of whether you are simply browsing the WineMcGee Website ("Visitor"), or if you are a registered Member ("Member"). You are only authorized to use the WineMcgee Website if you agree to be bound to and abide by this Agreement. If you do not agree to this Agreement, you must leave the WineMcGee Website and discontinue your use of WineMcGee services. All Members must read these terms and agree to be bound by this agreement during the Registration process.
1. Information We Collect and How We Use It
When you become a Member of the WineMcGee Website, you provide us with certain personal information, such as your full name and a login email address. You also may choose to update your profile to include other data, such as your address, phone number, photo, email address, and information about you. The privacy settings for the majority of the personal information that you provide to WineMcGee can be individually configured to allow you to specify how you would like to make this data available through the WineMcGee Website. Typically, Members will have the option to keep data private, share only with friends, or make the data public to everyone. Certain information that we collect will always be visible publicly to anyone using the WineMcGee Website, such as your Public Username. This publicly available information also includes any Content that you post on the WineMcGee Website outside of your profile ("Public Content"), including but not limited to (a) comments or images for byobs, retailers, events, and wineries; (b) wine reviews; (c) questions; (d) answers; (e) wine talk comments.
Through your use of the WineMcGee website, you can request and approve other Members as Friends, create events, post reviews and comments and transmit other Content. WineMcGee collects this information from you to provide you with a personalized service and facilitate user interaction on the WineMcGee Website. Typically, we retain this information in our database so that we can continue to provide you with the service in the future. For instance, we retain your Friends and Messages to allow you to communicate with your Friends in the future, and return to prior messages to view them at a future date. When you update your information, that change is typically reflected in real time throughout the WineMcGee website. For instance, if you change your email, your friends will be able to instantly see your new email on your profile page. Even though this change may occur immediately, WineMcGee typically stores a copy of the old information for a reasonable period of time on our backup servers, in order to facilitate disaster recovery and availability. You understand that even after you change or remove information, copies of your old Content may remain with other users that have copied or stored your Content. Your Content may also be viewable in archived or cached pages served by WineMcGee, or stored by third party search engine sites such as Google, were you profile publicly available to be crawled.
In certain sections of the website, we allow Members to invite their friends to use WineMcGee. In these cases, we will ask you for the neccessary information, such as email address and names, needed to fulfill your request. We may store these email addresses and names in order to send email invitations and reminders. If your friends don't want WineMcGee to store their information as provided by you, they can request that we remove it from our database by emailing support@winemcgee.com. Our invitation service also makes use of third party web services provided by companies such as Yahoo and Google, in order to automate the process of importing your friends email addresses and names. Through the use of these services, you will be asked to provide access to your email account to WineMcGee. We use this access solely for importing your contact email addresses and names, and not for any other means.
Although we provide tools to help you set your privacy options, and try hard to keep your data private and secure, we cannot guarantee privacy or security. WineMcGee has no control over the actions of other users with whom you may share your information. Furthermore, the security and stability of the WineMcGee Website is reliant on hardware and software which can fail and other factors that could potentially compromise your information, such as unauthorized user access or the actions of hackers. All sharing of personal information through the WineMcGee Website is done at your own risk.
In using the WineMcGee website, you also provide WineMcGee with website usage details. We collect user IP address, general location, and browser type. Additionally, we store information obtained from your browser using cookies. A cookie allows WineMcGee to store basic session details that allow users to login, logout, and allows the WineMcGee website to provide content along the way. These cookies are terminated after a short period of time of inactivity. In the future, we may also store persistent, long-term, cookies that store your login email to make it easier for you to login when you return to the WineMcGee Website. In this case, we will not store your password in a cookie.
2. Sharing Your Information with Third Parties
We provide your information to third parties in certain situations:
a. To comply with a legal request, such as a search warrant, court order, or subpeona. In such circumstances, we limit disclosure until we have a good faith belief that such disclosure is reasonably neccessary, or that it meets applicable legal standards.
b. When we believe it is neccessary to prevent faud or other suspected illegal activities.
c. When we believe it is required to protect our interests, rights, reputation or property, or those of our users, Members, affiliates, or partners.
d. We may provide your information in aggregate, without personally identifying you, to third parties for market research, analyzing user behavior, or for other business or marketing analysis.
e. Content or personal information that you provide may be accessible to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. The "web crawlers" for these sites will be unable to access your profile page if you limit access based using your privacy settings.
f. The Recent Happenings section of your profile aggregates your Public Content for viewing by anyone with access to your profile. You can prohibit others from viewing your Recent Happenings section by setting your privacy settings.
g. Members that choose to "Follow" you will have access to your Public Content within the Recent Happenings section of their profile regardless of how you define your privacy settings.
h. We may provide your personal information to third party service providers to help provide the services of the WineMcGee Website. We may use third parties to provide our underlying data network, host our web servers, provide our storage, deliver our email, process our payments, or provide our marketing material or advertisements. Through the performance of these business activities, our service providers may have access to your personal information.
i. WineMcGee reserves the right to transfer your user information to a successor if interest in ownership of all or substantially all of WineMcGee were to change.
j. Whenever you post Public Content, this content is available to all users of the WineMcGee website, and accessible by all search engines. In addition, your Public Username and profile photo are also accessible. However, your profile photo will not be displayed if you limit your privacy settings.
3. Links
WineMcGee is not responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other unaffiliated websites that may be accessible via the WineMcGee Website via a link. Except as defined within this Privacy Policy, we do not share information with these unaffiliated third parties. It is your responsibility to read the privacy policies of all web sites that collect personal information.4. Security
We will take appropriate precautions to protect our users data. Personal information is stored on secure servers behind physical and software firewalls, and access is only permitted to authenticated sessions initiated on WineMcGee servers. The network on which WineMcGee hardware and software resides provides significant protection for Denial of Service Attacks, Man in the Middle Attacks, IP Spoofing, and Packet Sniffing. The data centers used to host our network are protected by strict physical access control, video surveillance, and intrusion detection systems. When sensitive information is entered through the website, this data is encrypted for transit using SSL technology.5. Email Notices and Alerts
Through the control of your privacy settings, you have the ability to limit the users that can contact you via private messages. WineMcGee may send you service-related notifications and announcements occasionally as an important part of the service itself. These messages include but are not limited to notifications of private messages, comment postings on your profile, friend requests, praise for your reviews or comments, and answers to your questions. These messages are deemed integral to the service. Should you wish to discontinue receiving these messages, you have the option to terminate your WineMcGee Member account at any time by emailing support@winemcgee.com.6. Disputes and Questions
If you believe that WineMcGee has not conformed to this policy, or if you have questions about this privacy statement, please contact us at privacy@winemcgee.com.