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Guidescope provides software and services that help you surf the Web
faster and safer by blocking advertisements and other unwanted graphics.
Our software works by sending the URLs you visit to our server, which
checks them against a database of known ads and sends back a list of
graphics to be blocked. Because our service sees where you go on the Web
(so it can stop the ads there), we have carefully designed the service to
avoid gathering information that would be likely to harm the privacy of
your movements around the Web.
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- We avoid knowing who you are. Our software identifies
you only by a number, never a name, email address, or physical address.
- We quickly strip out and discard the account number in
our records of your Web-browsing activity so that they can't be linked
to your account.
- We show you all the information we have about your
account. We provide an easy way for you to change and delete it if you wish.
- We give you a button that you can press to stop the transmission to
our server of browsing information about where you are going on the Web.
You may turn this off and on at will. (Some features can't work while
you have it turned off.)
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To protect the information about where you go on the Web,
we take great care to reduce the possibility that
the URLs we vet for you could be associated with your real identity.
Instead of using your name or email address, your account is maintained
using a randomly generated account number for identification.
We never ask for your identity and we will never attempt to determine it.
Our software provides a way for you to communicate with us without
even revealing an email address. We do not ask for your email address
in order to provide the service to you.
You are also welcome to send us regular email, but if you already
use our service it's better to use
User Mail because it maintains
your anonymity and allows us to help with account-specific questions.
If you reveal your email address to us by sending us email we may reply
to you but we will not send you unsolicited commercial email or sell
your email address to spammers.
We maintain copies of email for the purpose of customer service
and do not normally disclose them to anyone else. If you wish to see
or delete our copies of email from you we can do this within
a reasonable time and for a reasonable fee; contact us at
sales@guidescope.com.
The profile maintained about your account is available for your inspection.
You can change or delete it as you wish,
online and at no charge.
Once you have installed the Guidescope software, links to your
"User Profile" will appear at the top and bottom of all of
the pages on the Guidescope Web site. Please refer to the
online manual for further information on
changing your user profile.
To see a sample profile
click here. It contains the following information:
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- Your filtering preference settings (how blocked graphics appear, the action
you want when the Web page you visit doesn't exist, your preferred search
engine, your preferred reference, your preferred weather site, and your favorite
sites list),
- Any optional demographic information you provide us (your birth year,
gender, country, and zip code).
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We "anonymize" the clickstream of URLs within a few days of processing it,
so that it is not associated for very long with your account number.
If we were required by a court or legal process to disclose the
information we have about your account number, all we would have to hand over
is what's in the profile and our cache. (Our cache probably has less
information than what's in your browser's cache.)
If the account number is associated with an institutional account,
we would also have the limited account information
described below.
Our software strips the information after the ?'s in URLs before sending
them to us, because the information after the ?'s sometimes contains
information that you typed into forms (for example, your query terms at
a search engine).
To protect your privacy and maintain security, we do not block ads on
or examine data streams associated with pages of Internet sites
that use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), an option commonly used on order forms
that collect personal information such as collect credit card numbers.
When we release lists of URLs and statistics about what groups
of people visit them, we take care to make sure that the groups
contain at least 100 people so that even your anonymized
visits are always one in a crowd.
These extensive precautions and features of our software were designed
to reduce the possibility that your browsing history might be associated
with you personally. Unfortunately we cannot completely eliminate this
possibility for you. Many other sites and software suppliers attempt
to link your browsing behavior with your identity, and we are not
responsible for this.
For Visitors to the Guidescope Site
Whereas the information above applies only to users of our software,
the following information also applies to all visitors to our site,
even if they are not using our software.
Guidescope's Web site does not use cookies.
Our Web server temporarily logs the following commonly collected
information. We use this information in aggregate to discover
where our visitors come from and to plan for future needs:
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- The URL of pages requested,
- The date and time of the requests,
- The "Referer" (the URL that led you to our site), and
- The IP address used to connect to our site over the Internet.
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We "anonymize" the server logs periodically, destroying
the individual records and cutting the link with a particular
IP address.
Our web site contains links to other sites, but these are not
endorsements of the information practices of those sites.
This privacy statement applies solely to Guidescope's Web site.
For Institutional Customers of Guidescope
In the case of businesses that pay Guidescope for its service, nonprofits,
and educational institutions,
Guidescope requires some additional information to manage this
business-to-business relationship.
This includes
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- email addresses for billing and technical contacts,
which may be email aliases (e.g. purchasing@YourCompanysName.com)
rather than specific to a real person,
- the organization name, and
- the number of users of the Guidescope service.
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This information, which is collected on
the Institutional Sign Up form,
is associated with an account number for the entire institution,
rather than a specific individual user at the institution.
All the information maintained by Guidescope about the institutional account
is available to the account contacts
on request, and may be deleted if desired after termination of the account.
Account contacts should send requests via
this form (check "Privacy").
As with individuals, the clickstream data of institutions is anonymized
within a few days of processing it, so that it is not
associated for very long with any account number.
To protect the corporate confidentiality of its institutional customers,
the aggregated statistics that Guidescope releases
are never specific to one institution or attributed to a particular institution.
Guidescope gives each user within an institution the same privacy
protection as described
above
for non-paying individuals.
Guidescope does not provide URL-specific clickstream data about users
to their own institution, though the institution could record
this information itself.
For Co-Brand Affiliates of Guidescope
In the case of participants in Guidescope's Affiliate program, Guidescope
requires some additional information to manage this business-to-business
relationship. This includes:
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- The organization name,
- A URL for the organization,
- An email address for the administrative contact, which may be an email
alias (e.g. marketing@YourCompanysName.com) rather than
specific to a real person,
- A graphic with a link URL, and
- A password.
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This information, which is collected on the Co-Branding
Affiliate Application form and on the
password-protected Affiliate Member
account maintenance pages, is associated with a randomly assigned account number for the
institution, rather than a specific individual user at the institution.
Individuals who publish Web sites are also permitted to become Affiliates.
Guidescope treats these email addresses and passwords as confidential;
the other information is published and made available to Guidescope
users as described in the Affiliate Agreement and
accompanying literature.
All the information maintained by Guidescope about administration of the
Affiliate's account is available to the account contacts on request,
and may be deleted if desired after termination of participation in
the program. Account contacts should use the password-protected form at
http://www.guidescope.com/cobrand/member.htm.
Guidescope may provide an Affiliate with statistics on the number
of downloads, their installations, and degree of use of the service
by users collectively who download following the Affiliate's links.
Guidescope will not provide individual clickstream data to Affiliates
about the users they refer to Guidescope, even in anonymous form.
Guidescope may provide the Affiliate with aggregate statistics about
the browsing behavior of large groups of the users it refers, consistent
with the section on individual users. Guidescope's
processes and procedures for supplying such statistics are designed to
prevent Affiliates from gaining information about each others' customers.
Changes To This Privacy Policy
We may make minor modifications to this policy simply by changing
this text at this URL. If we ever wish to make a major substantive change
to the policy for users,
such as changing one of the
top four points above, our
software will alert you beforehand and obtain your affirmative consent
to the specific change before allowing service to continue.
If we ever wish to make a material change affecting Personally
Identifiable Information (PII), such as the email address of an
institutional customer or affiliate, we will seek affirmative
consent, typically by emailing details of the proposed change. If
we do not receive consent, we will either use the PII only
according to the old policy, or we will delete the relevant
PII. Deletion may entail termination of the account or loss
of functionality.
Questions About This Privacy Policy
If you have any questions about privacy or our information practices,
please use this
feedback form, which will be processed faster
than User Mail or email to privacy@guidescope.com.
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