No… seriously. This is a community site and you are our community, ergo your privacy is important to Spot.Us.
Our goal is to make enough space for Spot.Us to continue operating without endangering your privacy. The policy may be revised or updated from time to time by us. We encourage you to check back often to ensure that you are familiar with the most recent version and the terms of our policy.
We’ve tried to keep this informal, but we also advise that you read the policy completetly (including the boring paragraphs).
YOUR USE OF THIS SITE, OR YOUR PROVISION TO US OF ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION CONSTITUTES YOUR AGREEMENT TO THESE TERMS AND ANY SUBSEQUENT CHANGES TO THESE TERMS; DO NOT USE THE SITE OR PROVIDE INFORMATION IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL OF THE TERMS.
Yes, we do ask for some of your information, including email address, general location, interests, and credit card information throughout the site. Anybody who wants to engage in Spot.Us must become a site member and fill in these types of fields during the sign up process. We don’t collect this information to spy on you, but to create a marketplace that will empower and enable local journalism. That is our only goal. We will only use this information to serve that end.
To stay committed to this goal, we are very excplicit anytime we intend to collect information that will be shared with a third party. Any page where we are collecting information that we intend to share with a third party will be excplicity and blatently marked as such. We urge the user to be aware if they are on a page around out "communtiy centered advertising" program which is the only place on the site where we collect user information with the intent of sharing that data.
If Spot.Us is asked to disclose the information in response to warrants, subpoenas or other valid legal process, we will begrudgingly do so, but we hope you can understand that we don’t want to break the law.
Some actions taken on Spot.Us, such as leaving a comment or creating a "pitch" or "tip" are visible to the public. Identification of all contributed content may include, but is not limited to, display of your account name and photo. All content may be retained for restorative, archival, or research purposes by Spot.Us. Editing or deleting content may alter the displayed state of the content, but will not permanently delete the content from the website. We are not responsible for the personal information you choose to submit in the public facing parts of the site.
The more we know about you, the better we are able to customize our web site to suit your personal preferences and interests. The e-mail address you provide may be used by Spot.Us to contact you for editorial purposes or to advise you of any changes to our site. Spot.Us may also contact you on occasion to let you know about specific actions that are available that can be taken to benefit the local journalism marketplace that we are setting up. At any time you can opt out of these messages from your personal settings page (under email notification settings). But even if you don't opt-out, we promise not to spam and that when we do reach out it will be for a good cause.
We do ask for your credit card information during the process of donating to a pitch. This information is only asked on pages that are safe and secure. You can verify this by noting that the page is encrypted with SSL. Also note, we do not store that credit card information on our servers. That information is verified by a professional payment gateway system called Authorize.Net. All credit card information is encrypted – so nobody (including Authorize.Net) has access to it once you’ve entered the information.
Note: No data transmission over the Internet or any wireless network can be 100% guaranteed to be secure. As a result, while we try to protect your personal information, we cannot ensure or guarantee the security of information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. We are not liable for the illegal acts of any third party.
The server does, however, keep a record of other actions you take on the site (pages you visit, fields you input, etc). Even if you are not logged in we note what URL you visited, your browser type and IP address. Lots of websites do this, it’s standard web server access log stuff. We keep this information only to study how people are engaging in our site. We will examine this information in terms of demographics, not to study individual users. We will not single people out as case studies without their explicit permission.
We analyze traffic to Spot.Us in various ways, including using a service called Google Analytics. (Google Analytics is subject to the privacy policy of Google, Inc., which you can find on their website.) We use this information to generate statistics and measure site activity to improve the usefulness of the site to our visitors.
We do use cookies but only to note if you are a user that has previously logged in to our site. This cookie is opt-in and noted in the login screen with a “remember me” checkbox.
This website’s content is intended for adults and we will not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age. If you are a parent or legal guardian of a child under age 13 who you believe has submitted personal information to this site, please contact us immediately.
Spot.Us contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by Spot.Us. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personal information. This Privacy Policy applies only to information collected by Spot.Us Site.
If you believe that Spot.Us has not adhered to the Privacy Statement, please contact Spot.Us by e-mail at info@spot.us (please include the subject: Privacy Violation). We will do our best to address your concerns. If you feel that your complaint has been addressed incompletely, we invite you to let us know for further investigation.
Effective date of this agreement: October 1st, 2009
Underground Economies: The Pot Biz $49.00 to go 
The cost of the DNA backlog $310.00 to go 
Investor’s Club: Do the UC Regents Spin Public Funds into Private Profit? $5,663.00 to go 
An Unfinished DREAM $647.00 to go
Spot.Us is an open source project to pioneer “community powered reporting.” Through
Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on
important and perhaps overlooked topics. Contributions are tax deductible and we partner
with news organizations to distribute content under appropriate licenses.
READ MORE »
