Last Modified: 2015-01-16
ThinkUp LLC. takes the private nature of your personal information very seriously. We respect your privacy and strive to use your information in ways that you can understand, predict and control.
This Privacy Policy describes how we treat the information we collect when you visit and use the Services. When you use the Services, you are consenting to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy.
Because your privacy is important, we ask that you please read this Policy carefully. We've also included higlighted annotations throughout this policy; these annotations aren't a part of the policy itself, but are intended to help you follow the text and to emphasize key sections.
“We do not collect personally identifiable information from children.”
The Services are not directed towards, and ThinkUp does not knowingly collect information from, children under the age of 13. If you are a parent and believe your child under the age of thirteen (13) has created a Services account or otherwise provided personal information to ThinkUp, please contact us at [email protected].
“This Policy covers information you share with ThinkUp, not third parties.”
This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of information gathered when you are using or accessing the Services. This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own or control, including but not limited to any third party websites, services and applications (“Third Party Services”) that you elect to access through the Service or to individuals that we don't manage or employ. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of all Third Party Services you access.
“ThinkUp needs your account information like an email address and password.”
When you create an account on a ThinkUp Service (an “Account”), you will provide information such as your username, password, and email address. You may also be required to provide us with your birthdate, which we use to verify your age and may use to personalize the Services for you (e.g., by presenting you with content relevant to your age group). This information may personally identify you. For example, if you use your full name as your username, you are disclosing your identity to the public.
“ThinkUp uses your email address to send necessary notificaitions.”
As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive email and other communications from us, such as administrative communications relating to your Account (e.g., for purposes of Account recovery or password reset). These communications are considered part of the Services and your Account, which you may not be able to opt-out from receiving. You can opt-out of some communications from ThinkUp, such as insight notifications; please see your Membership Settings page. Note that we will NEVER email you to ask for your password or other Account information; if you receive such an email, forward it to us at [email protected].
“ThinkUp uses your data shared from third-party networks like Twitter and Facebook, and you should understand their policies.”
Information about Your Accounts on Third Party Services: Key parts of the Services require you to link your Account to certain third party social networking services, such as Twitter or Facebook (“Third Party Services”). In order to do so, you will provide your user ID and authentication on each of those Third Party Services, where we receive a token that allows us to access those accounts. We use this authorization as permission to, for example, retrieve your activity on those services.
We do NOT ask for, receive or store your passwords for your Third Party Service accounts.
For your convenience, you can view the Twitter Terms of Service here:
https://twitter.com/tos
And you can view the Twitter Privacy Policy here:
https://twitter.com/privacy
Also for your convenience, you can view the Facebook Terms of Service:
https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
And you can view the Facebook Data Use Policy here:
https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy
We STRONGLY encourage you to familiarize yourself with the terms of service and privacy policy of any third-party services which you use in conjunction with ThinkUp.
In some cases, when you connect your Account with your accounts on Third Party Services, we may obtain information about you from those Third Party Services. Such information could include, for example, your gender, if you have disclosed that information to that third party and made it available for ThinkUp to access. To the extent we obtain such information, we may use the information about you that we receive from Third Party Services to improve and personalize the Services. As a general practice, we strongly urge you to make careful judgments about any personal information you disclose to Internet services, including ThinkUp and linked Third Party Services, regardless of whether you choose to link your accounts together.
“Your ThinkUp insights are public by default.”
By default, the information we get from your accounts with Third Party Services and the anlysis generated by the Services regarding that information is public, and it is published so that anyone can view it. We provide tools, like privacy and security settings, that let you limit who can see information in your ThinkUp account. You should assume that anything ThinkUp publishes for you is publicly accessible unless you have explicitly selected otherwise. Content published and shared publicly is accessible to everyone, including search engines. In addition, information shared publicly may be copied and shared throughout the Internet. While you are free to remove published content from or delete your Account, because of the nature of Internet sharing, copies of that content may exist elsewhere and be retained indefinitely, including in our systems.
“Your content might have data embedded in it. We may use that data.”
In some cases, we may collect information about content you provide to the Services. For example, when it's included with your images, we may collect information describing your camera and camera settings, or when it is included in your posts on Third Party Services, we may collect location information. This information allows us to improve the Services and provide additional features and functionality.
“Your payment details are stored at Amazon. You should read their policies.”
We do not collect or store your financial information when you decide to purchase a paid Service; instead, such information is stored by our third party payment processor (the “Payment Processor”), and use and storage of that information is governed by the Payment Processor’s applicable terms of service and privacy policy (the Payment Processor may also have other terms, and you are responsible for locating and familiarizing yourself with those terms, as applicable). Currently, our Payment Processor is Amazon Payments.
For your convenience, you can view the Privacy Policy for Amazon Payments here: https://payments.amazon.com/help?nodeId=82974
We do receive certain information from our Payment Processor: a unique token that we connect with your Account to enable you to make further purchases using the information stored by our Payment Processor.
“We use third party statistics and analytics services. Read their policies.”
We collect information about how people use the Services, including those with an Account. This information includes general usage information, and may include information such as the number and frequency of our visitors, which pages or features of the Services they have visited, which links on the Services they have clicked on, and the length of those visits. We may also use third party applications and services, such as Google Analytics and Chartbeat, to collect and analyze this information. This information enables us and third parties authorized by us to figure out how often individuals use the Services so that we can analyze and improve them. Some of this information may be associated with the IP Address (as defined below) used to access the Services, and some may be associated with your Account, such as the topics you search for and the help pages that you visit. We may also use some of this information in aggregate form, that is, as a statistical measure related to all of our users that would not identify you personally. We use information about your use of the Services to improve and enhance your experience on the Services.
For your convenience, you may view the Google Analytics Terms of Service:
http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html
And you can view the Google Analytics Privacy Policy:
http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html
Also for your convenience, you may view the Chartbeat Terms of Service:
https://chartbeat.com/terms/
And this is the Chartbeat Privacy Policy:
https://chartbeat.com/privacy/
“Web browsers typically send some data when you visit us; We use that to make ThinkUp better.”
We automatically receive and record information from your web browser when you interact with the Services, such as your browser type and version, what sort of device you are using, your operating system and version, your language preference, the website or service that referred you to the Services, the date and time of each web request you make, your screen display information, and information from any cookies we have placed on your web browser (as described below). We also sometimes detect whether you are using certain web browser extensions and store that information in a manner associated with your Account. Web browser-related information is used to enhance your experience with the Services (for example, by personalization) and to allow us to improve the Services; it is not, however, used in a manner that would identify you personally.
“Normally, when you visit ThinkUp we receive your IP address, which we'll use to improve ThinkUp.”
When you log into the Services or load a web page from the Services, we will collect and store your Internet Protocol Address (“IP Address”). We generally use IP Address information to fight spam, malware, and identity theft; we also may use it, in the future, to personalize the Services for you. IP Address information is also used by us to generate aggregate, non-identifying, information about use of the Services.
“If we receive your location information, we'll use it to provide better ThinkUp services to you.”
In some cases we collect and store information about where you are located, such as by converting your IP Address into a rough geolocation, or by using location data stored in photos or in social media messages. We may use location information to improve and personalize the Services for you.
“We use cookies to make ThinkUp work for you. If you turn them off, you won't be able to use ThinkUp. Some statistics services we use set cookies, too.”
Cookies are pieces of text that may be sent to and saved by your web browser when you access a website; your web browser stores these cookies in a way associated with each website you visit, and you can see your cookies through your browser settings. We use cookies to enable our servers to recognize your web browser and tell us how and when you use the Services. Our cookies do not, by themselves, contain information that personally identifies you, and we don't combine the general information collected through cookies with other such information to tell us who you are. However, we do use cookies to identify that you have logged in and that your web browser has accessed aspects of the Services, and we may associate that information with your Account if you have one. This information, in turn, is sometimes used to personalize your experiences on the Services, such as by presenting you with a different features when you are logged in to ThinkUp. Most web browsers have an option for turning off the cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your web browser software) allowing you to decide on acceptance of each new cookie in a variety of ways. If you disable cookies, you won't be able to log into your Account, and so will not be able to use the vast majority of our Services; as such, we don't recommend disabling your cookies when using the Services. Some third-party services that we use, such as Google Analytics and Chartbeat, may also place their own cookies on your browser. Note that this Privacy Policy covers our use of cookies only and does not cover the use of cookies by third parties.
“ThinkUp automatically retrieves your friend or follower list from connected services.”
Certain features of the Services allow you to provide us with your contact lists stored on other services. We only use and store that information to provide the ThinkUp service to you.
“We may deduce information about you from your activity. We only do that to provide the core ThinkUp services to you.”
We analyze your actions on the Services in order to derive or infer characteristics that may be descriptive of you. These characteristics are used to improve and personalize the Services.
“Sometimes we put a tracking link in emails to know if you opened an email or clicked on a link in it.”
We may place information in our emails to you (such as a web beacon) that allows us to measure our email deliverability, and we may track which links in an email are followed. We also use the third-party email services MailChimp and Mandrill to deliver messages and you should review the policies of these services which govern these messages as well.
““You may see more advertising for ThinkUp when you browse the web.”
We may use marketing services provided by Google and other third parties that allow us to deliver advertising to users after they leave our Services that they will see elsewhere on the web. This is a common practice called “remarketing.” Users will not see more ads than they otherwise would see as a result of remarketing; rather, the ads they see are more likely to be ads for ThinkUp products and services. Google and any other third party marketing services providers we use to help us with remarketing use cookies as part of the remarketing service. For more information regarding remarketing and the ability to opt-out, please visit:
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
http://www.networkadvertising.org
http://www.aboutads.info
“We don't share your personal information without telling you.”
We never share information we receive from you unless:
(a) we have your permission to share that information;
(b) we have given you prior notice (such as within this privacy policy) that the information will be shared, and with whom; or
(c) that information is aggregate information or other information that does not identify you.
“Your ThinkUp stream is public by default.”
As noted above, by default, content published through the Services is shared with the public, and this is an important feature of the Services. Such information includes, but isn't limited to, anything you choose to post on or submit to a connected service and anything apparent in a posted photograph. Because this kind of information can be seen by anyone and may be indexed by search engines (like Google Search), you should be careful in what you choose to disclose publicly and make sure it is information you want to share with everyone.
“We might combine your use of different networks together to improve ThinkUp.”
We may, if possible, aggregate information about your use of multiple Services and use that consolidated information to improve how the Services operate, and to develop new Services.
“ThinkUp relies on your activity on third party networks to work.”
You may access Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on externally-pointing links. You may also choose to share information that you provide to us, with those Third Party Services (for example, by sharing insights to Twitter or Facebook). This Privacy Policy only governs information we collect and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services' privacy policies.
“If we hire a contractor or consultant, they'll follow the same policy here.”
In some cases, we share information that we store (such as IP Addresses) with third parties, such as our service providers, consultants and other agents (“Agents”), for the purposes of operating and improving the Services. For example, we may share information with service providers in order to fight spam, and third-party consultants may have access to information in the process of improving our processes and technology. Agents with whom we share such information for these reasons are generally bound by confidentiality obligations and, unless we tell you differently, our Agents do not have any right to use information we share with them beyond the scope and duration of what is necessary to assist us. You hereby consent to our sharing of your information with our Agents.
“If we share information with business partners, it would be aggregate information.”
We may share or disclose non-private information, information that is aggregated with information relating to other Service user that does not personally identify you, or other non-personally identifiable Information with people and entities that we do business with.
“If we sell ThinkUp or its assets, all of your private information would come along in the sale.”
In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell business assets. In these transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if we, or substantially all of our assets, were acquired, or if we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of us or our assets may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.
“We will disclose information if needed to obey the law or to protect people.”
We believe in freedom of expression, and, to the extent reasonable, we try to protect our community from baseless legal demands. That said, we also reserve the right to access, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary, in our sole discretion, to (i) satisfy any law, regulation, legal process, governmental request, or governmental order, (ii) enforce this Privacy Policy and our [Terms of Service], including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and spam/malware prevention), (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect the rights, property, health or safety of us, our users, any third parties or the public in general, including but not limited to situations involving possible violence, suicide, or self-harm.
“If you want to share your data, we'll accommodate you.”
If you ask us to release information that we have about your Account, we will do so if reasonable and not unduly burdensome.
“Keep your password safe. We're doing everything we can to keep your data safe.”
Your Account information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. You need to prevent unauthorized access to your Account and Personal Information by selecting and protecting your password appropriately and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your Account on the Services.
We use reasonable measures to protect your information (including your Account information) to ensure that it is kept private; however, we can't guarantee the security of any information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors, may compromise the security of user information at any time.
“You can see your account information in your Settings page.”
If you are a registered user, you can access and delete most information associated with your Account by logging into the Services and checking your Account Settings page. Registered and unregistered users can access and delete cookies through their web browser settings.
Your California Privacy Rights: Under California Civil Code sections 1798.83-1798.84, California residents are entitled to ask us for a notice identifying the categories of personal customer information that we share with our affiliates and/or third parties for marketing purposes, and providing contact information for such affiliates and/or third parties. If you are a California resident and would like a copy of this notice, please submit a written request to the following address: 220 East 23rd Street, Suite 601, New York NY 10010.
“You can email us to cancel your account, and we'll delete your account. Some information may persist for a while after your account is deleted.”
If you want to delete your Account, you can do so from your Membership page or by emailing us at [email protected] and providing proof of authority over the Account. What constitutes “proof of authority” will vary depending on the circumstances, but generally will require sufficient identifying information so that we can be confident you are the Account owner. Deleting your Account may not fully or immediately remove the content you have published from our systems, as caching of, backups of, copies of, or references to your Account information may not be immediately removed. In addition, given the nature of sharing on the Services, some of the public activity on your Account prior to deletion may remain stored on our servers and accessible to the public.
“We may change this privacy policy. If we do, we'll tell you.”
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time, using the process for modifications set forth in our Terms of Service. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used.
“Seriously: If you have any questions or concerns about this policy, email us.”
If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, please send us a detailed message to [email protected].
“You can see the changes we've made to this policy over time.”
You will find a link to prior versions of our Privacy Policy below. We have stored these versions on GitHub, which will also allow you to compare different versions and see what terms have changed: