This Privacy Policy describes Mukodu Inc.'s policies and procedures on the collection, use and disclosure of your information. Mukodu receives your information through our various web sites, services and third-parties ("Services"), including 5blocksout.com, birdnestpress.com, and mukodu.com. By using any of the Services you are accepting the practices outlined below. See also our Terms of Use, which outline your obligations when using the 5 Blocks Out website.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@5blocksout.com.
Principles
Your privacy is critically important to us. We have a few fundamental privacy principles:
- We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We really dislike 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.
- We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public and what's kept private.
Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals.
Information Collection and Use
We collect and use your information to provide our Services and improve them over time.
Website Visitors: Like most website operators, we collect 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. Our purpose in doing this is to better understand how visitors use our Services. From time to time, we may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of our Services.
We also collect potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. We do not use such information to identify visitors, however, and do not disclose such information, other than under the same circumstances that we use and disclose personally-identifying information, as described below.
Information Collected Upon Registration: When you create or reconfigure a 5 Blocks Out account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, and email address. Some of this information, for example, your name and username, is listed publicly on our Services, including on your profile page and in search results. Some Services, such as search and public user profiles do not require registration.
Additional Information: You may, at your option, provide us with additional information to make public, such as a picture, or a brief biography.
Tips, Votes, and other Public Information: 5 Blocks Out is primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public. On 5 Blocks Out this includes not only the tips you might create and the metadata provided with tips, such as when you wrote the tip, but also the votes you cast, the people and places you follow, and many other bits of information. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public. As we learn more about what our users need we may provide settings to make some information more private. Your public information is broadly and instantly disseminated. For example, your tips are searchable by many search engines. You should be careful about all information that will be made public by 5 Blocks Out, not just your tips.
What you say on 5 Blocks Out may be viewed all around the world instantly.
Email to You: If you are a registered user of our Services we 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 us and our products. We primarily use our various blogs to communicate this type of information, and we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. You may unsubscribe from these messages by following the instructions contained within the messages or the instructions on our web site.
Requests from You: 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. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request.
Log Data: Our servers automatically record information ("Log Data") created by your use of the Services. We analyze this data to improve our Services. Log Data may include information such as your IP address, browser type, the referring domain, pages visited, and search terms. Other actions, such as problem reports, may also be included in Log Data. Passwords are filtered out of log data.
Links: We may keep track of how you interact with links on our Services by redirecting clicks or through other means. We do this to help improve our Services and to be able to share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on.
Cookies: Like many websites, we use "cookie" technology to collect additional website usage data and to improve the Services, but we do not require cookies for many parts of our Services such as searching and looking at public user profiles. 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. Mukodu uses both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our Services, to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on our Services, and to improve our Services. We also use cookies to identify and sign in registered users. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by editing its options, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit. The drawback is that certain features of the Services may not function properly without the aid of cookies. You will not be able to sign in to a 5 Blocks Out account without cookies enabled.
Third Party Services: Mukodu uses a variety of services hosted by third parties to help provide our Services, such as hosting our feedback service and various blogs, and to help us understand the use of our Services, such as Google Analytics. These services may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP request.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
We do not disclose your private information except in the limited circumstances described here.
Your Consent: We may share or disclose your information with your consent.
Employees and Service Providers: We engage employees and certain trusted third parties to perform functions and provide services to us. Mukodu discloses your personal information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Mukodu’s behalf or to provide our Services, 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 Mukodu’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them.
Law and Harm: We may disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect Mukodu's rights or property.
Business Transfers: In the event that Mukodu is involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. The promises in this privacy policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity.
Non-Private or Non-Personal Information: We may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your tips.
Mukodu will not rent or sell your personal information to anyone.
Information Protection
We take measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of your personal information. You can help by setting a strong password as described in the Terms of Service, and by signing out (logging out) after using the Services from a public shared computer.
Modifying Your Personal Information
If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools to access or modify the personal information you provided to us and associated with your account.
Our Policy Towards Children
Our Services are not directed at people under 13. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us at privacy@5blocksout.com. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we take steps to remove such information and terminate the child's account.
Changes to this Policy
Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most current version of the policy will govern our use of your information and will always be at http://5blocksout.com/privacy. If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will notify you via an e-mail to the email address associated with your account. By continuing to access or use the Services after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy.
This policy is effective as of June 19, 2010.
Thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy? Please, let us know.
License
Mukodu Inc. Privacy Policy by mukodu.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at automattic.com (the generous people behind Wordpress.com)
and inspired by the Twitter privacy policy.
Change Log
June 19, 2010: Expanded and rewrote privacy policy in preparation for public beta release.