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Effective Date:
05/28/2010
Gearlords.com
respects the privacy of visitors to our site.
This Privacy Policy governs the use and
collection of information from you by
Gearlords.com ("we" or "us") through your use of
this site. This Privacy Policy does not apply to
any information you may provide to us through
other means; for example, at a live event, via
mail, or via telephone.
Please read this Privacy Policy carefully so
that you understand our online privacy
practices. By visiting this site, you agree that
your visit, and any dispute over our online
privacy practices, is governed by this Privacy
Policy and our Visitor Agreement. Questions
regarding privacy issues should be directed to:
Contact Form
TYPES OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT
The information we gather falls into two
categories: (1) information (for example, your
name and address) that you voluntarily supply
(for example, when you register as a visitor to
the site, or customize our service to provide
you services specific to your neighborhood), and
(2) information gathered on usage patterns and
preferences as visitors navigate through our
sites. In some cases, it is an agent or
affiliate of ours that collects the information
on our behalf. Third-party providers featured on
or linked to by our site, such as vendors of
products and services offered through our site,
may be gathering the same kinds of information.
We may use your registration information to
contact you for customer service purposes, to
inform you about the services offered over our
site or of important changes or additions to our
site, and to send you newsletters, offers and
information that you request or that we think
may interest you.
Contests and Other Promotions. From time
to time, we may offer contests, sweepstakes or
other promotions on our site. If you enter one
of these promotions, you'll have to provide
information about yourself (such as your name,
address, telephone number and email address) so
that we can contact you if you win. We may share
this information with any wholly or
majority-owned subsidiary of Gearlords.com and
any co-sponsor of the promotion (we will
identify any co-sponsor in the official rules
for the promotion). If you don't want us to
collect the information requested in the
registration form or to provide it to any wholly
or majority-owned subsidiary of Gearlords.com or
contest co-sponsors, please do not enter the
contest or sweepstakes.
Email Newsletters. We may offer you the
opportunity to subscribe to email newsletters on
topics that we believe are of interest to our
visitors. If you have opted to receive a
particular newsletter, you may always
unsubscribe later if you decide not to receive
further mailings of the newsletter from us. Each
newsletter will include instructions on how to
unsubscribe from future issues by using either a
designated reply email address or hyperlink.
Cookies. To help make our sites more
responsive to the needs of our visitors, we use
a standard feature of browser software, called a
"cookie," to assign each visitor a unique,
random number, a sort of user ID, if you will,
that resides on your computer. The cookie
doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the
computer that a visitor uses to access our site.
The only personal information a cookie can
contain is information you supply. A cookie
can't read unrelated data off your hard drive.
Our advertisers and the third parties that
provide products or services through our site
may also assign their own cookies to your
browser, a process that we don't control. We use
cookies to help us tailor our site to your
needs, to deliver a better, more personalized
service. For example, we may use cookies to
allow you to search for those businesses closest
to your home. In addition, we may use cookies to
track the pages on our site visited by our
users. We can build a better site if we know
which pages our users are visiting and how
often. Of course, you can set your browser not
to accept cookies, but if you do, you may not be
able to take advantage of the personalized
features enjoyed by other visitors to our site.
Other Methods of Collecting Information.
Our web pages may contain electronic images
(called "single-pixel GIFs" or "web beacons")
that allow us and our vendors to count users who
have visited particular pages or to access
certain cookies. We may use these tools and
other technologies to recognize which pages
users visit, and which links they click on.
These features may also be included in our email
newsletters so that we can learn which messages
have been opened and acted upon. We may also be
able to verify your online purchases from us or
from third party sites that have agreed to share
such information with us.
Browser Level Information and IP Addresses.
Our web servers automatically collect limited
information about your computer configuration
when you visit our site, including the type of
browser software you use, the operating system
you're running, the resolution of your computer
monitor, the Web site that referred you, and
your IP address. (Your IP address is a numerical
address that is used by computers connected to
the Internet to identify your computer so that
data such as the web pages you want to view can
be transmitted to you.) We also use IP address
information for systems administration and
troubleshooting purposes. Your IP address does
not tell us who you are. We use this information
to deliver web pages to you upon request, to
tailor our site to the interests of our users,
and to measure traffic within our site.
DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION
Why we want to know. We collect
information in order to make the Web site more
useful and relevant to you. For example, we may
ask you for an address so that you can map a
route from your work or home address to that of
a service provider, or so you can narrow your
search to businesses that serve your
neighborhood.
Third Parties. We will not share the
personally-identifiable information you provide
when registering on our site with third parties.
We may, however, take the information you
provide and aggregate it with data from all the
other people that use this site and associated
services. Then we would use that pool of
information to inform third parties about our
audience without identifying you personally. For
example, we'll be able to say to a third party:
"We have 3,470 site visitors in this ZIP code,"
which happens to be your location.
Vendors and Provider Partners. To make
our sites more valuable to our visitors, we may
offer some features in conjunction with other
providers ("Provider Partners"). Our email
newsletters, email services and online
classifieds for example, may be made available
through cooperative arrangements with providers
that specialize in operating such services. In
some instances, our Provider Partners will have
the same access to your information as we do.
Their use of the information will be subject to
the terms of their respective privacy policies,
which you can find on their Web sites. We may
also use vendors and third-party contractors to
help us operate our site, analyze or process
data on our behalf, or improve the services that
we offer to you. We may provide these vendors
and contractors with information about our
visitors that is necessary for them to perform
the services that we request.
Statistical Information. Much of the
information we collect is in the form of
aggregated statistics, such as the traffic that
visits various pages within our sites, and the
habits and preferences of our audience. Such
aggregated information does not include any
information that would identify you personally.
We may use such aggregated information and
disclose it to third parties as we see fit.
Sites to Which We Link. Our site includes
links to plenty of other Web sites, and provides
access to services offered by third parties,
whose privacy policies we don't control. When
you access another site or purchase products or
services or conduct other transactions through
our sites, use of any information you provide is
governed by the privacy policy of the operator
of the site you're visiting or the provider of
such products or services.
Other Disclosures. We may occasionally
release information about our visitors when
release is appropriate to comply with law, to
enforce our Visitor Agreement, or to protect the
rights, property or safety of visitors to our
sites, the public, our customers, or our company
and its employees, agents, partners and
affiliates. As our business grows, we may buy or
sell various assets. In the unlikely event that
our company, or the bulk of our assets relating
to this site, is acquired by another company,
information on our visitors would be among the
transferred assets.
CHILDREN'S PRIVACY
Children should always get permission from their
parents before sending any information about
themselves (such as their names, email
addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet,
to us or to anyone else. We won't knowingly
allow anyone under 18 to register with our site,
to provide business information to our site, or
to provide any other personally identifying
information. If you're under 18, please do not
provide us with any personally identifying
information about yourself (such as your name,
your email address or your phone number).
STORAGE OF INFORMATION
All information gathered on our site is stored
within a database operated by us or by a
contractor on our behalf. Sensitive information,
such as password or information, is encoded (not
encrypted) for storage. We cannot guarantee the
security of our database, nor can we guarantee
that information you supply won't be intercepted
while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
CHANGES TO THIS
PRIVACY POLICY
A final note: The Web is an evolving medium. If
we need to change our privacy policy at some
point in the future, we'll post the changes
before they take effect.
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