KoiPedia:Privacy policy

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About This Privacy Policy

[edit] Web Sites Covered

The KHA web sites include any site that the KHA owns or controls (for example, KoiPedia, the Koi Health Advisor Forum and the Koi Health Advisor Information Portal), unless the web site states expressly that it is subject to a different policy. We may share information among the web sites that we own or control, but it is always protected under the terms of this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy applies to KHA Web sites. You should read the privacy policy at each web site that you visit after you leave one of our sites. We are not responsible for how other web sites treat your privacy, once you leave a KHA web site.

[edit] Privacy Policy Changes

As our Privacy Policy changes in significant ways, we attempt will make every effort to notify you of the changes. Minor changes to the policy may occur that will not affect our use of individually identifiable information. For these instances, the KHA may not notify you of such minor changes. We will post Privacy Policy changes on our Web sites in a timely manner.

[edit] Information We Collect

In this section of our Privacy Policy, we discuss the different types of information we may collect about you, and the ways in which we collect them.

Information We Collect from Unregistered Visitors

Visitors to each of our web sites can access the web site's home page and browse some areas of the site without disclosing any personally identifiable information. We do track information provided to us by your browser, including the web site you came from (known as the "referring URL"), the type of browser you use, the time and date of access, and other information that does not personally identify you. On most of our web sites, you must register with us to use the entire site.

Information We Collect When You Register

Users registering for services on our Web sites are asked to provide us with identifying information, such as name, birth date, contact information, and other personal information. On our registration screens, we clearly label which information is required for registration, and which information is optional and may be given at your discretion. You will also be given a choice about whether or not you want to receive newsletters and other information that we may distribute from time to time. KHA web sites will explain how personally identifiable information will be used and ask for your consent before collecting it.

Information from Outside Sources

We may also collect information about persons who register on our Web sites from other sources in order to verify their identity. In some cases we may ask customers for information after they register, such as credit card information. Where necessary (for example, to process an order for a purchase), our web sites may contact financial or credit organizations to confirm customer credit cards.

[edit] Other Information

• Forums and Discussion Boards: When you use a discussion board on one of our web sites, you may post a message and your user name, which is available for all registered users to see. When you are posting publicly, any user of our web site can see your message. You should not post any information you want or are required by law to keep private to a discussion board or other public forum on our web sites.
• Tools: On some of our web sites, we offer clinical tools that require you to provide information for the tools to operate (for example, a clinical calculator that provides information on adjusting drug dosage). Our tools may provide you with the option of storing the information that you provide on our servers.
• Member Lookup: When you are registering on some of our web sites, you may have a choice about whether or not you want other members to be able to look you up and send you messages. If you opt not to be listed, no other members will be able to look you up.
• Additional Forms and Emails: We may also ask you to provide additional information after you register if you want to obtain additional services or information or to resolve complaints or concerns.

In addition, we gather information about you that is automatically collected by our web server, such as your IP address and domain name. We will use this information to personalize our offerings and presentations to you, facilitate your movements through our web sites, provide personalized services, and to communicate with you individually.

[edit] Continuing Education

When you register for a Continuing Education ("CE") activity through one of our web sites, we collect certain personally identifiable information from you such as your name, email address and mailing address. In addition to personally identifiable information, we collect aggregated non-personally identifiable information about the activities undertaken by our users. We use the information that we collect through CE activities in several ways:

1. Commercial supporters of CE activities on our web sites will receive only aggregated data about CE activities that are relevant to their interests and/or the courses they support;
2. Our Editorial and Customer Support Staff will have internal access to files containing personally identifiable information, including evaluation forms and aggregated CE participant information. These files can be accessed in order to respond to your questions or comments. Our staff may also use personally identifiable information, including registration information and evaluation data, in assessing educational needs and planning marketing activities.

We may use the information we collect as otherwise permitted in this Privacy Policy.

[edit] Use of Cookies and Web Beacons

Cookies are a technology we use to keep track of users as they move through our web sites. Your browser allows us to place some information on your computer's hard drive that is associated with the computer you are using. We use cookies to personalize our web sites and to track your usage across all of our web sites.

Your web browser can be set to allow you to control whether you will accept cookies, reject cookies, or to notify you each time a cookie is sent to you. If your browser is set to reject cookies, web sites that are cookie-enabled will not recognize you when you return to the web site, and some web site functionality may be lost. The Help section of your browser will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting cookies.

Although cookies do not normally contain personally identifiable information, if you are a registered user, we may elect to associate your registration information with cookies our web site places on your computer's hard drive. Associating a cookie with your registration data allows us to offer increased personalization and functionality. For example, you can elect to have our web sites "remember" your user name and password and bypass the sign-in process on each visit to the site. Without cookies, this functionality would not be possible.

Some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers.) We have told them that we do not want them to use cookie information to track our users' activities once they leave our web sites. However, because of the way advertisements are served on our web sites, we do not have total control over how advertisers use cookies on our web site. If you believe that one of our advertisers is placing an unwanted cookie on your hard drive, please contact us to assist us in resolving the problem.

We may use also web beacons to collect non-personally identifiable information about your use of our web sites and the web sites of selected sponsors and advertisers, and your use of special promotions or newsletters. Web beacons are tiny graphic image files, embedded in a web page in GIF, JPG or HTML format, that provide a presence on the web page and send back to its home server (which can belong to the host site, a network advertiser or some other third party) information from a user's browser, such as the IP address, the URL of the page on which the beacon is located, the type browser that is accessing the site and the ID number of any cookies on the user's computer previously placed by that server. Web Beacons can also be used to place a Cookie on the user's browser. The information collected by web beacons

• allows us to statistically monitor how many people are using our Web sites and selected sponsors' and advertisers' sites,
• how many people open our emails, and
• for what purposes these actions are being taken.

Our web beacons are not used to track your activity outside of our web sites or those of our sponsors'. We do not use web beacons to collect or store personally-identifiable information about you.

[edit] Children's Privacy

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children. Our web sites are designed and intended for use by adults, and are not intended for, nor designed to be used by children under the age of 18. We do not collect personally identifiable information from any person we know is a child under the age of 18.

[edit] Uses We Make of Information

In this section of our Privacy Policy, we identify the ways we may use information about you that we have collected.

[edit] Aggregate Data

We create aggregate data about visitors to our web sites for product development and improvement activities. We also use it for market analysis. We may provide information from our web sites in aggregate form, with identifying information removed, to third parties. For example, we may tell a partner what percentage of our registered users reside in a particular geographical area. When aggregated information is provided, we pool it from many individual records and strip it of any data that could be used to identify an individual before it is used. Any third party that receives aggregated data must agree not to attempt to re-identify the people it belongs to. For example, we may provide information to a potential advertiser of a product that would appeal to a koi keeper treating parasites in their pond about what percentage of our users treat parasites. Depending on our agreement with the third parties, we may or may not charge for this information.

[edit] Marketing and Advertising

We may target our advertising or marketing depending on information we have about you. For example, a user we know is a Certified KHA may receive advertising for products targeted at KHAs that a non-KHA user will not see (although the advertiser will not have access to any individually identifiable information about you).

We may also personalize our web site based on your interests. For example, you may see different articles in different places on our web site based on information you have shared with us, or information we have gained by observing your previous behavior, or information we may have gained from your interactions with a third party that shares information with us. We use information for our own internal marketing, research, and related purposes.

[edit] Third Parties

In addition to aggregate information (discussed previously), we may share some kinds of personally identifiable information with third parties as described below.

• Other Companies: We have strategic relationships with other companies who offer products and services on our web sites. When you are interacting with those companies, different rules and privacy policies may apply. For example, if you order a book from a bookstore that advertises on one of our web sites, you will be asked to provide identifying information and credit card information to the company that runs the bookstore. We do not control the collection or use of information you provide under those circumstances, but we do require that those companies clearly state their policies so you can decide whether to give them any information.
• Companies and People Who Work for Us: We may on occasion contract with other companies and individuals to help us provide services. For example, we may host some of our web sites on another company's computers, hire technical consultants to maintain our web-based tools, or work with companies to remove repetitive information from customer lists, analyze data, provide marketing assistance, and provide customer service. In order to perform their jobs, these other companies may have limited access to some of the personal information we maintain about our users. We require all such companies to comply with the terms of our Privacy Policy, to limit their access to any personal information to the minimum necessary to perform their obligations, and not to use the information they may access for purposes other than fulfilling their responsibilities to us. We use our best efforts to limit the use of other companies in areas where personally identifiable information may be involved.
• Promotional Offers: Sometimes we send offers to selected groups of customers on behalf of other businesses. When we do this, we do not give that business your name and address. We provide a variety of mechanisms for you to tell us you do not want to receive such promotional offers. For example, we may provide an opt-in box for users to receive an email from another business, and we make clear that by opting in you are submitting your data to a third party.
• Business Transfers: If we transfer a business unit (such as a subsidiary) or an asset (such as a web site) to another company, we will require them to honor the applicable terms of this Privacy Policy.
• Legal Requirements: We may release account and other personal information if, in our judgment release is required to comply with law or regulation.
• Consent: We may release personally identifiable information to a third party in accordance with your consent, subject to the purposes and limits that we disclose when we request your consent.

When we share information with third parties, we ask that they agree in writing to abide by our Privacy Policy.

If we discover that a third party inadvertently disclosed personal information about any of our users, we will take immediate action to prevent further occurrences.

[edit] Protection of Information

In this section of our Privacy Policy, we discuss the security measures we take to protect information that we have collected about you.

[edit] General Policies

We have implemented technology and security policies, rules and other measures to protect the personal data that we have under our control from unauthorized access, improper use, alteration, unlawful or accidental destruction, and accidental loss. We also protect your information by requiring that all our employees and others who have access to or are associated with the processing of your data respect your confidentiality.

We use security methods to determine the identity of its registered users, so that appropriate rights and restrictions can be enforced for that user. Reliable verification of user identity is called authentication. We use both passwords and usernames to authenticate users. Users are responsible for maintaining their own passwords.

Access to Information and Choices

In this section of our Privacy Policy, we tell you how to obtain and correct information we have about you, and how to choose what types of information you may share with us.

Correction of Information We Have About You

If you believe that registration information collected by our web sites is in error, you may edit your personal profile any time that you like. You can directly edit your user profile on our web site on which you initially registered. Requests for deletion of your record may result in your removal from the registry, but we may keep certain demographic information about you for product improvement purposes. You may <a href="http://www.akca.org/forum/"mailto:hgbiggio@earthlink.net" class="external free" title="mailto:hgbiggio@earthlink.net" rel="nofollow">mailto:hgbiggio@earthlink.net">contact us and ask for the changes that you would like to make.

[edit] Employees

Our employees are required to keep customer information private, as a condition of their employment with the company. Only selected, authorized employees are permitted to access personally identifiable information.

All employees and contractors must abide by our Privacy Policy, and those who violate that policy are subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of their employment and legal action.