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PRIVACY POLICY:

Thank you for visiting PatsFans.com. When I put the site together, it was designed and built for fans from all over the world to have a place to connect and I value our privacy just as much as you do. To better protect your privacy, I'm providing this notice explaining this site's online information practices and the way the information is used.

THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT

At some areas of the site, you can register for the forum, read and reply to messages, vote in polls, subscribe to services such as online newsletters, etc, and utilize content. The types of information that may be requested and collected at these pages are:

E-mail Address
Date of Birth
Account Username
Account Password
I.P. Address
Name
Mailing Address (if we need to send you something from a contest, etc.)

We also may collect non-personally identifiable information when you visit our web pages such as the type of browser you are using (e.g., Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer), your I.P. Address, and the address of the website you were referred from.

There may be other occasions where you can submit information about other people. For example, you might submit a friend's name and e-mail address to send a story, or invite them to our site. We collect this information but only in the event we need to step in to prevent abuse or other misuse of that e-mail tool (e.g. someone e-mailing that story 300 times to one person).

HOW WE USE THE INFORMATION

We may use the information that you provide for account set up and to fulfill your request for products, programs, and services. We will sometimes use this information to communicate with you, such as to notify you of when you have won a contest, when changes to your account may be required, or to notify you in the event of any major changes in policy or services offered here at the site.

The non-personal information we collect is used to monitor traffic and also allows us to improve our site to better fit the needs of the fans who use it.

COLLECTION OF INFORMATION BY THIRD-PARTY SITES

Some of our pages will contain links to products to affiliate sites, or direct links to the site itself, and their information practices may be different than ours. Visitors should consult the other sites' privacy notices as we have no control over the information that is submitted to, or collected by, these third parties.

USE OF COOKIES:

1) The only cookies collected by PatsFans.com are used on just a few applications on this site:

  • The forum software sets one after you login to keep your session active.
  • If you're logged in and have the "new post" notifications enabled, a cookie is updated and logs that you've closed it so it doesn't pop up until the next time a post is changed. Otherwise, it would continue to pop up each time it's polled.
  • The newsletter popup on our blog has one, which is to save your setting for the remainder of your session if you (x) out so it doesn't pop up again.

2) A handful of ad networks are used here, and each uses cookies. Each ad network gives you the ability to click on the link on the ad and opt out. If you've visited the Account Upgrades section and you're a supporting member, the site is ad-free and the ad code doesn't run on the site at all which eliminates that all together. That's a recent change as it used to only be here in the forum, but now it allows anyone to read a blog entry, view stats, news, etc. without ads. So if you support the site, that ad-free benefit is now carried site-wide.

STORAGE/SHARING OF DATA:

1) If you've registered for an account here, the only data stored here is your username, your selected password, email, and date of birth (which is required to prove you're 18-years old or older - and is for a different compliance) and your IP address (used to prevent spam, abusive users, etc.). Also stored are your selections if you've enabled/disabled different boxes in the upper-left slideout menu, which control what you want to see along with your selections of reporters you do/don't want to view in the Twitter channel. The system obviously also saves and counts your likes, dislikes, winner, funny, etc. ratings. Your other profile settings and fields are also saved, and obviously not shared with anyone.

2) If you've saved any links in the link library, those are stored along with any additional information you've entered for them.

3) If you've signed up for our newsletter, which is powered by MailChimp, your name, username and email are stored and you can obviously opt out at any time.

Like most standard Web site servers we analyze traffic via log files. This includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and similar information. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information.

We use Google Analytics to analyze the use of our website. Google Analytics gathers information about website use by means of cookies. The information gathered relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website. Google's privacy policy is available at: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.

ADVERTISING PRIVACY STATEMENT

This Site is affiliated with CMI Marketing, Inc., d/b/a CafeMedia (“CafeMedia”) for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and CafeMedia will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about CafeMedia’s data usage, click here: www.cafemedia.com/publisher-advertising-privacy-policy.

This Site is also affiliated with AdThrive, LLC (“AdThrive”) for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site. AdThrive uses standard and widely-available tools for the placement and serving of ads, including those provided by Google, Inc. and its affiliates. We publish interest-based advertisements on the Site; that is, ads that are tailored to reflect your interests. To help understand your interests, AdThrive, Google and our other advertising partners will track your behaviour on our website and on other websites across the Internet using cookies. .

A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.

By using this Site, you consent to the use of such cookies and the sharing of data captured by such cookies with AdThrive, Google, and our other third party partners. You can view, delete or add interest categories associated with your browser by visiting: https://adssettings.google.com. You can also opt out of the network cookie using those settings or using the Network Advertising Initiative's multi-cookie opt-out mechanism at: http://optout.networkadvertising.org. However, these opt-out mechanisms themselves use cookies, and if you clear the cookies from your browser your opt-out will not be maintained.

For European Economic Area Residents:

If you reside in a country in the European Economic Area (EEA), then under the GDPR and applicable data protection laws you have the rights, among other things, to access your personal data, have us erase it, and/or restrict its further processing. If you wish to access or delete your personal data (if any) maintained by us or AdThrive related to advertising on the Site, you can contact us at **[email protected]** and contact AdThrive at [email protected]. If you wish to see a list of the advertising partners we work with or change which of those partners track your behavior using cookies, click the ad preferences link at the bottom of the site. (Available in the EU.)

LEGAL NOTES

We may disclose personally identifiable information in response to legal process, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena. We also may disclose such information in response to a law enforcement agency's request.

Although we take appropriate measures to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures of information with security measures, we cannot assure you that personally identifiable information that we collect will never be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Notice.

Otherwise, please let me know if you ever have any questions or concerns and I hope you enjoy your time here with us at PatsFans.com!

Sincerely,

Ian Logue
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Site Owner of PatsFans.com