Your privacy is critically important to us. At SF Gay History, 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.

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.

Automattic, Inc.

This Privacy Policy was developed with the help of Automattic, Inc., who made it available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you, and if you want we’d appreciate a link to Automattic.com somewhere on your site. Automattic, Inc. spent a lot of money and time on the below, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.

If you have questions about deleting or correcting your personal data please contact our support team.

SF Gay History operates sfgayhistory.com. It is our policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, SF Gay History 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. SF Gay History’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how SF Gay History’s visitors use its website. From time to time, SF Gay History may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

SF Gay History also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on WordPress.com blogs. SF Gay History only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses and email addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to SF Gay History’s websites choose to interact with SF Gay Life in ways that require SF Gay History to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that SF Gay History gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. SF Gay History 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

SF Gay History may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, SF Gay History may monitor comments on SFGayHistory.com or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. SF Gay History may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, SF Gay History does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Google Analytics

SF Gay History uses Google Analytics to analyze traffic and usage of the site. Google Analytics is a piece of software that grabs data about visitors to SF Gay History. Google Analytics records:

• What website you came from to get here.
• How long you stay for.
• What kind of computer you’re using.
• And quite a bit more.

The tracking information allows SF Gay History to better understand the kind of people who come to the site and what content they’re reading. This allows us to make better decisions about design and writing. Occasionally, we may compile aggregate statistics about the number of visitors this site receives and browsers being used. No personally identifying data is included in this type of reporting.

All of our activity falls within the bounds of the Google Analytics Terms of Service.

Want to opt out of tracking?

• You can choose to opt out of Google’s advertising tracking cookie; or
• You may use a browser plugin to opt out of all Google Analytics tracking software.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

SF Gay History 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 SF Gay History’s behalf or to provide services available at SF Gay History’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 SF Gay History’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. SF Gay History 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, SF Gay History discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when SF Gay History believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of SF Gay History, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an SF Gay History website and have supplied your email address, SF Gay History 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 SF Gay History 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. SF Gay History 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. SF Gay History uses cookies to help SF Gay History identify and track visitors, their usage of SF Gay History website, and their website access preferences. SF Gay History visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using SF Gay History’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of SF Gay History’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If SF Gay History, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that SF Gay History goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of SF Gay History may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by SF Gay History and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Comments

Comments and other content submitted to our Akismet anti-spam service are not saved on our servers 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.

SF Gay History also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on SFGayHistory.com. SF Gay History only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses and email addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, SF Gay History may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in SF Gay History’s sole discretion. SF Gay History encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy.

Change log:

August 17, 2014: Privacy Policy created.