privacy policy
Last updated April 16, 2012.
This Privacy Policy discloses the privacy practices for the BookLending.com Site (collectively, the “Website” located at www.BookLending.com). BookLending.com (referred to as “us” or “we”), is committed to protecting your privacy online. Please read the following to learn what information we collect from you (the “User” or the “End User”) and how we use that information. If you have any questions about our privacy policy, please email us.
PLEASE READ THIS PRIVACY POLICY CAREFULLY. BY ACCESSING OR USING OUR WEBSITE, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ, UNDERSTAND, AND AGREE TO BE BOUND TO ALL THE TERMS OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY AND OUR WEBSITE TERMS OF USE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, EXIT THIS PAGE AND DO NOT ACCESS OR USE THE WEBSITE.
1. Changes to Privacy Policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here or by email.
2. Types of Information Collected and Uses of Collected Information
We collect two types of information about our Website Users: Personally Identifiable Information and Non-Personally Identifiable Information.
Personally Identifiable Information. Personally Identifiable Information is information that identifies a specific End User. When you engage in certain activities on the Website, such as creating an account, submitting content and/or posting content in discussion forums, entering a contest or sweepstakes sponsored by us or our partners, filling out a survey, posting a review, sending us or our partners feedback, requesting information about our services, applying for a job, or signing up for special offers from third parties through the Website (collectively, “Identification Activities”), we may ask you to provide certain information about yourself. It is optional for you to engage in an Identification Activity. If you elect to engage in an Identification Activity, however, we may ask you to provide us with certain personal information about yourself, such as your first and last name, mailing address (including ZIP), email address, telephone number and date of birth. Depending on the activity, some of the information we ask you to provide is identified as mandatory and some is identified as voluntary. If you do not provide the mandatory information for a particular activity that requires it, you will not be permitted to engage in that activity. If you link your BookLending.com account with your Facebook.com account through Facebook Connect, we will gather your name, email address, "About Me" content and website URL as associated with your Facebook.com account.
Tell-A-Friend If you choose to use our referral service, we will ask you for your friend's name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. BookLending.com stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program.
Your friend may contact us at info@booklending.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
We use Personally Identifiable Information to provide products and services to you, administer sweepstakes and contests, enhance the operation of the Website, improve our marketing and promotional efforts, analyze Website use, improve our product and service offerings, and to tailor your experience with third parties as provided in Item 3 of this Privacy Policy. For example, if you send our customer service an email we may use your comments and feedback to tell others about our services, and may post your comment in our marketing materials or on our Website. Your comments may contain personal information such as your name, we will obtain consent from you to post your name along with your comment prior to posting your comment for public view. In addition, if you use our Website to send information to another person, we may store your personal information. We may also use Personally Identifiable Information to troubleshoot, resolve disputes, accomplish administrative tasks, contact you, enforce our agreements with you, including our Website Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy, comply with applicable law, and cooperate with law enforcement activities.
Non-Personally Identifiable Information. Non-Personally Identifiable Information is information that does not identify a specific End User. This type of information may include things like the Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) of the Site you visited before coming to our Website, the URL of the Site you visit after leaving our Website, the type of browser you are using and your Internet Protocol (“IP”) address. We, and/or our authorized Third Party Service Providers and Advertisers, may automatically collect this information when you visit our Website through the use of electronic tools like Cookies and Web beacons or Pixel tags, as described in Items 4 and 8 of this Privacy Policy.
We use Non-Personally Identifiable Information to troubleshoot, administer the Website, analyze trends, gather demographic information, comply with applicable law, and cooperate with law enforcement activities. We may also share this information with our authorized Third Party Service Providers and Advertisers to measure the overall effectiveness of our online advertising, content, and programming.
3. Release of Personally Identifiable Information
We will not share, sell, rent, or trade your Personally Identifiable Information with other parties except as provided below:
We use Personally Identifiable Information on the Website to populate your public profile page and to facilitate ebook loans. When you request to borrow a Kindle book from a lender, we will provide your email address to the lender so that the lender may effect the Kindle book loan. We do not provide your email to the borrower when you lend a Kindle book.
We may share your information with Authorized Third Party Service Providers. We provide services and products through third parties. These “Third Party Service Providers” perform functions on our behalf, like sending out and distributing our administrative and promotional emails. We may share your Personally Identifiable Information with such Service Providers to fulfill orders, deliver packages, send postal or email, administer contests or sweepstakes, remove repetitive information on customer lists, analyze data, provide marketing assistance, provide search results and links, process credit card payments, operate the Website, troubleshoot, and provide customer service. We may also collect personal information from individuals and companies (“Affiliates”) with whom we have business relationships and may share your information with Service Providers to accomplish our administrative tasks. We encourage BookLending.com Partners and Third Party Service Providers to adopt and post privacy policies. However, the use of your Personally Identifiable Information by such parties is governed by the privacy policies of such parties and is not subject to our control.
We may remarket your information. Remarketing is a way for us to connect with users, based upon your past interactions with the BookLending.com Site. Third-party marketing vendors may be hired by BookLending.com to perform remarketing services. As a result, third-party vendors, including Google, may show BookLending.com ads on sites on the internet. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to BookLending.com's Site. Users may opt out of Google's use of cookies by visiting the Google advertising opt-out page at https://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html. This information is used only for remarketing purposes and will not be used by them for any other purpose.
We may share your information in a Business Transfer. As with any other business, we could merge with, or be acquired by another company. If this occurs, the successor company would acquire the information we maintain, including Personally Identifiable Information. However, Personally Identifiable Information would remain subject to this Privacy Policy.
We may share your information for our Protection and the Protection of Others. We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Website; enforce or apply this Privacy Policy, our Website Terms of Use or other agreements; or protect the rights, property or safety of the Website, its Users or others.
4. Release of Non-Personally Identifiable Information
We may disclose or share Non-Personally Identifiable Information with Partners, Affiliates and Advertisers. For example, we may share aggregated demographic information (which does not include any Personally Identifiable Information) with “Third Party Advertisers” or “Third Party Advertising Companies” and other parties as provided below:
We use Third Party Advertising Companies to serve ads when you visit our Website. These companies may use Non-Personally Identifiable Information about your visits to this and other Sites in order to provide, through the use of network tags, advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you. Some of these Third Party Advertising Companies may be advertising networks that are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”). You can also obtain more information about any NAI member company, or you would like to opt-out of targeted advertising from any NAI member company.
We also use Third Party Service Providers to track and analyze Non-Personally Identifiable usage and volume statistical information from our Users to administer our Website and constantly improve its quality. We may also publish this information for promotional purposes or as a representative audience for Advertisers. Please note that this is not Personally Identifiable Information, only general summaries of the activities of our Users. Such data is collected on our behalf, and is owned and used by us.
5. Updating and Correcting Information
We believe that you should have the ability to access and edit the Personally Identifiable Information you provide us. You may change any of your Personally Identifiable Information by logging into your account and accessing your profile page or sending us an email at info@booklending.com. Please indicate your name, address and email address, and what information you would like to update when you contact us.
We encourage you to promptly update your Personally Identifiable Information if it changes. You may ask to have the information on your account deleted or removed; however, because we keep track of past transactions, you cannot delete information associated with past transactions on the Website. In addition, in may be impossible for us to completely delete all of your information because we periodically backup information.
6. User Choices on Collection and Use of Information
As discussed above, you can always choose not to provide information, although it may be required to engage in a certain activity on the Website.
As a condition of purchase of our products and services, we will send you Administrative and Promotional emails. We will send you information regarding your account activity as well as updates about BookLending.com and promotional offers. You cannot opt-out of Administrative Emails. “Administrative Emails” relate to a User’s activity on the Website, and include emails regarding a particular User’s account, requests or inquiries, and borrowing and lending of books. In contrast to Administrative Emails, however, you do have a choice with respect to Promotional Emails. Promotional Emails advertise our products and services, including exclusive sales and other offers, and/or the products and services of our Advertisers and Affiliates. If you do not want to receive Promotional Emails from us, you may elect to opt-out of receiving Promotional Emails at any time after registering by e-mailing us at info@booklending.com or by hitting the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any of our e-mails. When contacting us, please indicate your name, address, email address, and what Promotional Emails you do not want to receive.
7. Security of Information
We take security seriously and take numerous precautions to protect the security of Personally Identifiable Information. You can access your Personally Identifiable Information on our Website through a password and your email address. This password is encrypted. We recommend that you do not share your password with anyone. In addition, your Personally Identifiable Information resides on a secure server that only selected personnel and contractors have access to.
Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet or any wireless network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we employ commercially reasonable security measures to protect data and seek to partner with companies which do the same, we cannot guarantee the security of any information transmitted to or from the Website, and are not responsible for the actions of any third parties that may receive any such information.
8. Data Tracking
Cookies. To facilitate and customize your experience with the Website, we store cookies on your computer. A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a User’s computer for record-keeping purposes which contains information about that User. We use cookies to save you time while using the Website, remind us who you are, and track and target User interests in order to provide a customized experience. Cookies also allow us to collect Non-Personally Identifiable Information from you, like which pages you visited and what links you clicked on. Use of this information helps us to create a more user-friendly experience for all visitors. In addition, we may use Third Party Advertising Companies to display advertisements on our Website. As part of their service, they may place separate cookies on your computer. We have no access to or control over these cookies. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by our Website only and does not cover the use of cookies by any Advertiser. Most browsers automatically accept cookies, but you may be able to modify your browser settings to decline cookies. Please note that if you decline or delete these cookies, some parts of the Website may not work properly.
Other Tracking Devices. We may use other industry standard technologies like pixel tags and web beacons to track your use of our Website pages and promotions, or we may allow our Third Party Service Providers to use these devices on our behalf. Pixel tags and web beacons are tiny graphic images placed on certain pages on our Website, or in our emails that allow us to determine whether you have performed a specific action. When you access these pages or open or click an email, pixel tags and web beacons generate a Non-Personally Identifiable notice of that action. Pixel tags allow us to measure and improve our understanding of visitor traffic and behavior on our Website, as well as give us a way to measure our promotions and performance. We may also utilize pixel tags and web beacons provided by our Affiliates and/or Marketing Partners for the same purposes.
9. Privacy Policies of Third Party Websites
This Privacy Policy only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you on www.booklending.com. Other Sites that may be accessible through this Website have their own privacy policies and data collection, use and disclosure practices. If you link to any such Site, we urge you review the Site’s privacy policy. We are not responsible for the policies or practices of third parties.
10. Miscellaneous Privacy Issues
Children. Minors under the age of 18 may not use the Website. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 18, and no part of the Website is designed to attract anyone under the age of 18. BookLending.com does not sell products for purchase by children. In certain instances, we sell children's products for purchase by adults.
Public Areas. We may provide areas on our Website where you can publicly post information about yourself, can communicate with others such as discussion boards or blogs, or can review products, restaurants, and submit media content. This information may be accessible by other consumers and companies and may appear on other Sites or web searches, and therefore this information could be read, collected, and used by others. For example, if you post your email address along with a public restaurant review, you may receive unsolicited messages. We have no control over who reads your postings or what other users may do with the information you voluntarily post, so please use caution when posting any personal information. We do obtain consent from our users to post their name along with their reviews.
Facebook Connect. The BookLending.com Site allows users to access Facebook Connect to interact with friends and to share on Facebook through Wall and friends' News Feeds. If you are logged into BookLending.com and Facebook, when you click on "Connect with Facebook" your profiles will merge if the email addresses match. If the email addresses don't match, we ask you if you want to merge them and you must enter your BookLending.com password to validate that they control that account. If you are already logged into BookLending.com but not logged into Facebook, when you click on "Connect with Facebook" you will be prompted to enter your Facebook credentials or to "Sign up for Facebook". By proceeding you are allowing the BookLending.com Site to access your information and you are agreeing to the Facebook Terms of Use in your use of BookLending.com Sites.
Conversely, if you are not currently registered as a BookLending.com user and you click on "Sign in Using Facebook", you will first be asked to enter your Facebook credentials and then be given the option to register and join BookLending.com. Once you register on the BookLending.com site and Connect with Facebook, you will be able to automatically post recent activity back to Facebook. You have the option to disable Facebook Connect at any time by logging into "My Profile" and clicking on "My Facebook Profile". Further, you can edit privacy settings for the reviews that appear on Facebook or disconnect this service by visiting the Facebook Application Settings page.
11. Contacting Us
Whether you’re a new or loyal customer or a first-time site visitor, we look forward to hearing from you!
Customer Service Inquiries | info@booklending.com