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BracketMaker.com Privacy Policy

BracketMaker.com considers your privacy to be very important. The following notice explains our privacy policies in detail. Please contact us if you have any additional questions.

Information Collection and Use
BracketMaker.com is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. BracketMaker.com collects information from our users at several different points on our website.

Registration
In order to use certain areas of BracketMaker.com, a user must first complete the registration form. During registration a user is required to give their email address and a name (does not have to be their real name, but email address is required to verify identity and ensure accountability since each user has the ability to enter content into the website's database). Other information such as phone number are optional, and are used only if we need to contact the individual, for example, if they are having problems with their email. Information gathered may be used to contact the user about the services on our site for which they have expressed interest.

Cookies
A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's hard drive containing information about the user. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information while on our site. We deploy them simply to keep track of your login status, otherwise you would have to log back into the system every time you loaded a new page. Once you log out or your login expires, only your login id remains in a single cookie. This allows the website to remember who you are the next time you visit, thus saving you time since you don't have to enter your email address again. If a user rejects the cookie, they may still use our site. The only drawback to this is that the user will be limited in some areas of our site, most importantly the publisher's section where you can create your own brackets. In the future, we may also use cookies to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. Also, advertisers and/or advertising agencies may use cookies on our site, but we have no access to or control over those cookies because they are set from their own websites, totally separate from ours.

Log Files
We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer the site, track user's movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Information Sharing and Disclosure
BracketMaker.com will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information. In the future, we may share aggregated demographic information with our partners and advertisers, but this will not be linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.

Links
BracketMaker.com contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by BracketMaker.com.

Surveys & Contests
BracketMaker.com may request information from users via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and the user therefore has a choice whether or not to disclose this information. Information requested may include contact information (such as name and shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code, age level). Contact information will be used to notify the winners and award prizes. Survey information will be used for purposes of monitoring or improving the use and satisfaction of this site.

Security
Your BracketMaker.com registration information is password-protected for your privacy and security. For the same reasons, we do not allow the website to "remember" your password, because many users may be logging in from a public terminal, which creates a risk if another user gains access. Please always remember to logout and even close the web browser when you are done entering data, especially in these situations. All of our users' information is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, a customer service representative) are granted access to personally identifiable information. All our employees are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. Every quarter, as well as any time new policies are added, our employees are notified and/or reminded about the importance we place on privacy, and what they can do to ensure our customers' information is protected. Finally, the servers that we store personally identifiable information on are kept in a secure environment, connected directly to a switch instead of a hub so that other servers in our provider's colocation facility do not share packets of information travelling through the local network. However, since we do not have control over every point through which data may travel to and from your own location, it is a good policy to change your password now and then. Also note that password changes are confirmed via email.

Announcements and Special Offers
Registered users may occasionally receive site and service announcement updates or information on products, services, special deals, a newsletter, and so on. Out of respect for the privacy of our users we present the option to not receive these types of communications. Please see our choice and opt-out below.

Correction/Updating Personal Information
If your personally identifiable information changes, you can update it using the registration edit form which you can access from the My Brackets page. If you wish to be removed from our database, you can contact Customer Support.

Choice/Opt-out
To date we have not actually sent any group email announcements, but when we do we will give our users the opportunity to 'opt-out' of receiving email announcements by providing a link in the email which allows them to unsubscribe while still keeping their registration current (in the future we will also provide a checkbox for this in the registration form). Also, if we decide at any point in the future to share information with third parties, users will be able to opt out of that as well. Users of our site will always be notified when their information is being collected by any outside parties. We will only do this so our users can make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with services that require an outside party or not.

Notification of Changes
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes here so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify users by way of an email. Users will have a choice as to whether or not we use their information in this different manner. We will use information in accordance with the privacy policy under which the information was collected.

 


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