Privacy Statement

Under 18s
Children are not eligible to use our services and we ask that minors (under 18 years of age) do not submit any personal information to us.

Information that We Collect
Our primary goal in collecting personal information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and personalized experience while using our services. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience easier and quicker.

Using our Site
To fully use our services, you will need to register where you will be required to provide us with your contact information (e.g. e-mail address) and some other information relating to your professional employment (e.g. name of the company you work for, your position there).

Payment Processing.
In order to process payments online we require the billing address for the credit card used and our external payment provider, PayPal, requires your credit card details. For details of how your information is used, please see following section.

Our Use of Your Information.
We use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to improve our content and product offerings and to customize our site's content, layout, and services. We believe these uses allow us to improve our site and better tailor it to meet our users' needs.

We use information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site, to resolve any disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement.

Payment Processing.
We take online payments for our subscription and membership services. We use PayPal as our external payment provider. In addition to the information outlined above, we require the billing address of the credit card you use so that we can pass this to PayPal who check the address against the cardholder's details for security purposes. PayPal requires that you provide your credit card details to process the transaction. This is done on a secure PayPal server using SSL (secure sockets layer). As you go through the transaction process we let you know when you are about to be transferred to PayPal servers for the secure transaction. GoldenApples.org does not have any access to these credit card details and they are not stored or processed in any way by GoldenApples.org. In the case of a suspected fraudulent transaction, card details may be disclosed to GoldenApples.org by PayPal for the sole purpose of performing further checks.

Our Disclosure of Your Information
Unfortunately, due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other personally identifiable information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy.

By way of example (without limiting the foregoing), we may be forced to disclose information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us to legal liability.

As a general proposition, we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party.

Advertisers.
We do aggregate personally identifiable information and disclose such information in aggregate to advertisers and for other marketing and promotional purposes. However, in these situations, we do not disclose to these entities any information that could be used to personally identify you.

GoldenApples.org community.
Throughout the Site, you are identified by your User ID/email address, which is thereby disclosed to other users and third parties. Your User ID can be used to identify you and your activities throughout the Site, your postings on the Site, and so on. We also provide others a number of ways to allow other users to find more out about you and your site activities if you give them permission to access this information. Please be aware that if you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you risk receiving unsolicited messages from other parties in return. GoldenApples.org cannot be liable for any such communications.

Legal Requests.
GoldenApples.org cooperates with law enforcement inquiries and other third parties to enforce laws, intellectual property and other rights. Local, and international law enforcement agents can request and may receive your personally identifiable information.

Suppliers and Other Service Providers.
From time to time we use third party Suppliers and Service Providers to facilitate our services. Where any Service Provider collects information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask a Service Provider to conduct a survey for us) you will be notified of the involvement of the Supplier or Service Provider, and all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional.

Discussion Forums
If you choose to post messages in our forums, or leave a message or comment in other areas of the site (e.g. comments in the Providers section of the site), or leave feedback for us or other users, we will store such information in a file personal to you. This is so that we can see what contributions you have made to the site.

Where you make such comments or forum posts, your User ID will also be given on the site allowing other users to click on it to find out more about you. Although you may update and choose your own User ID, it is always publicly available information.

Control of Your Password
Except as specifically permitted by this section, you may not disclose your GoldenApples.org password to any third parties nor share it with any third parties. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifiable information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your password by visiting the preferences page on the Site.

You may, however, disclose your password to certain third parties with whom GoldenApples.org has entered into specific contractual and technical arrangements designed to safeguard your password, in order to enjoy the benefits of those third parties' services in relation to the GoldenApples.org services.

Other Information Collectors
Except as otherwise expressly discussed in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are other members of the Site or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the personal information you disclose to them.

Security
In order to process and protect your credit card details, our payment provider PayPal uses SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption. The secure server is hosted by PayPal and not GoldenApples.org.

On the GoldenApples.org site we use best efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information but we do not use encryption (such as SSL) or firewalls to further protect the information as it travels across the Internet. This is because we do not believe that, apart from the credit card information processed by PayPal, the personal information we currently collect warrants such measures and the accompanying loss of speed experienced. You should be aware that "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.

Changes to Privacy Policy
If we are going to use your personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify you via email, prior to making such changes. You will have a choice as to whether or not we use your information in this different manner. In addition, if we make any material changes in our privacy practices that do not affect user information already stored in our database, we will post a prominent notice, before changes go into affect, on our web site notifying users of the change. In some cases where we post the notice we will also email users, who have opted to receive communications from us, notifying them of the changes in our privacy practices.