CareGradet.com Privacy Policy Last Updated: January 15, 2007
caregrade.com believes the internet should be a safe place for people to find information and transact business. We have created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and usage practices. For additional information about Caregrade.com, please review our Terms of Use. This policy is a part of those Terms of Use. caregrade.com is committed to protecting your privacy. We want your time with us spent reviwing senior care providers and facilites and not worrying about your privacy. Therefore we have an extremely simple policy.
In order to register for this site we need information from you, such as your email address as well as a username and password. We use this information to validate your registration and update you in reference to our site.
1. Third Party Access to Your Email Address: caregrade.com is the sole owner of the information and does not sell or rent your email address to third parties.
3. Use of Membership Registration Data: Demographic and profile data may be collected at our site. We use this data to tailor your experience at caregrade.com, showing content that we think you might be interested in, and displaying the content according to your preferences. We do this in two ways. First, we analyze members’ information in aggregate - that is, we collect information about thousands of site visits and analyze it as a whole. This kind of study involves looking for trends among many visitors to caregrade.com, rather than analyzing information about any individual member. This allows us to measure relative interest in the various areas of our web sites for marketing and advertising purposes. Any information we collect is used for its own internal purposes to improve the content of the web sites, to enhance users' experiences when visiting our sites, to customize the content and/or layout of our pages, and to provide the services required by an individual user. We do not use personal identifying information for any reason that is not disclosed either in this Policy or at the time the information is requested Examples include researching which parts of the site are accessed most frequently, or determining which products are most attractive to our users. Second, we may use information gathered during your visit to help customize our communications with you at an individual level. Our site may contain links to other web sites, including web sites directed to children. Please note that we have no control over the privacy practices or the content of any of our business partners, advertisers, affiliates, sponsors or other sites to which we provide links from/to our site. It is recommended you check the applicable privacy policy of the web site sponsor when visiting other web sites. We have no control over the privacy practices or the content of posts made by individuals not employed by caregrade.com, and we take no responsibility for such posts.
4. Online Member Surveys: caregrade.com may periodically conduct individual voluntary member surveys. We encourage our members to participate in these surveys because they provide us with important information that helps us to improve the types of services we offer, and how we provide them to you. The responses we collect in online surveys are anonymous to us. In the end, we hope to tailor our communications with you and site layout to fit your needs --- so that you receive more of what you want from us and less of what you don't want.
5. Service Providers: We use third parties to provide some products or services. Information is shared as necessary for the third party to provide that service. These third parties are not permitted to use your personal information for any purpose unrelated to providing that product or service.
6. Public Forums, Chat Rooms, Blogs This site may make available to its users chat rooms, forums, blogs, message boards, instant messaging and/or news groups. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information. caregrade.com expressly disclaims any liability that may arise from the provision of any User of any information whatsoever to these forums. You, the User, do hereby agree to hold caregrade.com harmless from any liability that may arise from the provision of any information to these forums.
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. We use this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program.
Your friend may contact us at the listed contact information to request that we remove this information from our database.
8. Orders: Caregrade.com may make certain products or services available for purchase. If you purchase a product or service from us, we request certain personally identifiable information from you on our order form. You must provide contact information (such as name, email, and shipping address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date). We use this information for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.
9. The Security of Your Information: We work diligently to protect the security of your personal information during transmission by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, which encrypts information you input. Your data is kept in a highly secure environment protected from access by unauthorized parties. It is important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer by ensuring you logoff when finished visiting caregrade.com using a shared computer (such as computers from work, cyber-cafes or libraries).
10. Am I protected by Law?: We're subject to it just like everyone else. We're required to give information to legal authorities and other parties if they have the proper authorization such as a search warrant or court order. Short of that, the only people authorized to view your contact or billing information are authorized employees at caregrade.com, acting within the scope of their duties.
11. Cookies: Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored in a browser-related file on your computer's hard drive when you use our Web site. We use cookies to improve the member experience, like allowing the member to login without typing the registered email address or registration number and password. We also use them to deliver information and fresh content specific to your interests. Cookies are widely used on most major Web sites and ARE NOT tied to a users personal information.
12. Third-Party Cookies and Pixel GIFs: We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may employ cookies and action tags (also known as single pixel GIFs or Web beacons) to measure advertising effectiveness. Our understanding is that information that these third parties collect via cookies and action tags is anonymous and we do not enable third party advertising companies to have access to any of the personal information you have provided to us.
13. Browser Monitor: caregrade.com may employ a browser monitor within Web pages on our site (including your Home Page) in order to optimize your user experience. Browser monitors help identify browser status and the client-side metrics relating to page loading. We constantly seek ways to improve page load times for our members and may ultimately use these metrics for such purposes. Any such browser monitor will only be active while the use is active on the caregrade.com site. For your protection, any such browser monitor will not require an executable (*.exe) application.
14. IP Address and Log Files: Like most Internet sites, we use your IP address and standard log files to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our Web site. Your IP address and referring URLs also are used to gather broad demographic information. This information is distributed to current and potential advertisers, but only in aggregate form. It does not contain information that identifies individual members.
15. Advertisers Privacy Policies: Some caregrade.com advertisers and affiliate partners may request information directly from users, or link to sites that do so. Additionally, our site may contain links to other web sites, including web sites directed to children. Please note that we have no control over the privacy practices or the content of any of our business partners, advertisers, affiliates, sponsors or other sites to which we provide links from/to our site. It is recommended you check the applicable privacy policy of the web site sponsor when visiting other web sites. We have no control over the privacy practices or the content of posts made by individuals not employed by caregrade.com, and we take no responsibility for such posts.
16. Third-Party Links: caregrade.com contains non-advertising links to a variety of third party sites to enhance the member experience. caregrade.com has no control of either the content or privacy policies of such sites, nor should such links be considered an endorsement of these sites except where otherwise noted.
17. Children/Minors: Protecting the privacy of the young is especially important to Caregrade.com. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our Web site from those we actually know are under 18, and no part of our Web site should be used by those under 18. If we learn that anyone under 18 is using the site, that person will be blocked from accessing the site.
18. Updates to our information practices: From time to time, we make changes to our information practices or alter the functionality of our Web site. We always update this statement accordingly, so we encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on privacy practices caregrade.com. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you in this Privacy Policy, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.
19. Abuse of Terms of Use: We have the right to share your name and contact information with our attorneys and law enforcement officials, if needed, in the event we believe you have breached our Terms of Use.
20. Use of Materials: The right to download and store or output the materials on our site is granted for the user's personal use only, and materials may not be reproduced in any edited form. Any other reproduction, transmission, performance, displays or editing of these materials by any means mechanical or electronic without the express written permission of us is strictly prohibited. Users wishing to obtain permission to reprint or reproduce any materials appearing on these sites may contact us at info@caregrade.com.
21. Transfer of Our Assets: Maintaining the confidentiality of our customers' information is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling or sharing it with others. However, as we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy assets. In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets. In the event that caregrade.com is, or substantially all of caregrade.com's assets are, acquired by another company, customer information will be one of the transferred assets and that company may revise this Privacy Policy consistent with the “Updates to our information practices” section above.
If you have any questions or comments about our privacy practices, please contact us at info@caregrade.com.
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our homepage.
