Summary

If you only read the Startups.com website, no information out of the ordinary is collected about you than that which is already collected by other websites.

If you contribute to the Startups.com site, you are making every word you write public. If you write something, assume that it will be kept forever. This includes questions, answers, and comments. Some limited exceptions are described below.

Publishing on Startups.com and public data

Using the web site does not expose your identity publicly (see private logging below) unless you identify yourself by name or other identifying information, like an email address.

Identification of an author

When you publish a question, answer, or comment in the site, you may be logged in or not.

If you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account. By default this is "unknown (Provider)" where "Provider" would be your OpenID provider, such as Google.

If you have not logged in, you will not be identified unless you ask or answer a question. In that case, you will only be identified publicly by the pseudonym you choose to use, and a "Gravatar" image that is tied to your supplied email address if you have chosen to set that up. However, you may also be traceable by your IP address. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by contributing to identify you even by private individuals. The site lots your IP address and it is visible to administrators, moderators, developers, and anyone with private access to the Startups.com database.

Cookies

The site will set a temporary session cookie whenever you visit the site. You may deny this cookie, but your pseudonym from one question to another can't be tracked without it.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to associate your OpenID with your Startups.com account. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

Passwords

Thanks to the OpenID technology, the Startups.com site does not store your password.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the Startups.com site to use this information to keep track of legitimate users. However, Startups.com is hosted by a company called Fog Creek Software. Ultimately they run the servers and you should visit their site and read their privacy policy for more information.

Startups.com uses a service called Google Analytics to track aggregate usage of the site. This is performed by placing a small javascript program in the bottom of each page which instructs your browser to send a small amount of information to the Google Analytics service each time a page is loaded. You can turn it off by disabling javascript or blocking Google.com/Analytics.

Sharing information with 3rd parties

Except where otherwise specified, all text contributed to the Startups.com site is available for reuse under the terms of the CC-BY-SA License.

Startups.com Network, Inc. will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.

Security of information

Startups.com Network, Inc. makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information will be available to all developers with access to the servers, and those developers do not work directly for us.

User data

Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available through the site along with the contributions themselves, and occasionally in aggregated forms.

The IP address of a user is available to moderators and administrators of the site. We use this information to detect if one user is misusing the system by logging in under multiple accounts from the same computer.

Removal of accounts

User accounts can be suspended (for misuse) by a moderator or deleted completely.

Deletion of content

Deleting text from Startups.com does not necessarily delete it. Anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If a question is "deleted", any administrator or moderator, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Even in the case of an accidental deletion, there are backups.

This privacy policy was based on the Wikipedia Privacy Policy, and the Moms4Mom Privacy Policy which are available under the CC-BY-SA license, and therefore so is the text of this privacy policy.

Startups.com Network, Inc.