Privacy Policy
Your privacy is critically important to us. At VertHost we have a few fundamental principles:
- We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
- We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
- We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services. (For example: we don’t save comments that get submitted to our Akismet comment spam blocking service unless they were marked as false positives; in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.)
- In our blogging products, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.
Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals:
Website Visitors
Like most website operators, VertHost collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. VertHost’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how VertHost’s visitors use its website. From time to time, VertHost may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.
VertHost also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. VertHost does not use such information to identify its visitors, however, and does not disclose such information, other than under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information, as described below.
Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information
Certain visitors to VertHost’s websites choose to interact with VertHost in ways that require VertHost to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that VertHost gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for a blog at VertHost.com to provide a username and email address. VertHost does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.
Aggregated Statistics
VertHost may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, VertHost may monitor the most popular blogs on the VertHost.com site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. VertHost may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, VertHost does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.
Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information
VertHost discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on VertHost’s behalf or to provide services available at VertHost’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using VertHost’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. VertHost will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, VertHost discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when VertHost believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of VertHost, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an VertHost website and have supplied your email address, VertHost may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with VertHost and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. VertHost takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.
Cookies
A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. VertHost uses cookies to help VertHost identify and track visitors, their usage of VertHost website, and their website access preferences. VertHost visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using VertHost’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of VertHost’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, VertHost may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in VertHost’s sole discretion. VertHost encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a VertHost.com account, you should also check your blog’s dashboard for alerts to these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.
