Privacy Notice

PosiTek.net LLC Privacy Policy

PosiTek.net LLC (“PosiTek.net®”) has created this policy in order to help you make an informed decision about using our services, and to explain to you what information we collect, how we store that information and how we may use it. By using our website (all pages under https://positek.net aka “Practical Help”), you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and/or processed in the United States in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. By using our website, you are also agreeing to the Terms of Service provided by link in the sidebar near the bottom of every page of the main Practical Help website at https://positek.net. We also use an alias domain name (http://practicalhelp.tv) that simply repoints your browser to https://positek.net, so this policy applies equally.

PosiTek.net® collects all data entered into this website and is responsible for implementing and ensuring compliance with this privacy policy. PosiTek.net® participates in the Safe Harbor program developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and complies with the requirements of the European Union’s GDPR.

What Information Do We Collect?
When you enter the Practical Help website, we collect your browser information (which typically includes browser type, version, host operating system and browser language) and IP address. PosiTek.net® uses your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server and for other administrative purposes including, but not limited to, directing you to a geographically closer data center or providing you pages in your country’s local currency/language. We also use IP addresses to gather broad demographic information from all visitors. You can browse this entire website without giving us any additional information.

Should you choose to avail yourself of a service offered on our website, we may collect certain information about you:

• For newsletter signup, you must provide an email address (so we can send you the newsletter), and you may choose to give us your name (optional).
• For 1-on-1 Tech Support service, you may choose to give us additional information including address, phone number, IM address, Skype address, Google Hangout address, Facetime address, or other contact information. During the course of the tech support session, you may also give us additional information on your personal consumer technology, and give us access to your computer – and by extension your personal data. If you choose to do this, know that we will never access your personal data without your express permission, and that our remote access to your computer is fully controlled by you, is temporary, and can be revoked at any time. And we will always keep whatever information you share with us private between you and us to the extent of the law.

PosiTek.net® uses third party credit card processors including Paypal to process payments, and none of the information you provide to those 3rd party processors is collected by or accessible to PosiTek.net® with the exception of your name, email address, phone number, the purchased product or service details and the total amounts collected by the third party processor. PosiTek.net® only uses third party payment processors who are PCI Compliant. We certify that the PosiTek.net® website is fully compliant with all laws, regulations, and policies in effect for the control of credit card information.

PosiTek.net® may use aggregate general and demographic information (such as your zip code) should you choose to share such information with us. Aggregate demographic, sales and traffic information data is used for improving the services offered at PosiTek.net® and to develop marketing programs. PosiTek.net® may also provide aggregate (but never personally identifiable) statistics about our members, sales, traffic patterns and related site information to third-party vendors and our advertisers. See the below sections for details.

Should you choose to give us any additional personally identifiable information, we will hold this information with the same level of security that our payment processors use protect your credit card information. All such information will be securely stored in encrypted file servers under our direct control. Voluntarily submitted profile details we may also collect from you may include:

If you post any comments or questions in any part of the Practical Help website, please know that this information is publicly viewable and we make no guarantee of security other than that we will not allow any other website visitor to change your comment or question. Should you wish to retract or change a comment or question, just email us at Support@PosiTek.net and we will remove the original comment to allow you to post a revised comment. Your comments are stored on our databases and we have complete control over their visibility – inappropriate comments will be deleted. However, PosiTek.net® takes no responsibility for the content of any comments you or any other website visitor chooses to post.

Information on Visitors – Use of Cookies
During the course of any visit to the Practical Help website or any other domain name that delivers to you the same website (https://positek.net), the pages you see are downloaded to your computer along with something called a “cookie”. Cookies are simple text files that identify your computer to our server. Cookies in themselves do not identify the individual user, just the computer used. Cookies themselves record those areas of the site that have been visited by the computer in question, and for how long. Our advertisers may also leave cookies, particularly should you choose to click on an ad. Most websites use cookies because cookies allow the website publisher to ascertain whether the computer has visited the site before, and certain activity you take on the website. In addition to browsing history, cookies may store the geographic location of a computer and the web browsing preferences associated with that computer. At no time will our cookies (or our servers) contain any credit card information.

Any information that is supplied by cookies can help us to provide you with a better service and assists us to analyze the profile of our visitors. They make it easier for us to help you, and tailor our website to improve our service to you. We will not resell or share any information gathered with our cookies to a third party. Should you choose a paid service, you will visit the website of our payment processor for the purpose of completing your transaction, and only the information needed to complete your transaction, which will never be visible to the PosiTek.net® website.

PosiTek.net® does accept 3rd party advertising which includes blocks in various areas: embedded in our postings, displayed in the top banner, in the sidebar and in the footer areas. If you click on a link that takes you away from our site, our policy does not apply, and other websites may collect and use cookies in variance to our policy. This policy only covers the use of cookies by PosiTek.net® and does not cover the use of cookies by anyone else, except that we will not share any of the cookie information we have collected with any other site. PosiTek.net® does not have control, nor have access to the information contained in other websites’ cookies.

Your ability to monitor and control cookies
Website visitors have the opportunity to set their computers and/or web browsers to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. The last of these, of course, means that certain personalized services cannot then be provided to that visitor.

You can, should you choose, disable the cookies from your browser and/or delete cookies currently stored on your computer. This may prevent you from taking advantage of all the services that PosiTek.net® has to offer.

Our Primary Use of Your Personal Information
The information you provide to PosiTek.net® will be used for the following reasons:

PosiTek.net periodically contacts members using information supplied by members. Members may opt-out of receiving certain mailings, such as PosiTek.net newsletters and marketing mailings by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of such mailings.

PosiTek.net may contact you for a number of purposes related to the service you have signed up for. For example, we may wish to notify you that a particular service has been improved or suspended. The only way you can opt out of receiving these types of administration communications would be to unsubscribe.

Additional Uses of Your Personal Information
Surveys: Our online surveys may ask members for contact information (e.g., email address) and demographic information (e.g., zip code, age, or income level). Personal information collected in this manner is used for site development purposes in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Contests: We may run contests on our site in which we may ask members for contact information (e.g., email address) and demographic information (e.g., zip code). Personal information collected in this manner is used to facilitate the member’s participation in the contest, and for site development purposes, in accordance with this Privacy Policy, and in accordance with the Terms and Conditions applicable to a contest.

Disclosure of Your Personal Information
We will not pass on your personal information to third parties, except in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We do not share, sell, rent or trade personal information with third parties for their promotional purposes.

We reserve the right to disclose your personal information, without prior notice to you, as required by law, or when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our web site. Additionally, we may share your personal information when we believe it is necessary to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the PosiTek.net® service or using the PosiTek.net® name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents, law enforcement or government agencies.

We employ service providers and other companies and individuals to perform functions and provide services on our behalf who may have access to your information needed to perform their functions and also to provide you with the services that you have requested, but these service providers may not use it for any other purpose. Such service providers may include credit card transaction processors, communication platform providers, and hosting services providers; the information that could be provided to these service providers may include but is not limited to names, email addresses and other information provided by you. Such service providers will be subject to appropriate contractual arrangements and security obligations as required by applicable law, and your privacy rights are subject to these other providers, not PosiTek.net®.

Our Storage of Your Personal Information
We may hold your personal information on our systems for as long as you use the services you have requested. If you choose to unsubscribe from our newsletter service, we will immediately purge your information from our web servers, with the exception of previous comments (and the associated metadata) you have posted (see below for how to request purging of your comments). For any other services, we may maintain your information for a reasonable period of time after such service is rendered to permit us to provide you with follow-on service, and to maintain any benefits you accrued while your prior service relationship was in effect.

In some circumstances it may be necessary to retain your personal information to deal with any disputes. Accordingly, PosiTek.net® may store messaging transcript data (including message content, names, email addresses times and dates) arising from the use of PosiTek.net® services for a period necessary to fulfill such purpose. We will ensure that all personal information supplied is held securely. Your contribution to information exchanges on PosiTek.net®, and any information linked to such information exchanges, may be maintained indefinitely by PosiTek.net® in order to serve the site’s intended purpose.

Any of your personal information held on our web servers will also be stored on our backup system, which is kept in case of loss of data. It may be that where data is lost, the personal data held on you as part of our backup system is used to restore our website to its status from the latest backup prior to the loss of data. All personal data (including communication data) stored on the backup system shall be held in a secure manner in compliance with applicable law.

Unfortunately, no transmissions of information via the internet is 100% secure. Although we will protect your personal data once we have received it on our site, we cannot guarantee the security of any data during the transmission to our site; any transmission, therefore, is at your own risk. Our protection of your personal data is limited in that we assume no liability over information you wish to share with us.

We recognize that computer and online account hacking is a serious concern. In order to help safeguard your credit card information in this environment, we do not process financial transactions on our website; we send you to our secure, PCI-compliant credit card processors for all financial transactions. That way, your credit card information remains separately secure. Our website is secured by SSL encryption, and is continually monitored for security. None of your sensitive credit card information (to include card number, expiration date and CVV code) is ever accessible by PosiTek.net®.

Your Sensitive Information

If you pay for services using our website, know that all credit card processing is handled by our service provider (Authorize.net) and you actually leave our website to make your payment directly at the service provider’s website, returning to our website after the transaction is completed. This ensures we comply fully with PCI requirements for merchants who process major credit card transactions. Authorize.net is the payment processor used by 80% of online merchants and is considered the ‘gold standard’ for secure payment processing. Paypal.com is used by small businesses and individuals to make easy payments, and we provide that as an alternative. Of course, if you send us a check for payment, we will make a copy of the check and keep it in our records for proper accounting purposes.

How we protect your data

We use industry-standard security features and tools on this website to prevent data breaches. Our website is fully secured with all communication between your web browser and our server being fully SSL encrypted. Access by us is further secured by 2-factor authentication and reCaptcha to prevent bots and hackers from gaining unauthorized access. All data on the website is backed up by our web hosting service provider on a regular basis and stored encrypted on their servers. Since we’ve started operations, we’ve never experienced a breach, and remain pro-active with ongoing improvements to our security posture to ensure we never do. That said, if we were to suffer a breach, we would report such to law enforcement authorities and take steps to lock down our website, even to the point of closing the site down temporarily. Since we have none of your financial information on our servers, we have ensured that we never will risk your sensitive data.

Since we do keep electronic copies of your check payments, they are secured with industry-standard hardware firewall protection, bolstered by software security programs running pro-actively to monitor and report on security. We apply security patches immediately when they are released, watch for and implement new and better security practices and products on an iterative and routine basis, and monitor all traffic to ensure that the image(s) of your check(s) are never at risk of being stolen. Similar to our website security procedures, if we were to suffer a breach, we would report such to law enforcement authorities, and notify any affected clients.

Email and Spam

If you have subscribed to our newsletter or if you are a member of our website (you can log in) or if you have purchased on our website, there is a good chance you will receive emails from us.

We will only send you emails which you have signed up to receive, or which pertain to the services we provided to you.

To send you emails, we use the name and email address you provide us. Our site also logs the IP address you used when you signed up for the service to prevent abuse of the system.

We use a trusted provider (SendGrid) to deliver our emails. This service allows us to track opens and clicks on our emails. We use this information to improve the content of our newsletters. No identifiable information is otherwise tracked outside this website except for the email address.

For our email newsletter and other marketing and information services, we scrub our list regularly. Plus we are on guard to prevent our mail server from being listed as a spammer. If you subscribed to our newsletter service and are not receiving emails, please send us a note to Subscriber_issues@PosiTek.net.

Every email you receive from us has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. We subscribe to the tenets and fully comply with the CAN SPAM Act and will act promptly to remove your email from our lists if you unsubscribe or our messages are rejected by your email service or blocked in any way. For your security, your subscription page can only be accessed from the links in our newsletter emails. And we don’t use your email address for anything else, nor sell it to 3rd parties!

Comments you post on our website

When you leave a comment on any of our articles, we we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here.

After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. All our comments are moderated, which means they will not appear on our website until we have reviewed them. We reserve the right to not approve comments for any reason, and we may also edit them to remove any objectionable information including language, URL, sales pitches, and potentially contentious religious or political bits. If you wish to retract a comment you’ve posted, please make your request via email to Subscriber_issues@PosiTek.net.

Questions you post on our website

If you use the Ask Your Tech Coach form, all information you provide is captured, along with your IP address. Since we don’t charge for answering questions, we cannot guarantee that we will answer your question. But if we do, we will email you a response and/or post an article in the Library. We reserve the right to edit your question for clarity and brevity, and we may generalize things a bit so that the Q&A helps more readers. If you wish to retract your question, please make your request via email to Subscriber_issues@PosiTek.net.

Our library continues to grow indefinitely, and your questions and comments are kept online indefinitely.

Media you upload to our website

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. If you upload any file to our website, you are giving us unrestricted use of that file, and we can use it on our website with no restrictions and no liabilities. We will preserve your identity by masking out any personally identifiable information.

Advertisers and Links to Other Web Sites
While the PosiTek.net® website does contain links to other websites, none of these are intended or implied as advertising or endorsements of third-party products or services, except where we specifically state our recommendations. The PosiTek.net® website does contain third party advertising and/or sponsorship blocks, and should you click on any advertising or sponsorship block, we assume no liability for any consequences to you or your personal data. When viewing our Content on other websites such as Youtube, Vimeo, and iTunes/Liberated Syndication, you may see advertising from which we may receive remuneration. You are under no obligation to respond to or click on any 3rd party advertising on this website or any other online resource.

The PosiTek.net® website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, third-party vendors, and affiliates. While we form relationships with partners to promote PosiTek.net® and encourage new members to join our Network, we do not accept any remuneration for any links, images, or descriptions which we may display from time to time, outside of specific 3rd party advertising listed below. Any specific products or services which we either recommend or otherwise make reference to, are completely without any remuneration or consideration for said display.

One form of these relationships is shared account information (e.g., Facebook Connect). If you choose to connect your PosiTek.net® website account with any such shared authentication methods, you are subject to the privacy policies of those external entities for the shared information (e.g., username, password, profile data, etc.). The security of your website account is therefore assumed by you; we can only protect your information on our website to the extent of the terms of this privacy policy.

This site contains links to other sites. PosiTek.net is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such websites. Therefore, if you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check those policies before you submit any personal data to those websites.

3rd party Advertising

We use Google AdSense to deliver advertising to our webpages. Please see Google’s AdSense Privacy policy here.

• Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website.
• Google’s use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to our website and/or other sites on the Internet.
• You may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting Ads Settings.

Analytics

We capture analytics on our website use with Google Analytics, discarding all personal data and only keeping aggregate data such as geographic location, type of browser used, length of time spent on our website, and pages visited. We use this data to improve our website and our services only, and will never provide this data to anyone other than our analytics provider (Google). Google Analytics’ Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

Data Retention

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their own personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

You can request a copy of all the personally identifiable data we have on you. Send your request to privacy@PosiTek.net.

We can delete your comments, metadata and personal information within 3 business days after you ask us to do so. Send your request to privacy@PosiTek.net.

Users Under Age 13
If you are under the age of 13, your use of the PosiTek.net website is under the control of your parent or guardian. Any actions said minor takes on this website are considered the actions of the parent or guardian, and we assume no liability for any such actions other than that provided in this Privacy Policy or our Terms and Conditions. The PosiTek.net website is intended for individuals 13 and older only.

A Note for Parents Concerning Privacy
PosiTek.net is not intended for use by children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. PosiTek.net® seeks to encourage children to consult with their parents before using any website. However, PosiTek.net® believes that parents should supervise their children’s online activities and teach their children about safety of their information and safety on the internet. While we don’t believe that any of the commercially-available parental control tools and software can replace supervision and education, you may choose to avail yourself of such parental control tools and software available from online services and software manufacturers that help provide a safe online environment for children to work within. These tools can also prevent children from disclosing personal information without parental permission.

Ownership Changes
If the ownership of all or substantially all of the PosiTek.net® business, or individual business units owned by PosiTek.net® were to change, your user information may be transferred to the new owner so the service can continue operations, without prior notice to you. In any such transfer of information, your user information would remain subject to the provisions of the then-current privacy policy.

Changes to This Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently and at least each time you submit personal information to PosiTek.net®. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you.

Contact PosiTek.net®
If you have questions or concerns regarding this privacy policy, you should first contact our privacy staff as follows:

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information PosiTek.net® holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. There may be a small charge for such administration requests. All such inquiries should be sent to our Chief Privacy Officer. Additionally, you may at any time submit changes or updates to your information, or complete removal of such information. If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or if your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should contact the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. at eusafeharbor@council.bbb.org

If You have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our Terms and Conditions on the PosiTek.net® website, You can e-mail your inquiries to feedback@positek.net.