Privacy Policy

Our privacy policy is straight forward.

Generally Speaking

First we'll say the obvious - in a sentence.

An example of consent is supplying your full name in a publicly viewable area of the site. Do we really need to say that we won't share your credit card numbers, social security number, genetic material or any other data protected already by the government? Okay - “we won't share your credit card numbers, social security number, genetic material or any other data already protected by the government.”

What we really need to talk about is the data not already protected by law. Simply put:

1. We give your data the respect of a conversation.
2. Data stored on our site remains in our site.
3. You own your personal and User Generated Data (UGD).
4. We manage your UGD as if it were our own.
5. We won't monetize your data out of the context it was provided.

Please do not put personal data like credit card numbers in publicly viewable areas of the site. If you do that, it will you sharing your personal information, not us.

For the Detail Minded

1) We give your data the respect of a conversation
Forums, weBLogs, Wiki pages, knowledge sharing are all forms of communication. When we post information we are sharing what we know. In the area of opinions we share how we feel as well. Folks visiting our site that contribute are doing the same. That is a conversation. We would expect that what we put on the site would be taken in proper context. We expect it to not be spun, twisted or analyzed to be used against us in some way. We treat your data as we expect ours to be treated.

2) Data stored on our site remains in our site.
We do not “harvest” the data on our site to be sold as a crop. We do not pass site data to any other entity for their use to develop sales focused customer profiles. We do not do this for third party benefit. We do not do this for our own benefit. There are some obvious exceptions where data does leave our site. These are really a bit out of context from this consideration. We'll explain them anyway for the hair splitters out there:

• Purchases made through our site will be processed by a financial transaction service provider. This is no different than buying that great bean dip you love at the grocery store using a credit or debit card.
• Passive conveyance of information from the site is going to happen. Actually, we hope it happens. “Passive conveyance” is when someone visiting the site likes what they see and passes it forward. Maybe they'll cut and paste it into an email. Maybe they'll use it in a research paper. This is good healthy sharing.
• “Watches” can be set on the site by anyone using the site. These are like mini subscriptions. When something being watched changes the watcher is notified. Sometimes the watcher is sent the actual content. We see this as enabling a conversation between interested parties. It is a far cry from quietly harvesting information out of our site database and passing it off to companies that could care less about the conversation. Such companies are generally more interested in the conversation participants than the conversation.

3) You own your personal and User Generated Data (UGD)
TekAdvocates lays no claim on any data posted to our site by participants. We do claim ownership and copyright for all content entered to the site by TekAdvocates team members. (We own our data just like you own yours.) Comments, weBLog entries, forum posts, photos, drawings or any other data posted by a site participant remains their property. This does not exclude anyone using the TekAdvocates site from making use of the information. Some may even profit from posted data.
Standard rules of conversation, courtesy and plagiarism apply. Grab whatever content you want from the site for your own use. Share whatever you like from the site for the interested parties own use. If you are going to use a few lines of content from someone else in your own work, be sure to credit them. If you are going to use more than a few lines, reach out and ask first. With a little community minded respect and courtesy everyone will get along fine.
You own your data – but you're lending it to everyone using the site by putting it here. It's yours to edit or delete. We respect it as yours, just as we do anything we've learned in any other conversation.

4) We manage your UGD as if it were our own.
That's the bottom line. We do not use the data on our site to generate profiles intending to manipulate the data source – you. We may examine the data to identify the needs of site participants. This is a subtle, but important difference. In the former the intent is to sell regardless of actual need. In the latter the intent is to help. (The latter applies to us.) We do not see your data as our resource to exploit for our own out of context benefit. We see site data as community property.
The data on the site is generally going to fall into two categories, requests for help and offers to help. We will make every effort to get those who need help the help they need. We also strive to give helpers the opportunity to help. The intent is to pair the knowledgeable to provide aid to those needing a hand. We'll not do things like looking through the data to see who is mistyping words with letters to the right of the “T,” “G,” “B” keyboard keys to figure who might have an injured right hand so we can sell them BandAids. But if you drop us a note saying you hurt your hand we'll see what we can find for you.

5) We won't monetize your data out of the context it was provided.
We do not aggregate site participant UGD for profiling and resale. We certainly don't sell UGD to third parties for marketing purposes of any kind. We do intend to profit from the information posted to our site. Such profits will stem from straight forward billing practices. It is our intention to garner an income by providing services evolving from site content. (We gotta keep the lights on somehow.) In all honesty, we're not quite sure what those services are going to look like exactly. So, for now, we can just leave it at, “we're not monetizing what's posted at all.”

Summary

TekAdvocates is founded out of frustration for how data belonging to the people of the world is being abused simply because they chose to share it, knowingly or not. Data taken out of context and analyzed to identify weak points, habits and vices of those who generated it to the benefit of the analyzer is wrong. At TekAdvocates we treat your data as if it were our own and do nothing with it we wouldn't want someone we trust doing with ours.