Terms and Conditions

It’s a big, wide world out there, full of threats and danger. When you use anything online, you enter an uncertain realm where anything you write might be used against you. Various governments have passed laws that regulate how we treat your information, should you share it with us. These include the GDPR, HIPAA, COPPA, PIPEDA, and a few other acronyms. It is our duty, if you are governed by any of these rules, to follow them and protect you as far as we can through our own enforcement of this policy. The spirit of these laws is to establish trust and transparency. Therefore, if we have written them here, it means that we have all committed to follow them and require that contractors and others that perform work for us follow them, too.

Information we collect

What we collect on you comes through four primary means:

  • You give it to us directly – a username, email, gender, profile information. This also includes information you send us in communications such as emails to support, etc.
  • You give it to us indirectly – photos, comments, chat, and other posts that are flagged, blocked. Information that you share with everyone using our services. Information that you choose to share with us along with others. Contests you enter or rewards that you earn that you ask us for assistance to track, build, etc. Your IP address, which our and other services routinely collect for security and other similar purposes, such as enforcing licensing restrictions.
  • We purchase the information about you – as we try to build our user base, we may acquire information about how to contact you, especially if you are a business. We might purchase information such as IP address reverse look-ups, etc., so that we can use that to correlate with the origins of our user base.
  • Someone other than you provides us the information – People may talk about you. They may comment about you on our services. There are many reasons why someone else might provide us information about you that neither you nor we requested.

How we collect it is almost always the same. As you utilize the Internet and other networks, your information will traverse from place to place and hit our shores. We have servers that are designed to protect our data and access to our servers that are not within our direct control. These servers may collect abstract information, such as how many packets you sent of data. On our own servers, we persist data into our database(s). That data, in many cases, is encrypted and stored in a way that makes it difficult to view without proper authorization. Payment information is not stored on our servers, as we prefer to be compliant with PCI DSS and similar protocols.

Why we collect the information varies. Some basic information we collect in order for you to provide information to other users about yourself, or to allow you to access our services. Other information is collected to help us grow and improve our products and services. We are data-hungry and we like figuring out trends, correlations and predictors. That means if you are comfortable providing us with data, we will use it to figure out things that create opportunities for all of us. For our user base that uses our products and services without any remuneration, in your case, we want to hopefully allow you to view ads so that we can pay our light bill. It isn’t cheap to build products and software and we all have to make it work out.

How long we collect information depends on the method we collected it. For what you provide directly to us, that lasts as long as you wish, as you are free to ask us to delete your personal information at any time. We will lose your number, if that’s what you want. On the other hand, there might be information provided by third parties or by you in comments or chat that might be more difficult to remove. If someone has violated your rights in the relevant jurisdiction and you let us know, we will comply with that jurisdiction’s requirements. We are hoping most of the time that it is common sense, but you never can tell.

Information We Use

Information we have about you we use to:

  • Provide TBBSE – Business Directory services to you
  • Respond to your requests, inquiries, comments or concerns
  • Notify you about changes and updates to our products and services, including those belonging to third parties in some cases
  • Provide you with special offers and other information about related events, products and services and to invite you to participate in surveys, competitions and promotions, ad determined by your choices and persisted settings
  • Analyze and improve our products and services in order to develop new products or services
  • Provide technical, product and other support to keep our services working, safe and secure
  • Comply with any and all legal obligations

Special Cases

Human beings susceptible to exploitation

  • Children under 13 – We follow COPPA and similar regulations which means that we will obtain the consent of parents and legal guardians before we allow children under 13 to access some of our data. If you are under 13, we want our products and services to be safe for you, which means that we have to keep your family informed about your activities so they can ensure you safe. Once they give their permission, you have more ability to access our content that is for children of similar age. In general, family has the ability to administer an account on the child’s behalf as an organization would.
  • Technically-challenged users – We will try to assist any user who is confused by our products or services and has questions. Our default policy is to protect your interests as much as we can, practicably.

Cookie Policy

We and our partners may use various technologies to collect and store information when you use our products and services, and this may include using cookies and similar tracking technologies on our client-facing web properties, track users’ movements around our products and services, serve targeted advertisements, and gather demographic information about our user base in the aggregate. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. We partner with third parties to display advertising on our website or to manage and serve our advertising on other sites. Our third party partners may use cookies or similar tracking technologies in order to provide you advertising or other content based upon your browsing activities and interests.

As a smaller organization, our list of cookies that we use or third parties use may vary rapidly. Therefore, rather than provide a list, we will provide to anyone interested in our most up-to-date information to contact our support to obtain the list at any time.

Miscellaneous

If you have registered to use our services, we will not sell, rent, swap or authorize any third party to use your personal information without your permission, except as outlined above. In the future, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, we may include your information among the transferred assets.

If you have a concern about this policy or data use, please contact us first. If we fail to address it satisfactorily, we can discuss how to resolve the dispute via mediation or third party arbitration.

This is a living document. From time to time we may need to make changes, either due to new or modified regulations or experience. We will take two actions to notify you, including a) providing a notification on our products and services that are public-facing and b) notice via communication channels 30 days prior to implementation.

 

If you have any question or need clarification please contact us using our form.