Webenue, LLC Privacy Statement
This is the official Privacy Statement of Webenue, LLC, a Florida
Limited Liability Company (the "Company", or "We").
This statement pertains to all of the Company's brands and divisions
including TrafficBoys, MarketingBoys, SafelistBoys, HitBoys, EmailBoys,
FrugalBoys, CopySurgery and automatically extends to any future division or
brand, unless a separate privacy statement is published on the
brand's web site.
OK, that's all the legalese you're going to find on this page.
I don't know about you, but I fall asleep reading privacy statements.
They're too full of "Forwith" and "To As",
and "Parties of the First Part" to suit me. You end
up clicking off and hoping to God that you didn't just give someone
permission to sell photographs of you in the shower to the National
Enquirer.
You may have gone to Harvard Law School, but around here we're
just a bunch of marketing and techno-geeks. So, without further
delay, here is our no-nonsense, straight-up, no loophole Privacy
Statement:
Collection of Non-Personal Data
The Executives that run this company are always bothering us
to find out things like how many people stopped by today, what
part of the world they were from, and did they manage to leave
any money behind before they left. In order to keep them busy,
and to guarantee that they keep doing things like buying coffee
for our break room, we've installed software that tells them those
kinds of things.
We track the company-owned domains that you visit, but we have
no idea who "you" are. We are aware of you only on the
bit-stream level. Our software is quite aware the you probably
have a name, and an address, and a telephone number, but it is
not rude enough to ask you for it. In fact, it doesn't even know
how to ask you for it, so it's not as smart as those executives
think it is.
We've heard rumors that the executives take this information
and scurry off to conference rooms where they analyze it for their
own purposes including, but not limited to, marketing analysis,
evaluation of Webenue's service standards, and business planning.
Since there really isn't too much else they could do with it,
we suspect that those rumors are true.
Use of "Cookies"
Being enamored with those little Keebler Elves, we do a little
cookie baking ourselves. Very little. In fact, we only use cookies
to maintain session. Maintaining session simply means that your
browser and our server have a way to remember who they are talking
to and a way to send requests and pages back and forth to each
other. Without session, your visit to our site would become confused
with other people's visits and your browser might receive a page
that someone else requested and someone else might receive yours.
The confusion would get worse and worse until it resembled dinner
conversation around my Uncle Angelo's table at Easter. The cookie
has no idea who you are, and it wouldn't tell us if it knew. It
is simply a randomly generated set of characters that act as a
temporary name tag. The cookie crumbles when you leave our site.
Collection of Personal Data
If you are visiting one of our sites, and you find something
that you just have to buy, you'll soon discover that we are more
than happy to sell it to you. It is at this point that we start
getting personal. In order to feed all of the computers up and
down the credit card authorization food chain , we need to know
things like: your full name, telephone number, email address,
street address, city, state, zip, country, or the International
equivalent of all that address stuff if you do not live in the
USA. And, of course, we will need your charge card number, that
stupid little "validation code" thingie they all have
now, and your expiration date. Well, not YOUR expiration date,
but your card's expiration date. We don't have any choice but
to collect this information. You don't HAVE to give it to us but,
if you don't, then you can't get that shiny new product or outstanding
service that gives you so much value for the measly, low, low
price that we charge.
Oh yeah, if you decide that you want to become an affiliate,
and have us pay you a whopping commission every time you refer
a new sale to us, then you are going to have to provide your Social
Security number, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, or your Canadian
Social Security number if you are a taxpayer from our good neighbor
to the North. We need this information to keep the IRS or Revenue
Canada fed, and to make sure that our Governments collect enough
money to fund studies of the mating habits of the Greentailed
Tax Sucker. Again, you don't HAVE to give us this information
if you don't want to. But then we don't HAVE to pay you your commissions
if you don't. And, in fact, we won't.
What we do with your Personal Data
Other than using it for all that purchase processing that we
just told you about, we stuff everything, except for the credit
card information, into an electronic shoe box ( also called a
database) and keep it around for a few years in case the IRS wants
to audit us or something. We might also send you an email telling
you about some new great thing that we're selling, but only if
you checked a little box telling us that it was OK with you, and
further providing that you haven't unchecked that little box,
at some later date, telling us that is was no longer OK with you.
What we do with your Credit Card Information
After feeding it into the banking system we eat it. Ok, we don't
physically chew it and gulp it down like some sort of plastic
taco, but we electronically shred it. Sometimes we have to keep
it around if you bought something on a subscription plan where
we charge you each month. In those cases, it is NEVER stored on
our servers or any computer connected to our servers. We know
that hackers are clever and relentless in their pursuit of credit
card information. The last thing that we want is to have some
Wall Street Journal reporter telling the world how someone bought
a brand new Jaguar XK8 with your credit card that was stolen from
our web site. The executives would definitely stop buying us coffee
if that happened.
How do we Protect the Transmission of Sensitive Data
All sensitive data is transmitted from your browser, to our server,
using SSL and Secure Certificates. This is the electronic equivalent
of a little armored car that picks up your information and drives
it along a whole bunch of long wires, and through lots of other
people's computers, until it reaches ours and deposits the information
into a secure data vault.. As it "vroooms" along the
Information Super Highway, little armed guards protect the information
from being hijacked along the way. That's how the geek in the
next cubical explained it to me anyway. It's probably a little
more technical than that, but you get the idea.
Who do we Share your Personal Information With?
Normally, no one. We don't have any of those "we share your
data with approved marketing partners" clauses that so many
sites have. Translated from legalese to English, that means that
they will sell your information to anyone who comes along and
offers the right price.
We don't have any marketing partners. Most companies don't like
us anyway because we make fun of them, and their stupid privacy
policies. They wouldn't partner with us if WE paid THEM.
Now, I did say "Normally, no one". There are some un-normal
situations where we might share your information. For example,
if the U.S. Marshals, or, say, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
showed up with a warrant ordering us to give them you're information,
then you're hosed. There are no heroes here in cubical alley,
and I can guarantee you that the executives aren't going to jail
to cover your butt. So, if you aren't doing anything illegal,
and that really is your credit card that you used, you probably
will fall under the "Normally, no one" category. Be
warned, however, that if you get bored some night and you decide
that you are going to do terrible things to our server in an effort
to give it a heart attack or something worse, then we're going
to tell on you. When we do tell on you, you are going to get in
a lot of trouble and we're going to say "Serves you right".
So don't do anything stupid. The same goes if you send SPAM when
you're advertising our site and the SPAM Police want to know who
you are. We'll sing like a bird.
There. That's it. If anything we said isn't legal in your State
or Government jurisdiction then, for that part, we were only kidding
and we didn't mean it or we meant it, but we're automatically
changing what we said to what the Government wants to hear. We're
real serious about the other stuff though, so we still mean that.
Oh, one more thing. No lawyers were paid to write this, but we
did toss 30 pieces of silver to one to read it over before we
posted it and he says everything sounded right to him. He did
suggest we add just one thing, so here it is:
This document may include company or product names, or marks,
or registered marks, which are the property of their respective
owners, and those owners are in no way affiliated with Webenue,
LLC. or its brands or divisions.
(c) 2003, Webenue, LLC. All Rights Reserved. It's not like you'd
want to reprint this on your own web site anyway.