Privacy Policy – Philosophy With Friends

Privacy Policy

Last Updated On: May 27 2024

Your privacy is critically important to us. We have a few fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use Philosophy With Friends (“PWF”) products or services, including the website (philosophywithfriends.com), the Friends Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Forum (forum.philosophywithfriends.com), the Philosophy With Friends Editor, along with any associated software applications and websites (all together, our “Services”).

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

We collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name.
Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have an account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a forum post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate through a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services.
Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform on our Services. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, interactions with other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
Information from cookies & other technologies: 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. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. We may use cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

Third Party Login: If our services allow you create or log in through another service we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address)

The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services. For example, to facilitate you use of the Services, including to verify user information.
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will appreciate.
To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of PWF and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, and recommending content.
To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on PWF. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of non-essential or non-account related communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

Independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you or to communicate (for example through email), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations; other third-party tools that help us manage operations. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of PWF, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is disclosed publicly. That means information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public, and your “Likes” and comments are all available to others. For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar. Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, may display alongside the comments and “Likes” that you make on the services. Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.

Security

We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information.
Opt out of communications: You may opt out of receiving non-essential and non-account related communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of such communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, PWF does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using PWF’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of PWF’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our other legitimate interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including some US states and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws may give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

Request access to your personal data;
Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

US Privacy Laws

Laws in some US states require us to provide residents with additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. You’ll find that information in this section.

In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information, depending on the Services used:

Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take as a moderator or editor of our Services);
Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one), and;
Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

We collect personal information for the purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. We retain this information for the length of time described in our How Long We Keep Information section.

In some US states you may have additional rights subject to any exemptions provided by your state’s respective law, including the right to:

Request a copy of the specific pieces of information we collect about you and, if you’re in California, to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, and the categories of third parties we share it with;
Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
Request correction of personal information we collect or maintain;
Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information;
Receive a copy of your information in a readily portable format; and
Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.

Right to Opt Out

We never directly sell your personal information. We may share your information as necessary with our third-party service providers to provide our services to you. Our opt-out is managed through cookies, so if you delete cookies, your browser is set to delete cookies automatically after a certain length of time, or if you visit sites in a different browser, you’ll need to make this selection again.

We do not collect or process your sensitive (and potentially sensitive) personal information except where it is strictly necessary to provide you with our service, where the processing is not for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you, or for other purposes that do not require an option to limit under California law.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to, well, find out how to reach us.

When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us through our contact form.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because PWF’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us (if any), other members of our group of companies (if any), or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above.

When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures may include entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Third-Party Software and Services

If you’d like to use any services provided by third parties, or other third-party software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself to those third parties. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services. Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, PWF may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. PWF encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we’ll provide notice of the changes, such as by posting the amended Privacy Policy and updating the “Last Updated on:” date above, or giving notification via email. Any changes will apply immediately upon such notification. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Translation

Our Privacy Policy was originally written in English (US). We may translate it into other languages. In the event of a conflict between a translated version of our Privacy Policy and the English version, the English version will control.