Privacy Policy

Updated June 12, 2011

This Privacy Policy discloses the privacy practices for the Votifi website (collectively, the “Website” located at www.votifi.com). Discourse Analytics, Inc., a Delaware corporation, the provider of the Website (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 at admin@votifi.com.

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, the home page, 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, by email, or by means of notice on our home page.

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, using our services, participating in our polls be they on-line or through your mobile phone, submitting content and/or posting content in discussion forums, filling out a survey, posting a review, sending us or our partners feedback, requesting information about our services, or applying for a job (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 code), voting district, email address, mobile phone 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.

By analyzing the data you provide both directly and indirectly we will make recommendations to you on content and suggest to you other users with whom you may be interested in interacting with. We will not take your personal data and sell or rent it to outside parties. We will, however, use what we learn about you through your activity on our site to conduct polls for third parties for a fee. These fees enable us to offer the site and our services to you for free. You do not have to participate in the polls but you do have to agree to let us send them to you.

You may contact us at [admin at votifi dot com] or write to us at Discourse Analytics, Inc., 6917 Anchorage Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20817 to request that we remove this information from our database.

We use Personally Identifiable Information to provide products and services to you, administer polls, 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. If your comments contain personal information such as your name, then 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 website you visited before coming to our Website, the URL of the website 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, 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.

Location Information. To provide advanced features of Votifi, we collect, maintain, use, and display your personal data and the geographic location of your mobile device (we call this location fix of your mobile device “location information”). You are not required to provide this information in order to use the Votifi service. In order to use the mobile polling features of the Votifi Service, you must consent to: (a) the use of your phone’s location to provide Votifi to you; (b) receive text messages; and (c) pay carrier data, messaging, and other fees resulting from Votifi usage. Data and messaging (including SMS text messages) plans are required to use the mobile features of the Votifi Service. Standard data and messaging charges, fees, and taxes from your carrier apply.

To provide the mobile features of the Service, we derive location information from your wireless carrier, certain third-party service providers, or directly from the mobile device that you used to register with Votifi. This location tracking of your mobile device occurs only when the Votifi mobile application is actively open and running. Votifi is not responsible for the personally identifiable, profile, or location information that you choose to disclose publicly on the Service. If you remove information that you posted to the Service, copies may remain viewable in cached and archived pages of the Service, or if other Users have copied or saved that information.

3. Release of Personally Identifiable

We will not share, sell, rent, or trade your Personally Identifiable Information with other parties except as provided below:

We may provide services and products through third parties. These “Third Party Service Providers” may 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 send email, administer polls, remove repetitive information on customer lists, analyze data, provide marketing assistance, provide search results and links, 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 will encourage Votifi Third Party Service Providers to adopt and post privacy policies. However, the use of your Personally Identifiable Information by such parties will be governed by the privacy policies of such parties and is not subject to our control.

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.

Also we may 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 the “My Profile” section of the site, sending us an email at admin at Votifi dot com or by writing to us at Discourse Analytics, Inc., 6917 Anchorage Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20817. 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 using our services, we will send you Administrative and Promotional emails. We will send you information regarding your account activity as well as updates about our services. 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 our services. In contrast to Administrative Emails, however, you do have a choice with respect to Promotional Emails. Promotional Emails advertise our services. 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 admin at Votifi dot com or by writing to us at the address contained herein, or by hitting the “unsubscribe” button 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. We may encrypt certain sensitive information using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to ensure that your Personally Identifiable Information is safe as it is transmitted to us.

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 that 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, 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.votifi.com. Other websites 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 website, we urge you review the website’s privacy policy. We are not responsible for the policies or practices of third parties.

10. Miscellaneous Privacy Issues

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, and submit media content. This information may be accessible by other consumers and companies and may appear on other websites or web searches, and therefore this information could be read, collected, and used by others. 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.

Children’s Privacy. Protecting the privacy of young children is especially important. For that reason, Votifi does not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register as Members for the commercial service. If you are under 13, please do not send any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, or email address. No one under age 13 is allowed to provide any personal information to or on Votifi. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at admin at Votifi dot com or write to us at Discourse Analytics, Inc., 6917 Anchorage Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20817.

Notice of Privacy Rights to California Residents. California law requires that we provide you with a summary of your privacy rights under the California Online Privacy Protection Act (the “Act”) and the California Business and Professions Code. As required by the Act, we will provide you with the categories of Personally Identifiable Information that we collect through the Website and the categories of third party persons or entities with whom such Personally Identifiable Information may be shared for direct marketing purposes at your request. California law requires us to inform you, at your request, (1) the categories of Personally Identifiable Information we collect and what third parties we share that information with; (2) the names and addresses of those third parties; and (3) examples of the products marketed by those companies. The Act further requires us to allow you to control who you do not want us to share that information with. To obtain this information, please send a request by email or standard mail to the address found below. When contacting us, please indicate your name, address, email address, and what Personally Identifiable Information you do not want us to share with Affiliated Businesses. The request should be sent to the attention of our legal department, and labeled “California Customer Choice Notice.” Please allow 30 days for a response. Also, please note that there is no charge for controlling the sharing of your Personally Identifiable Information or requesting this notice.

11. Contacting Us

Whether you’re a new or loyal User, we’d like to stay connected and want to hear from you!

Corporate Address

Discourse Analytics, Inc. (operating through our Website, Votifi.com)
6917 Anchorage Drive
Bethesda, Maryland 20817