Your privacy is critically important to us. At Technomic247.com, we have a few fundamental principles:
- We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
- We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
- We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
- We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
- We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.
What This Policy Covers
Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website as “Services.”
Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services, like our Facebook Group, that have a separate privacy policy.
Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.
Information We Collect
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.
We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.
Information You Provide to Us
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:
- Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a WordPress.com account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name — and that’s it. You may provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create a WordPress.com account.
- Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a account on our website, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
- Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
- Communications with us : You may also provide us with information when you communicate with us about a support question, post comments in our public forums. When you communicate with us via form, email, WordPress.com comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).
Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically:
- Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services — for example, when you create or make changes to your website on WordPress.com.
- Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
- Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (like when you post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
- Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of the sunrise to your website.
- Interactions with other users’ sites: We collect some information about your interactions with other users’ sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend posts we think may interest you.
- Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. We use cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.
Information We Collect from Other Sources
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:
- Third Party Login: If you create or log in to your WordPress.com account through another service (like Google) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address)
- Social Sharing Services: If you connect our website or account to a social media service (like Twitter), we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list) via the authorization procedures for that service.
The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.
Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users (but we hope will be!). We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.
How and Why We Use Information
Purposes for Using Information
We use information about you for the purposes listed below:
- To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, host the website, backup and restore your website, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
- To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.
- To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads on our users’ sites and some of our own sites as part of our advertising program, and understand ad performance.
- To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
- To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Middle Aged Club and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
- To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
- To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, recommending content through our Reader post suggestions, and providing new essays and stories through Longreads for your reading pleasure.
- To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on our services; texting you to verify your payment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)
Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information
A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:
(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or
(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or
(5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on,
Sharing Information
How We Share Information
We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below.
- Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
- Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
- Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
- To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Middle Aged Club, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
- Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Middle Aged Club goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
- With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so, like when you connected your site to a social media service through our Publicize feature.
- Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
- Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.
We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.
We show ads on some of our users’ sites as well as some of our own, and the revenue they generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services so that money doesn’t become an obstacle to having a voice.
Under a new California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), some personalized advertising you see online and on our services might be considered a “sale” even though we don’t share information that identifies you personally, like your name or email address, as part of our advertising program.
Information Shared Publicly
Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.
That means information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on your website, and your “Likes” and comments on other websites are all available to others — and we hope they get a lot of views!
Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.
How Long We Keep Information
We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.
For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to Middle Aged Club, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Middle Aged Club and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
Security
While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.
Your Rights
If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.
European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:
- Request access to your personal data;
- Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
- Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
- Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
- Request portability of your personal data.
You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
For California Residents: CCPA Information
Rights and Choices
The CCPA provides consumers located in the state of California with certain rights regarding their personal information and data. The following section describes those rights and explains how to exercise them:
Access to Specific Information and Data Portability Rights
You have the right to request that GG Software LP disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past 12 months. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request (as described in the section “Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights”), we will disclose to you:
- The categories of personal information we collected about you.
- The categories of sources for the personal information we collected about you.
- Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling that personal information.
- The categories of third parties with whom we share that personal information.
- The specific pieces of personal information we collected about you (also called data portability request)
- If we sold or disclose your personal information for a business purpose, two separate lists disclosing:
- Sales, identifying the personal information categories that each category of recipient purchased, and
- Disclosures for a business purpose, identifying the personal information categories that each category of recipient obtained
Non-Discrimination
We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights. Unless permitted by the CCPA, we will not:
- Deny you goods or services.
- Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or imposing penalties.
- Provide you a different level or quality of goods or services.
- Suggest that you may receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level of quality of goods or services.
Any CCPA-permitted financial incentive we offer will reasonably relate to your value and contain written terms that describe the program’s material aspects.
Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights
To exercise the access, data portability, and deletion rights described above, please submit a verifiable consumer request to us by emailing us at
Only you, or a person registered with the California Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your personal information. You may also make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child.
You may only make a verifiable consumer request for access of data portability twice within a 12-month period. The verifiable consumer request must:
- Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or an authorized representative.
- Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.
We cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the personal information relates to you.
Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us. We will only use personal information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request.
Information We Collect
Our websites, emails (with your consent, where required by law), and other products, services and platforms collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or device (“personal information”). In particular, our websites, apps, emails, and other products, services and platforms may have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months:
Category | Collected |
---|---|
A. Identifiers | YES |
B. Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)) | YES |
C. Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law | NO |
D. Commercial information. | YES |
E. Biometric information. | NO |
F. Internet or other similar network activity. | YES |
G. Geolocation data. | YES |
H. Sensory data. | NO |
I. Professional or employment-related information. | NO |
J. Inferences drawn from other personal information. | YES |
Personal information does not include:
- Publicly available information from government records.
- Deidentified or aggregated consumer information.
- Information excluded from the CCPA’s scope, like:
- health or medical information covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) or clinical trial data;
- personal information covered by certain sector-specific privacy laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) or California Financial Information Privacy Act (FIPA), and the Driver’s Privacy.
Use of Personal Information
We may use or disclose the personal information we collect for one or more of the following business purposes:
- To fulfill or meet the reason you provided the information. For example, if you share your name and contact information to request a newsletter or ask a question about our products or services, we will use that personal information to respond to your inquiry. If you provide your personal information to purchase a product or service, we or our third-party service providers will use that information to process your payment and facilitate delivery. We may also save your information to facilitate new product or service orders and requests.
- To provide, support, personalize, and develop our websites, emails, and other products, services and platforms.
- To create, maintain, customize, and secure your account with us.
- To process your requests, purchases, transactions, and payments and prevent transactional fraud.
- To provide you with support and to respond to your inquiries, including investigating and addressing your concerns and monitoring and improving our responses.
- To personalize your website, apps, emails, or other product, service or platform experience and to deliver content and product and service offerings relevant to your interests, including targeted offers and ads through our websites, apps, emails, and other products, services and platforms.
- To help maintain the safety, security, and integrity of our websites, apps, emails, and other products, services and platforms, databases and other technology assets, and business.
- For testing, research, analysis, and product development, including to develop and improve our websites, apps, emails, and other products, services and platforms.
- To respond to law enforcement requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.
- As described to you when collecting your personal information or as otherwise set forth in the CCPA.
- To evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of the Company’s assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which personal information held by the Company about our Website users is among the assets transferred.
The Company will not collect additional categories of personal information or use the personal information we collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes without providing you notice.
Sharing Personal Information
The Company may disclose your personal information to a third-party for a business purpose or sell your personal information, subject to your right to opt-out of those sales (see ‘Sales of Personal Information’ below). When we disclose personal information for a business purpose, we enter a contract that describes the purpose and requires the recipient to both keep that personal information confidential and not use it for any purpose except performing the contract. The CCPA prohibits third parties who purchase the personal information we hold from reselling it unless you have received explicit notice and an opportunity to opt-out of further sales (see ‘Sales of Personal Information’ below).
We may share your personal information with the following categories of third parties:
- Subsidiaries and affiliates.
- Contractors and service providers.
- Data aggregators.
- Third parties with whom we partner to offer products and services to you.
Disclosures of Personal Information for a Business Purpose
In the preceding twelve (12) months, the Company has disclosed the following categories of personal information for a business purpose:
- [Category A: Identifiers.]
- [Category B: California Customer Records personal information categories.]
- [Category F: Internet or other similar network activity.]
- [Category G: Geolocation Data.]
- [Category K: Inferences drawn from other personal information.]
Sales of Personal Information
In the preceding twelve (12) months, the company has not sold any personal information.