Ettinger’s Factoids and we (Stephen Ettinger, Edward Feldman, and Etienne Côte) take your privacy seriously because we recognize its importance. This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes our policies and procedures on the collection, use and disclosure of your personally identifiable information (“Personal Information”) when you use Ettinger’s Factoids and any linked pages, features, content, and any other services we may offer from time to time in connection with any of the above (collectively, the “Service”). The Ettinger’s Factoids Terms of Use, including their paragraphs limiting damages and providing for individual arbitration of disputes, apply to and are incorporated by reference into this Policy. This Policy does not apply to information we collect by other means (including offline) or from other sources.
The informational content within Ettinger’s Factoids is copyright Elsevier, Inc. (2017) and the Privacy Policies of Elsevier, Inc. and its subsidiaries and relevant third parties apply to the informational content (factual information regarding veterinary internal medicine) in Ettinger’s Factoids. Distribution of Ettinger’s Factoids occurs through digital distribution services such as the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play, and use of Ettinger’s Factoids exists under the privacy policy of the associated digital distribution service from which it was obtained.
The Service may be made available to business and enterprise customers (and their users, collectively, the “business users”). In order to provide the Service, Ettinger’s Factoids could collect information from its business users that may include personal information of business users. We may also collect certain information directly from business users’ employees and other users who access the Service. Unless otherwise noted, references to users or end users include both consumer users and business users.
When a user registers for an account with us, accesses our Service, or updates their profile with us, we may collect information directly from that user, including name and email address, as well as other information added to a user’s profile (such as domain name; browser type and operating system; web pages viewed; links clicked; IP address; the length of time on platform; the referring URL, or the webpage or other source, that led to our site; access time; and any device identifier). We may also receive certain additional user information from our business users. For example, our business users may provide us with the names and email addresses of their employees or other agents who are authorized to access the Service, as well as other information about such employees or agents.
Although a user profile is not currently part of Ettinger’s Factoids, if a profile feature is created in the future, your name and other information you choose to add to your profile may be available to other users of the Service. Users may also be able to follow other users; if a user chooses to follow you, the user will be able to see the information, such as notes and certain profile information, that you have not set to private. Consumer users could interact with Ettinger’s Factoids in a way that involves their social networking site (“SNS”) account credentials. If you were to use your Facebook®, Twitter®, or other SNS credentials to sign in to Ettinger’s Factoids, we would have the right to collect and store your SNS user ID. We also could collect information you supply to us regarding your personal preferences and interests. If you used your SNS account credentials to access the Service, you would do so while understanding that some content and/or information in your SNS account (“Third Party Account Information”) may be transmitted into your account with us if you authorize such transmissions, and that Third Party Account Information transmitted to our Service is covered by this Policy. You also could provide us information by submitting user-generated content to the Service (“User-generated Content”), including your notes and highlights, and collaborate with other users.
Your User-generated Content, and metadata about it (such as when you submitted the User-generated Content), could be viewable by other Ettinger’s Factoids users, along with your first name and the first initial of your last name (unless the Service permits you to post anonymously). You may generally control whether your User-generated Content is private or public either at the time you submit such information or when setting the preferences for your account.
Business users can collaborate with other business users, their subcontractors and other collaborators within the same organizations, as part of a project or otherwise. In such cases, the content you post is shared with these other users unless you set it to private; your name and email address is also viewable by other users within your organization.
Consumer users may invite other users and share or gift content to other consumer users. If you choose to follow a friend using the Service, invite a friend to use the Service or gift Ettinger’s Factoids content to a friend, we will ask you for that person’s email address. Ettinger’s Factoids has the right to store the email address(es) you submit to send relevant communications, to register your friend(s) if your invitation or gift is accepted, to track the success of invitation and gifting programs, and to identify your friends on Ettinger’s Factoids. If you submit any personal information about other people to us or to our service providers, you represent that you have the authority to do so and to allow us to use their Personal Information in accordance with this Privacy Policy (for example, by asking for their consent).
We may automatically collect the following information about your use of our Service through cookies, web beacons, and other technologies: your domain name; your browser type and operating system; web pages you view; links you click; your IP address; the length of time you use our Services; the referring URL, or the webpage or other source, that led you to our site; access time; and any device identifier. We may combine this information with other information that we have collected about you, including, where applicable, your username, name, and other personal information Please see the section “Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” below for more information.
In addition, we may collect different types of information about your location, including general information (e.g., IP address, zip code) and more specific information (e.g., GPS-based functionality on mobile devices used to access the Service), and may use that information to customize the Service with location-based information and features. If you access the Service through a mobile device and you do not want your device to provide us with location-tracking information, you can disable the GPS or other location-tracking functions on your device, provided your device allows you to do this.
You can choose not to provide us with any or all of the information we specify or request, but then you may not be able to register with us or to take advantage of some or all of our features.
By using Ettinger’s Factoids, you grant us the right to use the information that we gather about you for the following sorts of purposes:
While we do not currently share Personal Information, we reserve the right to do so with the following third-party recipients:
In certain situations, we may employ other companies and people to perform tasks on our behalf and share your information with them to provide that service. Except as stated in this Privacy Policy or unless we inform you otherwise, our agents do not have our permission to use the Personal Information we share with them beyond what we deem necessary to assist us in performing such tasks.
Certain user profile information, including without limitation, a user’s username and any image content that such user has used in relation to our Service, may be visible to other users to facilitate user interaction within the Service, to address your request for our services or to otherwise enable features of the Service. Although a public user profile feature is not currently part of Ettinger’s Factoids, if one were to become available in the future, any content you upload to your public user profile, along with any personal information or content that you voluntarily disclose online in a manner other users can view (on discussion boards, in messages and chat areas, etc.) could be viewable by others.
Businesses or third-party websites we work with may provide services to you through the Service (either alone or jointly with us). For example, we could include the ability for you to automatically transmit information from Ettinger’s Factoids to an account on a third-party website or service, such as Facebook or Instagram. We do not control the policies and practices of third party websites or businesses, such as Facebook or Instagram, even if they may be affiliated or partnered with us or the Service, so if you choose to take part in any transaction or service relating to a third party website or business, please review all relevant privacy and other policies of such website or business.
We may disclose personal information in connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your personal information according to this Privacy Policy.
We and Ettinger’s Factoids may disclose your Personal Information if required to do so by law, court order, subpoena, other legal process, or if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect our rights and/or property.
We and Ettinger’s Factoids may disclose aggregate and/or anonymized information collected through the Service and our and Ettinger’s Factoids’s use and disclosure of such aggregate and/or anonymized information by us or third parties is not subject to any restrictions under this Policy.
We and Ettinger’s Factoids may disclose your personal information to any other person with your consent to the disclosure.
Our third-party service providers use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about your use of our Service. We may combine this information with other personal information we collect from you (and our third-party service providers may do so on our behalf).
Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive through your web browser for record-keeping purposes. Some cookies allow us to make it easier for you to navigate our Service, while others are used to enable a faster log-in process, to allow us to track your activities on our Service, or to otherwise enable Service features. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can edit your browser options to block them in the future. The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your computer from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether.
Clear GIFs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on your computer’s hard drive, clear GIFs are embedded invisibly on web pages. We may use clear GIFs (also known as web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags), in connection with our site to, among other things, track the activities of site visitors, help us manage content and compile statistics about site usage. We or our service providers may also use clear GIFs in HTML emails to our customers to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed and track whether our emails are forwarded.
We or third parties with whom we partner to provide certain features of the Service or to display advertising based upon your tracked activity may use Local Storage Objects (LSOs) using technologies such as HTML5 or Flash to collect and store information. Various browsers may offer management tools for removing HTML5 LSOs.
We may use third party analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to collect, monitor and analyze collected information in order to improve functionality and user-friendliness, to better tailor the Services to our visitors’ needs, and for marketing and business development purposes. Accordingly, usage data is shared with Google, which has its own privacy policy addressing how it uses such information. We encourage you to review this privacy policy to understand how Google uses such information.
Currently, our systems do not recognize browser “do-not-track” requests. You may, however, disable certain tracking as discussed above (e.g., by disabling cookies).
We reserve the right to use third parties such as network advertisers to serve advertisements on our Site and on third-party websites or other media (e.g. social networking platforms). For example, we may use LinkedIn, Microsoft AdCenter, and Google Ad Words to serve advertisements on third-party websites. This would enable us and these third parties to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Third-party ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs), LSOs and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These third-party cookies and other technologies are governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, not this one. We may provide these third-party advertisers with information, including Personal Information, about you.
Users in the United States may opt out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) Consumer Choice Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and choices regarding having information used by DAA companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and choices regarding having information used by NAI members.
Users in the European Union may also opt out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (“EDAA”) Your Online Choices Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and choices regarding having information used by EDAA members.
Opting out from one or more companies listed on the DAA Consumer Choice Page, the NAI Consumer Opt-Out Page or the EDAA Your Online Choices Page will opt you out from those companies’ delivery of interest-based content or ads to you, but it does not mean you will no longer receive any advertisements: you may continue to receive advertisements, for example, based on the particular website that you are viewing (i.e., contextually based ads). Also, if your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you opt out on the DAA, NAI, or EDAA-related websites, your opt-out may not be effective. Additional information is available on the DAA’s website at http://www.aboutads.info, the NAI’s website at http://www.networkadvertising.org, and the EDAA’s website at http://www.youronlinechoices.com/goodpractice.
We invite you to generate content on our Service, including notes, tags, and other content features should they become available in the future. If you create content, the information that you create may be available to any other users of our Services. Your content may become public and we expect anyone viewing such content to comply with this Privacy Policy; however, we cannot guarantee that user-generated content will not be used by others in a manner that may violate this Policy, the law, or your personal privacy.
Our site may include social media features and widgets, such as the Facebook Like button and the “Share this” button, as well as other interactive mini-programs that run on our site and enable certain features to work (e.g., blogs and comments). These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our site, or other information, and may set a cookie or use other tracking technology to enable the feature to function properly and for other purposes. These features are displayed on our site, but are hosted by third parties, and are subject to their own privacy policies, not this one.
If you are a resident from the European Economic Area, our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.
However, we will normally collect personal information from you only where we have your consent to do so, where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, or where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your data protection interests or fundamental rights and freedoms. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.
If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information). Similarly, if we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.
If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your Personal Information for any specific processing activity, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “Contact Us” Section below.
Please be aware that despite our best efforts, no data security measures can guarantee 100% security. You are responsible for taking steps to protect against unauthorized access to your password, phone, and computer by, among other things, signing off after using a shared computer, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess, and keeping your log-in and password private. We are not responsible for any lost, stolen, or compromised passwords or for any unauthorized activity on your account.
If you are located outside the United States, please note that your Personal Information may be transferred to and processed in the United States. The level of data protection provided may or may not be comparable to the level of data protection in the country where you are located.
If you wish to access, correct, update or request deletion of your personal information, you can do so at any time by contacting us at ettingersfactoids@gmail.com.
In addition, if you are a resident of the European Union, you can object to processing of your personal information, ask us to restrict processing of your personal information or request portability of your personal information. You can exercise these rights by contacting us at ettingersfactoids@gmail.com.
You have the right to opt out of marketing communications we send you at any time. You can exercise this right by contacting us at ettingersfactoids@gmail.com.
Similarly, if we have collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. (Contact details for data protection authorities in the European Economic Area are available here). We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
Our Service is not designed for children under 13, and we do not want to collect, nor do we seek to collect, Personal Information from children under 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register with the Service. If we discover that we have collected Personal Information from a child under 13, we will take steps to remove that information from our systems. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at ettingersfactoids@gmail.com.
We are not responsible for the practices employed by third parties linked to or from the Service, nor the information or content contained therein. Please remember that if you use a link to go from the Service to a third party (website or other location), our Policy is no longer in effect. Your browsing and interaction on any third party location, including those that have a link on our Service, is subject to that third-party website’s own rules and policies.
We reserve the right to retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements).
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing to the best of our ability until deletion is possible.
We may amend this Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Policy in effect at the time such information is used. If we make any changes to this Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to the Personal Information we have previously collected from you, we will endeavor to notify you in advance of such change by contacting you using the contact information you have provided to Ettinger’s Factoids as part of your Personal Information. If we are required by applicable data protection laws to seek your consent to any changes in use of your Personal Information described in our updated Privacy Policy, then we will endeavor to do so using the contact information you have provided to Ettinger’s Factoids.
If you have any questions about our privacy practices or this Policy, please contact us at ettingersfactoids@gmail.com.
Last updated: November 16, 2019