Welcome

We believe that information-gathering and use should go hand-in-hand with transparency. This Privacy Policy explains how getsteps.com ("Site", "we" or "us") collects, uses, and shares information we receive from you through your use of the Site. It is essential to understand that, by using this Site, you consent to the collection, transfer, processing, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. That means that reading this Policy carefully is important.

Use of info

Types of Information We Receive From You, How We Get It, & How We Use It

Your Public Contributions

Whatever you post on Site can be seen and used by everyone.

The Site was primarily created to help you share your knowledge with the world, and we share your contributions because you have asked us to do so.

When you make a contribution to any part of Site, you are creating a permanent, public record of every piece of content added, removed, or altered by you. The page history may show when your contribution or deletion was made, as well as your username or your IP address. We may use your public contributions, either aggregated with the public contributions of others or individually, to create new features or data-related products for you or to learn more about how the Site is used.

Unless this Policy says otherwise, you should assume that information that you actively contribute to the Site, including personal information, is publicly visible and can be found by search engines. Like most things on the Internet, anything you share may be copied and redistributed throughout the Internet by other people. Please do not contribute any information that you are uncomfortable making permanently public, like revealing your real name or location in your contributions.

You should be aware that specific data made public by you or aggregated data that is made public by us can be used by anyone for analysis and to infer information about users, such as which country a user is from, political affiliation, and gender.

Account Information & Registration

If you want to create an account, we require following information: username (nickname), password and email address. Your username will be publicly visible, so please be careful about using your real name as your username. Your password is only used to verify that the account is yours. Your IP address is also automatically submitted to us, and we record it temporarily to help prevent abuse. No other personal information is required: no real name, no date of birth, no credit card information.

Once created, user accounts cannot be removed entirely (although you can usually hide the information on your user page if you choose to). This is because your public contributions must be associated with their author (you!). So make sure you pick a name that you will be comfortable with for years to come.

Information Related to Your Use of the Site

We want to make the Site better for you by learning more about how you use it. Examples of this might include how often you visit the Site, what you like, what you find helpful, how you get to the Site, and whether you would use a helpful feature more if we explained it differently. We keep information related to your use of the Site confidential, except as provided in this Policy.

Information We Receive Automatically

Because of how browsers work and similar to other major websites, we receive some information automatically when you visit the Site. This information includes the type of device you are using, the type and version of your browser, your browser's language preference, the type and version of your device's operating system, in some cases the name of your internet service provider or mobile carrier, the website that referred you to the Site, which pages you request and visit, and the date and time of each request you make to the Site.

Put simply, we use this information to enhance your experience with Site. For example, we use this information to administer the sites, provide greater security, and fight vandalism; customize content and set language preferences, test features to see what works, and improve performance; understand how users interact with the Site, track and study use of various features, gain understanding about the demographics of the Site and analyze trends.

Emails

You provide us an email address at the time of registration. Your email address is kept confidential, except as provided in this Policy. We do not sell, rent, or use your email address to advertise third-party products or services to you.

We use your email address to let you know about things that are happening with the Site, such as telling you important information about your account, letting you know if something is changing about the Site or policies, and alerting you when there has been a change to an article that you have decided to follow. Please note that if you email us, we may keep your message, email address, and any other information you provide us, so that we can process and respond to your request.

You can choose to limit some of these kinds of notifications, like those alerting you if an article changes. Others, such as those containing critical information that all users need to know to participate successfully in the Site, you may not be able to opt out of.

We will never ask for your password by email. If you ever receive such an email, please let us know by sending it to info@getsteps.com, so we can investigate the source of the email.

Surveys & Feedback

Participating in optional surveys or providing feedback helps us make the Site better. If you don't feel comfortable with how we plan on using the survey or feedback results, you are not obligated to take the survey or give feedback.

Location Information

Metadata

Sometimes, we may automatically receive location data from your device. For example, if you want to upload a photo on the Site, we may receive metadata, such as the place and time you took the photo, automatically from your device. Please be aware that, unlike location information collected using GPS signals, the default setting on your mobile device typically includes the metadata in your photo or video upload to the Site. If you do not want metadata sent to us and made public at the time of your upload, please change your settings on your device.

IP Addresses

When you visit the Site, we automatically receive the IP address of the device (or your proxy server) you are using to access the Internet, which could be used to infer your geographical location. If you are visiting Site with your mobile device, we may use your IP address to get anonymized or aggregated information regarding the volume of usage in certain areas. We use IP addresses for research and analytics; to better personalize content, notices, and settings for you; to fight spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of abuse.

Sharing

When May We Share Your Information?

With Your Permission

We may share your information for a particular purpose, if you agree.

To Protect You, Ourselves & Others

We, or particular users with certain administrative rights as described below, may need to share your personal information if it is reasonably believed to be necessary to enforce or investigate potential violations of our Terms of Use or this Privacy Policy. We may also need to access and share information to investigate and defend ourselves against legal threats or actions.

Some of the users of the Site may hold certain administrative rights. These rights may include access to limited amounts of otherwise nonpublic information about recent contributions and activity by other users. They use this access to help protect against vandalism and abuse, fight harassment of other users, and generally try to minimize disruptive behavior on the Site. However, the legal names of these users are not known to us.

We hope that this never comes up, but we may disclose your personal information if we believe that it's reasonably necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm or death to a person, or to protect our organization, employees, contractors, users, or the public. We may also disclose your personal information if we reasonably believe it necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise assess and address potential spam, malware, fraud, abuse, unlawful activity, and security or technical concerns.

To Understand & Experiment

The software that powers the Sites depends on the contributions of volunteer software developers, who spend time writing and testing code to help it improve and evolve with our users' needs. To facilitate their work, we may give some developers limited access to systems that contain your personal information, but only as reasonably necessary for them to develop and contribute to the Site.

Please note that, despite the obligations we impose on developers we cannot guarantee that they will use your personal information only to make a contribution to the Site, nor do we guarantee that we will regularly screen or audit their projects.

Because You Made It Public

Any information you post publicly on the Site is just that - public. For example, if you include your mailing address in your contribution to the Site, that address is public, and not protected by this Policy. Please think carefully about your desired level of anonymity before you disclose personal information on your user page or elsewhere.

How Do We Protect Your Data?

We strive to protect your information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. We use variety of measures to protect your information. Some measures may be implemented by our hosting service provider, but these measures are outside of our control. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as completely secure data transmission or storage, so we can't guarantee that our security will not be breached (by technical measures or through violation of our policies and procedures).

How Long Do We Keep Your Data?

Once we receive personal information from you, we keep it for the shortest possible time that is consistent with the maintenance, understanding, and improvement of the Site, and our obligations under applicable law. Non-personal information may be retained indefinitely.

Please remember that certain information is retained and displayed indefinitely, such as your IP address, username and any public contributions to the Site.

Cookies

To make this site work properly, we sometimes place small data files called cookies on your device. Most big websites do this too.

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language, font size and other display preferences) over a period of time, so you do not have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to improve your experience using this Site, to assess content usage or to support marketing of our services. To support these goals, we may use third party services which uses their own privacy policy.

We use following third party services:

• Disqus - to allow you discuss under selected content on Site. See Disqus Privacy Policy.
• Addthis - to help you share content on Site with your friends and give you tips of another content we host. See AddThis Privacy policy.
• Google Analytics - to assess content usage. See Google Privacy Policy.
  • For more information about how Google uses data when you use this site and how you can control information sent to Google visit following page: How Google uses data when you use our partners' sites or apps

How to control cookies

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish - for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.

Important info

For the protection of us and other users, if you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, you may not use the Site.

Where is the Site & What Does That Mean for Me?

Site is hosted on server located in the U.S. If you decide to use Site, whether from inside or outside of the U.S., you consent to the collection, transfer, storage, processing, disclosure, and other uses of your information in the U.S. as described in this Privacy Policy. You also consent to the transfer of your information by us from the U.S. to other countries, which may have different or less stringent data protection laws than your country, in connection with providing services to you or administrating of Site.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Because things naturally change over time and we want to ensure our Privacy Policy accurately reflects our practices and the law, it may be necessary to modify this Privacy Policy from time to time.

We ask that you please review the most up-to-date version of our Privacy Policy. Your continued use of the Site after this Privacy Policy becomes effective constitutes acceptance of this Privacy Policy on your part. Your continued use of the Site after any subsequent version of this Privacy Policy becomes effective, constitutes acceptance of that version of the Privacy Policy on your part.