CommentAnywhere

Privacy Policy

CommentAnywhere Principles

CommentAnywhere turns the entire internet into a social context for sharing, collaborating, and interacting with your friends and networks. We understand that you don’t want everyone in all of your networks to see all of your posts so we give you control, by network, over who can view your posts. Our default privacy settings ensure that users can intuitively and quickly control who sees your posts.

CommentAnywhere follows two core principles:

  1. You should have control over your comments, photos and videos and who sees them. CommentAnywhere helps you express yourself on the internet by allowing you to share comments, photos and videos with your friends and people in your community networks. You choose what information you put in your comments, photos and videos. And you control the users with whom you share that information by selecting what networks can see a post.
  2. You should have access to the comments, photos and videos that others want to share. In adding the social context and ability to express oneself on any page, CommentAnywhere facilitates management of this rich personalized meta layer of communication. CommentAnywhere ensures that you can view posts from your friends and those in your networks that would like to share, collaborate and interact with you all across the internet.
Sharing comments, photos and videos all across the internet should be easy. And we want to provide you with the privacy capabilities necessary to control how and with whom you share that information. If you have questions or ideas, please send them to general@commentanywhere.com.

CommentAnywhere’s Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand how we collect and use the information you decide to post to your networks and friends, and help you make informed decisions when using the CommentAnywhere Service, located at www.commentanywhere.com, all across the internet with the CommentAnywhere browser extention and its directly associated domains (collectively, "CommentAnywhere", "Website" or the “Service”).

By using or accessing CommentAnywhere, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

When you visit CommentAnwhere you provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected by us and Web Site use information collected by us as you interact with our Website and Service.

When you register with CommentAnywhere, you provide us with certain personal information, such as your name, your email address, your Facebook login, your Facebook password and any other personal or preference information that you provide to us.

When you enter CommentAnywhere, we collect your browser type and IP address. This information is gathered for all CommentAnywhere visitors. In addition, we store certain information from your browser using "cookies." A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are logged in. These cookies terminate once the user closes the browser. By default, we use a persistent cookie that stores your login ID (but not your password) to make it easier for you to login when you come back to CommentAnywhere. You can remove or block this cookie using the settings in your browser if you want to disable this convenience feature.

When you use CommentAnywhere, you may set up your personal profile and post comments, photos and videos on any page on the internet. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior comments, photos and videos you have posted or easily see your friend’s posts. When you update information and posts, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.

You post User Content, as defined in the CommentAnywhere Terms of Service, on the Website and across the internet using the Service at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your posts, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your posts and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post using the Service will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site and Service. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Any improper collection or misuse of information provided on CommentAnywhere is a violation of the CommentAnywhere Terms of Service and should be reported to general@commentanywhere.com.

If you choose to use our invitation service to tell a friend about our service, we will ask you for your friend's email address. We will automatically send your friend an email inviting him or her to visit the site. CommentAnywhere stores this information to send this email and to track the success of our referral program. Your friend may contact us at general@commentanywhere.com to request that we remove this information from our database.

CommentAnywhere may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the CommentAnywhere service through the operation of the service (e.g., comment, photo or video tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

By using CommentAnywhere, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

Children Under Age 13
CommentAnywhere does 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, please do not attempt to register for CommentAnywhere or send any information about yourself to us, including your name, email address or any other personal information. No one under age 13 may provide any personal information to or on CommentAnywhere. In the event that we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at general@commentanywhere.com.

Children Between the Ages of 13 and 18
We recommend that minors over the age of 13 ask their parents for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet.

Use of Information Obtained by CommentAnywhere
When you register with CommentAnywhere, you create your own profile and network privacy settings. Your profile information, as well as your name, email and photo, are displayed to people in the networks specified in your privacy settings to enable you to connect with people on CommentAnywhere and across the internet with posts. We may occasionally use your name and email address to send you notifications regarding new services offered by CommentAnywhere that we think you may find valuable.

Profile information is used by CommentAnywhere primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings.

Profile information you submit to CommentAnywhere will be available to users of CommentAnywhere who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, network names, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the CommentAnywhere system and those limited pieces of information may be made available to third party search engines. This is primarily so your friends can find you. People who see your name in searches, however, will not be able to access your profile information unless they have a relationship to you (friend, member of your networks, etc.) that allows such access based on your privacy settings.

CommentAnywhere may send you service-related announcements from time to time through the general operation of the service.

Generally, you may opt out of such emails, though CommentAnywhere reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications.

CommentAnywhere may use information in your profile or posts without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network comment about a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you CommentAnywhere. We believe this benefits you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile or comments, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don't tell the movie company who you are.

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, other social networks as is permitted by their Terms of Service and other users of CommentAnywhere, to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile.

Sharing Your Information with Third Parties
CommentAnywhere is about sharing your comments, photos and videos with friends and people in your networks while providing you with privacy settings that restrict other users from accessing your information. We allow you to choose the information you provide to friends and networks through CommentAnywhere. CommentAnywhere creates your friends, school and regional networks automatically. CommentAnywhere is currently developing additional networks which you will be able to join soon to expand your options on who you can interact with across the internet. Your privacy settings allow you to make informed choices about who has access to your information. We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you. For example:
  • Your news feed and mini-feed may aggregate the comments, photos and videos you provide and make it available to your friends and network members according to your privacy settings.
  • We may provide information to service providers to help us bring you the services we offer. Specifically, we may use third parties to facilitate our business, such as to host the service at a co-location facility for servers, to send out email updates about CommentAnywhere, to remove repetitive information from our user lists, to process payments for products or services, to offer an online job application process, or to provide search results or links (including sponsored links). In connection with these offerings and business operations, our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities. Where we utilize third parties for the processing of any personal information, we implement reasonable contractual and technical protections limiting the use of that information to the CommentAnywhere-specified purposes.
  • If you, your friends, or members of your network use CommentAnywhere’s Facebook application on the Facebook Platform, that Facebook application may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with Facebook’s policies regarding Facebook, the Facebook Platform and Facebook Applications.
  • We occasionally provide demonstration accounts that allow non-users a glimpse into the CommentAnywhere world. Such accounts have only limited capabilities and passwords are changed regularly to limit possible misuse.
  • We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the CommentAnywhere service or using the CommentAnywhere name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.
  • We may offer services jointly with other companies on CommentAnywhere. You can tell when another company is involved in any service provided on CommentAnywhere, and we may share customer information with that company in connection with your use of that store or service.
  • If the ownership of all or substantially all of the CommentAnywhere business, or individual business units owned by CommentAnywhere, Inc., were to change, your user information may be transferred to the new owner so the service can continue operations. In any such transfer of information, your user information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.
When you use CommentAnywhere, certain information you post or share with third parties (e.g., a friend or someone in your network), such as personal information, comments, photos or videos may be shared with other users in accordance with the privacy settings you select. All such sharing of information is done at your own risk. Please keep in mind that if you disclose personal information in your profile or other personal or sensitive information when posting comments, photos or videos, this information may become publicly available.

Links
CommentAnywhere may contain links to other websites. We are of course not responsible for the privacy practices of other web sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information and posts collected by CommentAnywhere.

Third Party Advertising
Advertisements that appear on CommentAnywhere are sometimes delivered (or "served") directly to users by third party advertisers. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. These third party advertisers may also download cookies to your computer, or use other technologies such as JavaScript and "web beacons" (also known as "1x1 gifs") to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. Doing this allows the advertising network to recognize your computer each time they send you an advertisement in order to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. In this way, they may compile information about where individuals using your computer or browser saw their advertisements and determine which advertisements are clicked. CommentAnywhere does not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by the third party advertisers. Third party advertisers have no access to your contact information stored on CommentAnywhere unless you choose to share it with them.

This privacy policy covers the use of cookies by CommentAnywhere and does not cover the use of cookies or other tracking technologies by any of its advertisers.

Changing or Removing Information
Access and control over most personal information on CommentAnywhere is readily available through the profile editing tools. CommentAnywhere users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Information will be updated immediately. Individuals who wish to deactivate their CommentAnywhere account may do by disabling the CommentAnywhere browser extension and following instructions on the Account page. When you deactivate your account CommentAnywhere will erase all of your posts and profile information. Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of CommentAnywhere.

Security
CommentAnywhere takes appropriate precautions to protect our users' information. Your account information is located on a secured server behind a firewall. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number or your password), we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). (To learn more about SSL, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer). Because email and instant messaging are not recognized as secure communications, we request that you not send private information to us by email or instant messaging services. If you have any questions about the security of CommentAnywhere Web Site, please contact us at general@commentanywhere.com.

Terms of Use, Notices and Revisions
Your use of CommentAnywhere, and any disputes arising from it, is subject to this Privacy Policy as well as our Terms of Service and all of its dispute resolution provisions including arbitration, limitation on damages and choice of law. We reserve the right to change our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service at any time. Changes and clarifications will take effect immediately. If we make changes, we will post them and will indicate at the top of this page the policy's new effective date. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or through notice on our home page. We encourage you to refer to this policy on an ongoing basis so that you understand our current privacy policy. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account.

Contacting the Web Site
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at general@commentanywhere.com.