Last Updated: December 8, 2011
This privacy policy applies to all websites and web services operated by Chase Professional Services, LLC; Plain and Precious Publishing; or the Making Precious Things Plain Webs Store. Since all of these businesses operate under Chase Professional Services, LLC, we will refer to them collectively as “Chase Services” in this policy when describing practices that apply to any or all of them.
Website Visitors
Except as described below, Chase Services does not collect or require visitors to its websites to furnish personally identifying information such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Like most website operators, Chase Services does collect non-personally identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, operating system, language preference, referring site and date and time of each visitor request. Chase Services also collects potentially-personally identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are non-personally identifying in and of themselves but could be used in conjunction with other information to personally identify users.
Chase Services’s purpose in collecting this information is to better understand how Chase Services’s visitors use its websites. To that end, Chase Services may share potentially personally-identifying information with its employees, contractors, service providers, and subsidiaries and related organizations. Chase Services may also release its results of such analyses of non-personally identifying information about visitors by publishing a report on website usage trends. Otherwise, Chase Services will not publicly release potentially-personally identifying information except under the same circumstances as Chase Services releases personally identifying information. Those circumstances are explained below.
Community Members
Certain members of the Chase Services community (contributors, customers, sustaining members, etc.) choose to interact with Chase Services in ways that require Chase Services and others to know more about them. The amount and type of information that Chase Services gathers from those members depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, members who wish to post content to certain portions of Chase Services’s websites or participate in blogs are asked to provide usernames that are used to identify content as having been posted by a particular member (who is identified by the username).
Customers of the Chase Services stores (which sell merchandise and other items on behalf of Chase Services) are asked to provide even more information, including billing and shipping addresses and credit card or similar information to third party vendors so that their transactions can be processed and fulfilled by Chase Services or a third-party fulfillment vendor such as Authorize.net. Chase Services reserves the right to change such vendors at its own discretion from time to time.
We also permit community members to provide their names and email addresses so that they can have a more direct engagement with Chase Services and so that Chase Services can send them information related to Chase Services, such as educational material, promotional and cross-promotional material, surveys to be completed, messages about the Chase Services Foundation, events information, and other such information and materials. These are opt-in
interactions where community members affirmatively sign-up for inclusion in a direct communication with Chase Services (and with an ability to unsubscribe/opt-out on any email received). These campaigns may be conducted with the help of a third-party customer relationship manager to help us manage the database of information and its analysis and use,
in each case such third party’s involvement with all the data collected will be solely on Chase Services’s behalf. As part of these marketing campaigns, we might also ask you to provide demographic information such as gender, age, job or role, country, geographic location, and areas of interest. If we ask you for this information, we will use it to customize our communication with you and to better understand those interested in Chase Services and its products. As part of these marketing campaigns, we may collect a campaign source ID, marketing campaign ID, and a campaign referrer ID. These types of information are used so that we may better understand your interests and the effectiveness of particular marketing campaigns. In each case, Chase Services collects personally identifying information only insofar as is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the community member’s interaction with Chase Services.
Our websites also may provide a means for candidates to apply on-line for employment with Chase Services. Applicants for employment with Chase Services are required to provide contact information, including name, street address, telephone number, and email address, as well as resume information. We use this information to process and evaluate the application for
employment, and to communicate with the applicant about employment opportunities. If we elect to make an offer of employment, this information may become part of the employee file and may be used for other employment and work-related purposes.
Chase Services is an open organization that believes in sharing as much information as possible about its products, its operations and its associations. Accordingly, community members should assume—as should most folks who interact with Chase Services—that any personally identifying information provided to Chase Services will be made available to the public.
There are four broad exceptions to that rule:
1. Chase Services does not publicly release information gathered in connection with commercial transactions (i.e., transactions involving money), including transactions conducted through Chase Services online stores, in person at a Chase Services class or event, or donations to Chase Services.
2. Chase Services does not publicly release personally identifying information collected in connection with an application for employment with Chase Services.
3. Chase Services does not make publicly available information that is used to authenticate users, the publication of which would compromise the security of Chase Services’s websites (e.g., passwords).
4. Chase Services does not make publicly available information that it specifically promises at the time of collection to maintain in confidence.
Outside those four contexts, users should assume that personally identifying information provided through Chase Services’s websites will be made available to the public.
Children
Chase Services’s websites are not directed to individuals under the age of thirteen (13), and we request that such individuals do not provide personally identifying information through our websites.
Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information
Where Chase Services has collected personally identifying information subject to one of the four exceptions described in the Community Members section, above, it discloses that information only to those of its employees, contractors, service providers, and subsidiaries and related organizations that need to know that information in order to process it on Chase Services’s behalf and that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Its related organizations are Chase Professional Services, LLC; Plain and Precious Publishing; the Making Precious Things Plain website and those associated with it; and the Making Precious Things Plain Web Store. Some of these employees, contractors, service providers, and subsidiaries and related organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Chase Services’s websites, you consent to the transfer of your information to them, which may involve the transfer of your information to countries that may provide a lesser level of data protection than your country of residence. Additionally, Chase Services may need to transfer personally identifying information to an affiliate or successor in the event of a change of our corporate structure or status, such as in the event of a restructuring, sale, or bankruptcy. We will retain any personally identifying information for the period necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this privacy policy. Chase Services does not rent or sell personally identifying information to anyone.
Security
Chase Services undertakes a range of security measures including physical access restraints and technical security monitoring to help to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. We also do not permit employees to view your personal information without business justification.
Updating of Personally-Identifying Information
You may request access, correction, or deletion of your personally identifiable information or potentially personally identifiable information, as permitted by law. Chase Services will seek to comply with such requests, provided that we have sufficient information to identify the personally identifiable information or potentially personally identifiable information related to you. To do so, users should look for the “Contact Us” link on whichever Chase Services websites store the relevant information or contact Chase Services by using one of the email addresses on these sites.
Cookies and Clear GIFs
*What Are 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. Most major websites use cookies. Because the browser provides this cookie information to the website at each visit, cookies serve as a sort of label that allows a website to “recognize” a browser when it returns to the site. The domain name in Chase Services cookies will clearly identify their affiliation with Chase Services and, where applicable, its third-party service provider.
*What Are Clear GIFs?* Clear gifs (also known as web beacons) are used in combination with cookies to help website operators understand how visitors interact with their websites. A clear gif is typically a transparent graphic image (usually 1 pixel x 1 pixel) that is placed on a site. The use of a clear gif allows the site to measure the actions of the visitor opening the page that contains the clear gif. It makes it easier to follow and record the activities of a recognized browser, such as the path of pages visited at a website.
*How We Use Cookies and Clear GIFs.* Chase Services’s websites use cookies to help Chase Services identify and track visitors, their usage of Chase Services websites, and their website access preferences across multiple requests and visits to Chase Services’s websites. Our websites, and advertisements that Chase Services may run occasionally on third-party advertising networks, also may use clear gifs for these purposes. The basic idea is to gather aggregate data about how people use the Chase Services websites. The term usually used to describe this is “web analytics” and the cookies and clear gifs are the tools by which a website owner collects this web analytics data.
Chase Services will use the web analytics data only to determine aggregate usage patterns for our websites as described above. Chase Services websites do this by using either our own internal analytics software or by sending this information to a third-party service provider to help Chase Services analyze this data. Chase Services will always secure appropriate agreements with any such third-party service providers that they will not share this information with others or use the information for purposes other than to maintain the services they provide to Chase Services. It is possible to link cookies and clear gifs to personally identifying information, thereby permitting website operators, including our third-party analytics providers, to track the online movements of particular individuals. Chase Services does not do so and its third-party service providers are not allowed to correlate Chase Services data with any other data.
Chase Services uses the information provided by cookies and clear gifs to develop a better understanding of how Chase Services’s visitors use Chase Services’s websites, and to facilitate those visitors’ interactions with Chase Services’s websites. Chase Services may make the aggregate data obtained from web analytics (including from our third-party analytics providers, if applicable) publicly available. If this data is made available, none of the information will be personally identifying information or potentially-personally identifying information.
*Other Third Party Cookies.* Content from other sources that is hosted on Chase Services websites may sometimes contain cookies that send information to those third parties. In certain cases, often associated with embedded content such as YouTube videos and other site linking buttons, a third party cookie may be set by the 3rd party content or provider. In these cases, the privacy policy of the 3rd party governs with respect to information that may be collected by and sent to the respective 3rd party. If you are concerned about these third party cookies, please see
the information below on how to decline cookies.
*How to Control the Use of Cookies.* You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Chase Services visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers by Chase Services, its contractors, or third-party service providers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before linking to Chase Services’s websites. Certain features of Chase Services’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Opt-out Procedures
If you do not want to allow your session visitation information on the Chase Services websites to be aggregated and analyzed by Chase Services (or its third-party analytics providers) you may opt-out of these procedures by contacting Chase Services directly through the “Contact Us” link on any Chase Services site or through any of the email addresses for Chase Services that can be found on these sites. Additionally, if you signed up to receive but no longer wish to receive electronic marketing communications from Chase Services, you can opt-out from receiving these communications by following the “unsubscribe” instructions in any such communication you receive.
Chase Services Ads
Chase Services places advertisements on third party websites to introduce people to our products and services, to encourage people to contribute to our community-based activities, and to sign up to receive communications from Chase Services. We stand by our online advertising practices and aim to provide full transparency and control over how our ads appear and function.
Some advertisements may use cookies. Cookies are text files that your web browser places on your computer when you visit a website and can be used to store information about your activity. When you view Chase Services’s advertisements on third party sites where we advertise, cookies from these campaigns provide information to us that is used to help measure and improve performance of our advertising. We do not use cookies to save data that identifies you personally such as your name, address, credit card number or other confidential information, nor do we capture behavioral data to personalize future ads or create targeting profiles about you.
Most browsers accept cookies automatically, but they can be configured not to accept them or to indicate when a cookie is being set (see http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/). You may choose to opt-out of our cookies by following these instructions.
Legal Process and Other Disclosures
Consistent with our privacy commitments, we will scrutinize third party requests for information about you for compliance with the law, including those coming from governmental agencies or civil litigants. We may access, use, preserve or disclose information about you only when we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to do so to satisfy the applicable law, regulation, legal process or lawful governmental request of any country, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Chase Services, its users or the public. We will provide notice of legal process or governmental requests unless prohibited to do so by law or the circumstances warrant otherwise.
Privacy Policy Changes
By using the websites, you agree to the terms and conditions of this privacy policy. If you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this privacy policy, please do not use the websites. Chase Services may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Any and all changes will be reflected on this page. Substantive changes will also be announced through the standard mechanisms through which Chase Services communicates with the Chase Services community.
For More Information
If you have questions about this privacy policy, please contact Chase Services directly by clicking on the “Contact Us” link on any Chase Services site, or by contacting us through any of the email addresses that may be found on our websites.
Footnotes:
This privacy policy draws heavily upon the wording of the privacy policy of Mozilla Firefox and its associated companies and websites. We have borrowed their language and organization in order to insure that our policy is consistent with the contemporary standards of an industry leader in website services. We acknowledge thankfully their assistance in this matter.
