Golfbert Privacy Policy
Effective Date: May 1, 2009
Your privacy is important to Golfbert ("Golfbert", "we" or "us"). This Privacy and Information Security Policy ("the Policy") discusses the personally identifying information ("PII") that we collect about you when you use our website http://www.Golfbert.com ("the Site") and the other services we provide on or through the Site (together with the Site, the "Service"). This Policy is part of and incorporated into the Golfbert Terms of Use (collectively, the "Terms").
Policy highlights:
We will not collect PII about you through the Service unless you disclose such information to us;
We will not knowingly disclose PII about you that we collect through the Service to third parties, except under the limited circumstances described in this Policy; and
We will take reasonable steps to protect the security of the PII we collect from you through the Service.
These Policy highlights are qualified by full reference to the terms and conditions described below.
BY PROVIDING PII OR OTHER INFORMATION TO US OR BY USING OUR SERVICE, YOU AGREE TO THIS POLICY AND THE PRACTICES DESCRIBED IN THE POLICY.
- INFORMATION YOU GIVE US.
- The Types of Information Golfbert Collects. We collect any information you enter on the Service or give us in any other way (such as through an email, survey, or letter). The information that we collect varies depending upon how you use our Service. Our account registration process requires that you provide us with your user name, birthday and email address, and that you create and provide us with a password. We may also request other information, such as but not limited to, your actual first and last name, gender, and zip code. You may access and update certain of your personal information or account settings by accessing "My Account" or "My Profile" or a similar link on the Site.
- Information in Public Areas of the Site. Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily provide information in public areas of the Service, such as the user profile pages or forums, that information can be viewed and possibly used by others. We therefore advise visitors not to disclose contact information, including phone number, email address, street address or instant messenger address (within these public areas) that they do not wish to share. We are not responsible for PII you choose to submit in these public areas. Also, we may highlight content you post to the public areas of the Service such as reviews or comments, such as by featuring your content on the Site's home page.
- Minors. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register. If you are under 13, do not attempt to register for our Site or send any information about yourself to us. We recommend that prospective users between the ages of 13 and 17 ask their parents or other legal guardians for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet.
- AUTOMATIC INFORMATION COLLECTION.
- Cookies. Like many websites, we use "cookies." Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser. We use persistent, identifying cookies to remember your information and to link your activities to you. While you can take steps to warn off, block or disable cookies, if you do, the Service may not function and appear as we have designed it. Nonetheless, if you want to take these steps, you can do so by following the instructions associated with your browser. Our cookies do not collect PII that you provide to us during the registration process, but they do collect other information such as the following:
- the domain name and host from which you access the Internet and the Internet address of the site from which you direct-linked to ours;
- the date and time you access the Site and pages you visit;
- your computer's IP address and information about its operating system, platform and the Web browser type and version you use;
- demographic and other non-personally identifiable profile information about you; and
- information to combat fraud or misuse.
- Pixel Tags. In our email to you, we use "pixel tags" to determine if your email software or service can display html-formatted email (this helps us optimize the size of our email messages and conserve bandwith).
- Collection of Information by Third Parties. Our Site may include third-party advertising, links to other websites, and other content from third party businesses. The content posted by these parties will be reasonably identifiable as coming from a third party. We do not provide any PII to these advertisers, third-party websites, or other businesses, although on occasion we may mutually share non-personally identifiable (e.g., demographic) information to facilitate delivery of relevant advertisements. These third-party websites, businesses, and advertisers, or advertising companies working on their behalf, sometimes use technology to deliver (or "serve") the advertisements that appear on our Site directly to your browser. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. They may also use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (also known as action tags or single-pixel gifs), and other technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize or optimize advertising content. We do not have access to or control over cookies or other technologies that they may use, and the information practices of these advertisers and third-party websites or businesses are not covered by this Policy but are covered by their respective privacy politices. Some, but not all, third party advertising companies provide a mechanism to opt-out of their technology. For more information and an identification of advertisers that provide an opt-out mechanism, please click the following: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
- Promotions, Sweepstakes, and Contests. From time to time, we may host a promotion, sweepstake, or contest on the Service. You may be asked to provide personal information or permit the transfer to a third party of your personal information in connection with such promotion, sweepstake or contest. It will be disclosed at the point of collection or transfer who is collecting or transferring the information and whose privacy statement applies, and it will be your choice whether or not you wish to permit such transfer or collection of personal information to a third party.
- GOLFBERT'S USE AND RETENTION OF YOUR INFORMATION.
- Use of PII. We use your PII for purposes such as responding to your requests, monitoring and providing the Service, maintaining your Golfbert account, providing you with advertising and non-advertising content that we believe would be of interest to you, enforcing our rights and the rights of third parties, and investigating and ensuring compliance with the Terms. We also may use your PII to contact you regarding your account, such as to inform you that you have received an email from another Golfbert member, or to forward user comments to you about the content that you have posted. We may also email Golfbert newsletters, and similar communications about the Service.
- Opting-Out. Subject to the exceptions noted below, at any time, you may modify the types of communications you wish to receive by changing your preferences as part of your account on the Site. In addition, in our marketing or promotional e-mails to you, we will include instructions on how to unsubscribe and/or inform us of your preferences if you do not want to receive any marketing or promotional e-mails from us. We reserve the right to send you customary business communications such as acceptance/rejection notices regarding content submissions, general system and administrative messages regarding the Service, address confirmations, and transactional information about your account, and we may not offer you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving such communications so long as you are registered with the Site.
- Use of Other Information. We use non-PII about our users for purposes such as measuring the number of visitors to sections of our Site, making the Service more useful to visitors and delivering targeted advertising and non-advertising content. We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer the Site, track a user's movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate, non-personally identifiable use.
- Retention of Information. We retain information for as long as required, allowed or we believe it useful, but do not undertake retention obligations. We may dispose of information in our discretion without notice, subject to applicable law that specifically requires the handling or retention of information. You must keep your own, separate back-up records.
- GOLFBERT'S SHARING OF INFORMATION. Golfbert shares information with third parties, but only as described in this Section 4.
- Advertisers and Others. We share non-personally identifiable information with advertisers, service providers, and other persons with whom we conduct business. Similarly, these advertisers, service providers, and other persons may share with us non-PII about you that they have independently gathered or acquired.
- Third Party Services. We contract with affiliated and non-affiliated third parties to provide services to us or to you on our behalf. Examples include providing marketing assistance, providing customer service, sending Golfbert emails to you, removing repetitive information from customer lists, and analyzing data. These third parties may have access to your PII for use solely in connection with these authorized business activities.
- Business Transfer. As we develop our business, we might sell or buy businesses or their assets, or engage in acquisitions, mergers, restructurings, changes of control, or similar transactions. In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets, and your PII may be subject to such a transfer. Also, in the unlikely event of a bankruptcy, customer information may be transferred to a bankruptcy trustee or debtor in possession and then to a subsequent purchaser.
- Affiliates. We may share PII, non-PII and other information with our corporate affiliates. Corporate affiliates are those entities that we control, are controlled by us, or are under common control with us and any joint venture in which any of the controlled entities may participate from time to time. Any use of your information by our corporate affiliates is subject to this Policy or another policy no less protective of your privacy. Conversely, we may obtain information about you from our corporate affiliates or from your visits to other websites that we or our corporate affiliates control.
- Compliance and Safety. We may release user information when we believe release is appropriate to:
- comply with applicable law, and to respond to legal process, including subpoenas, search warrants and court orders, and to respond to or otherwise address written complaints of copyright infringement;
- make disclosures under programs intended to prevent potential crimes or investigate persons;
- enforce or apply agreements, including the Terms; or
- protect the rights, property, or safety of Golfbert, our users, or others, including exchanging information with other companies for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
- INFORMATION SECURITY.
- Your Obligations. You must protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer. Please sign off when finished using a shared computer. Your emails to us are not necessarily secure against interception so do not include sensitive information in them. We generally will not ask for passwords in an email and you should assume that if you get such a request, it might be fraudulent. YOU MUST DO WHAT YOU REASONABLY CAN TO ENSURE THE SECURITY OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION.
- Our Security Measures. We take reasonable precautions to protect the security of our users' information. We have physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to help safeguard, prevent unauthorized access, maintain data security, and correctly use your information. However, neither people nor security systems are foolproof, including encryption systems. In addition, people can commit intentional crimes, make mistakes or fail to follow policies. Therefore, while we use reasonable efforts to protect your PII, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. If applicable law imposes any non-disclaimable duty to protect your PII, you agree that intentional misconduct will be the standards used to measure our compliance with that duty.
- LINKS. The Service contains links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage you to be aware when you leave our Site and to read the privacy statements of every web site that collects your personally identifiable information. This Policy applies only to information collected by the Service.
- CONDITIONS OF USE, NOTICES, AND REVISIONS.
- Privacy Concerns. Your use of the Service and any dispute over privacy is subject to the Terms. If you have any concern about privacy at Golfbert, please send us a thorough description to customerservice@Golfbert.com, and we will try to resolve it. If you think we are in default of the Terms, you may contact us at Our Legal Notices Address in Section 8 below.
- Notice Required by Law. In those jurisdictions that permit email notice, if we are required to disclose or provide notice of invasion of certain security systems, we will do so by email to the most current email address provided by you to us. It is critical that you keep your email contact information correct and updated with Golfbert at all times.
- Identity Theft. If you believe that you are a victim of identity theft entitled by law to request information from us, write us at our Legal Notice address (see the next section of this Policy) and we will let you know what additional information you must provide to us. After we have received that information, we will supply without charge the information legally required to be disclosed that we then have, subject to applicable law and reserving all of our rights and defenses.
- Revisions. We reserve the right to change our Policy at any time. Non-material changes and clarifications will take effect immediately. If we make non-material changes, we will indicate at the top of this page the revised Policy's new effective date. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or through notice on the home page of the Site, and will also indicate so at the top of this page. The material changes will take effect 30 days after such notice. We encourage you to refer to this Policy at least every 30 days to check for material changes to this Policy.
- CONTACT INFORMATION AND INFORMATION ABOUT ENFORCEMENT OF OUR POLICY. For customer service matters (including questions relating to this Policy), you may email us at customerservice@Golfbert.com. To send us a legal notice, mail it by certified mail (return receipt requested) to: Golfbert Legal Department, 5555 Hill Road., Brentwood, TN 37027. When we need to contact you, including when we give a legal notice, we may do so to an email address that we have on file for you or to your Golfbert email account, or we may post notice on the Site. You must keep your email address information accurate. If we make a material change to this Policy, we will notify you by posting notice to the Site for at least 30 days and sending you an email to your Golfbert email account or to the non-Golfbert email address that we have on record for you.
Golfbert is a trademark or registered trademark of Golfbert, LLC. in the United States and other countries.