Privacy @ Geek Culture

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Who We Are
Geek Culture provides forums, websites, and applications (collectively, “Services”). We are based in Canada.

Upon request, we will delete your account and de-associate your screen name from posts. If you wish to delete posts, you can do that at any time (go to the post you wish to delete and select ‘edit’ or ‘delete’).

How This Policy Applies

This Policy describes the information we collect from you, how we use that information, and our legal basis for doing so. It also covers whether and how that information may be shared and your rights and choices regarding the information you provide to us. By using the Services offered by Geek Culture, you’re acknowledging you have agreed to our Terms of Service and that you’ve read and understood this Privacy Policy.

The Information We Collect and Receive

In order for you to create an account on Geek Culture and use our Services, or to purchase something from us, we need to collect and process certain information. Depending on your use of the Services, that may include:

Information you provide by completing forms on Geek Culture: This may contain items like your email address, age, login, and password details. We may ask for this information if you register as a user of the Services, subscribe to our newsletters, or if you contact us.
Details of any requests or transactions you make through the Services: In other words, if you buy something from us, we may collect your address in order to send you the products. Geek Culture partners with Paypal.com for payment processing, and the payment information you submit is collected and used by them in accordance with their privacy policy (click here). Geek Culture does not store your payment information.
Information about your activity on and interaction with Geek Culture, including use of our mobile apps: Such as your IP address, the type of device or browser you use, may be recorded and used for traffic anayatic purposes.
Information about the ways people visit and interact with our Services, in the form of traffic analytics: You can opt out of being included in Google Analytics here.
Communications you send to us: For example, when you ask for support, send us questions or comments, or report a problem.
Your content that you submit on or to Geek Culture in the form of comments, contributions to discussions, or messages to other users: Your content, date and time stamps, and all associated comments may be publicly viewable on Geek Culture, along with your member name. This also may be indexed by search engines and be republished elsewhere on the Internet in accordance with our Terms of Service.

You may decline to provide us with your information. However, this will limit your ability to register an account or use our Services.

You may review, change, or remove your information through your account settings. To delete your account, contact us and we will delete your account.

When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others, unless you delete such content. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes after you delete your account, but most likely we will not keep a thing, except perhaps the email you sent to ask to delete your account.

Retention

We will retain your information as long as your account is active, as necessary to provide you with the Services or as otherwise set forth in this Policy. We will also retain and use this information as necessary for the purposes set out in this Policy and to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements and protect Geek Culture’s legal rights.

Location Information

We may receive and process information about your location. We may receive location information from you when you choose to share such information on our Services, including by associating your content with a location, or we may derive your approximate location from other information about you, including your IP address.

Security

We take reasonable measures to help protect information about you from loss, theft, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

How We Use This Information

We do not sell your personal data to third parties to use for their own marketing purposes. We may use the information we collect for the following purposes:

To enable us to provide you with our Services and to improve and promote our Services.
To create and administer your account, contact you, and customize your experience on Geek Culture.
To display internet-based advertising to you on Geek Culture, to improve our advertising and measurement systems so we can show you relevant ads, and to measure the effectiveness and reach of ads and Services.
To track and analyze use of our Services so that we can improve how Geek Culture is performing and provide users with the best experience possible.
To comply with legal obligations, as part of our general business operations, and for other business administration purposes.
To keep your account secure and protect our services. Where we believe necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person or violations of our Terms of Service or this Privacy Policy.

European Union Users
Data protection law in Europe requires a “lawful basis” for collecting and retaining personal information from citizens or residents of the European Economic Area. Our lawful bases include:

Legitimate interests: This is a technical term in data protection law which essentially means we have a good and fair reason to use your data and we do so in ways which do not hurt your interest and rights. We sometimes require your data to pursue our legitimate interests in a way that might reasonably be expected as part of running our business and that does not materially impact your rights, freedom, or interests.For example, we use identity, device, and location information to prevent fraud and abuse and keep our services secure. We may also send you promotional communications about our Services, although we rarely do, subject to your right to control whether we do so.We analyze how users interact with our Services so we can understand better what elements of the design are working well and which are working not so well. This allows us to improve and develop the quality of the online experience we offer all our users.

How This Information Is Shared

We share information as set forth below, and where individuals have otherwise consented:

Information that is shared publicly

When you create a Forum account, we create a basic profile page for you on Geek Culture containing your username and the date the account was created. By default, your profile is private and you can choose to make profile information public in your account settings. Your username appears with the comments you post and messages you send on Geek Culture and, if your profile is set to public, people can click your username to view profile. If you choose to make these profile items public, others may be able to see the following things if you include them...

Your online status
Your current activity
Your month and date of birth
Your year of birth
Your details on your profile page

You may also choose to allow registered users or people you follow to do the following:

Post messages on your profile page
Receive your news feed
Start conversations with you

If you use the Geek Culture Forums on this site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. However, use of information for these purposes is a violation of our Geek Culture Terms of Service. To request removal of your personal information from our community forum, contact Snaggy.

Social Sharing

We may offer social sharing features or other integrated tools that let you share content or actions you take on our Services with other media. Your use of these features enables the sharing of certain information with your friends or the public, depending on the settings you establish with the third-party that provides the social sharing feature. For more information about the purpose and scope of data collection and processing in connection with social sharing features, please visit the privacy policies of the third parties that provide these social sharing features (e.g., Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter).

Information that’s shared with trusted third-party services

We may share your information with certain trusted third-party services to help us provide, improve, promote, or protect Geek Culture’s Services, as well as those who assist us in providing advertising services. But it's highly doubtful we ever will.

Information that’s shared to protect Geek Culture and comply with the law

We do reserve the right to disclose personal information when we believe that doing so is reasonably necessary to comply with the law or law enforcement, to prevent fraud or abuse, or to protect Geek Culture’s legal rights, property, or the safety of Geek Culture, its employees, users, or others.

Links to other websites and services

Our Services may include links to other websites or services whose privacy practices may differ from Geek Culture’s. When you use a link to an external site or service, the privacy policy and data processing disclosures for that site or service governs.

Cookies, Pixels and Tracking

Our third-party providers may use use cookies, clear GIFs/pixel tags, JavaScript, local storage, log files, and other mechanisms to automatically collect and record information about your usage and browsing activities on Geek Culture and across third-party sites or online services.

Cookies. These are small files with a unique identifier that are transferred to your browser through our websites. They allow us to remember users who are logged in, to understand how users navigate through and use Geek Culture Services, and to display personalized content and targeted ads (including on third party sites and applications).
Pixels, web beacons, clear GIFs. These are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, which we use to track the online movements of users of Geek Culture Services and the web pages of users of our ad services, and to personalize content. We also use these in our emails to let us know when they have been opened or forwarded, so we can gauge the effectiveness of our communications.
Analytics Tools.We may use internal and third-party analytics tools, including Google Analytics. You can opt out of being included in Google Analytics The third party analytics companies we work with may combine the information collected with other information they have independently collected from other websites and/or other online products and services. Their collection and use of information is subject to their own privacy policies.

Geek Culture Ads and Personalization

We also work with third parties such as network advertisers to serve ads on Geek Culture such as Google AdSense (more info here). These third parties may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs), Flash LSOs and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you.

You may opt out of much interest-based advertising on third party sites and through third party ad networks (including Google AdSense):

Children’s Privacy

We do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13 (or under the age of 14 for anyone living in Spain or South Korea) or knowingly allow such persons to register. If we become aware that we have collected personal information from a child under the relevant age without parental consent, we take steps to delete that information.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

If we change our privacy policies and procedures, we will post those changes on this page. If we make any changes to this Privacy Policy that materially change how we treat your personal information, we will endeavor to provide you with reasonable notice of such changes, such as via prominent notice in the Geek Culture forums or to your email address of record. If you continue to use our services after Privacy Policy changes go into effect, you consent to the revised policy.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy statement, please contact Snaggy.