Drought Smart Plants Privacy Policy

I recognize that your privacy is important. This document outlines the types of personal information I receive and collect when you use Drought Smart Plants, as well as some of the steps I take to safeguard information. I hope this will help you make an informed decision about sharing personal information with me.

Drought Smart Plants strives to maintain the highest standards of decency, fairness and integrity in all my operations. Likewise, I am dedicated to protecting my customers', consumers' and online visitors' privacy on my website.

Personal Information

Drought Smart Plants collects personally identifiable information from the visitors to my website only on a voluntary basis. Personal information collected on a voluntary basis may include name, postal address, email address, company name and telephone number.

This information is collected if you request information from me, participate in a contest or sweepstakes, and sign up to join my email list or request some other service or information from me. The information collected is internally reviewed, used to improve the content of my website, notify my visitors of updates, and respond to visitor inquiries.

Once information is reviewed, it is discarded or stored in my files. If I make material changes in the collection of personally identifiable information I will inform you by placing a notice on my site. Personal information received from any visitor will be used only for internal purposes and will not be sold or provided to third parties.

About Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that Drought Smart Plants stores on your computer, which your browser provides to Drought Smart Plants each time you return to the site. We use cookies to help us identify and track visitors, their use of our website, and their website access preferences.

Use of Cookies and Web Beacons

I may use cookies to help you personalize your online experience. Cookies are identifiers that are transferred to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable my systems to recognize your browser. The purpose of a cookie is to tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page. For example, if you personalize the sites pages, or register with any of my site's services, a cookie enables Drought Smart Plants to recall your specific information on subsequent visits.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying your Web browser; however, if you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of the site.

A web beacon is a transparent image file used to monitor your journey around a single website or collection of sites. They are also referred to as web bugs and are commonly used by sites that hire third-party services to monitor traffic. They may be used in association with cookies to understand how visitors interact with the pages and content on the pages of a web site.

I may serve third-party advertisements that use cookies and web beacons in the course of ads being served on my web site to ascertain how many times you've seen an advertisement. No personally identifiable information you give me is provided to them for cookie or web beacon use, so they cannot personally identify you with that information on my web site.

Some third-party advertisements may be provided by Google, which uses the DoubleClick cookie to serve ads. This cookie enables Google to serve ads to users based on their visits to sites on the Web. You may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Browsers can be set to accept or reject cookies or notify you when a cookie is being sent. Privacy software can be used to override web beacons. Taking either of these actions shouldn't cause a problem with my site, should you so choose.

Google Analytics Cookies

Drought Smart Plants uses Google Analytics to analyze the use of this website. Google Analytics collects demographic and interest data, and generates statistical and other information about website use, by means of cookies. These cookies are kept on your computer. We share this information with Google, which will store and use this information on its servers. Google's privacy policy is available at this link.

Drought Smart Plants uses information from Google Analytics to track the number of visits to the website, browsers and operating systems. No personally identifiable information is obtained from these cookies. We use the information that Google Analytics generates relating to our website to create reports about the use of the site. These reports allow us to update the site and improve your usage of it.

If you do not wish your data to be collected via Google Analytics, you can install its opt-out browser extension or add-on.

Advertising Cookies

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads on our website. These companies use cookies and web beacons in their ads to ascertain how many times you've seen an advertisement. We share this information with these companies, but do not provide them with any personally identifiable information for cookie or web beacon use, so they cannot personally identify you with that information from our website.

You may opt out of personalized ads for over 125 different ad networks. Click here to do that.

Affiliate Products and Services

I receive an affiliate commission for some of the products or services sold on Drought Smart Plants. By clicking on a product or service link, you consent to that platforms use of cookies as outlined on Amazon here.

Refusing Cookies

You can set your browser to accept or refuse all cookies automatically, or notify you when a cookie is being requested. Taking this action should not cause a problem with the continued use of our site. Consult the Help section of your browser for guidance on how to refuse all cookies or to notify you when a cookie is requested.

If you choose to refuse Drought Smart Plant's cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of the site.

Personally Identifiable Information

Drought Smart Plants may collect and use your personal information for the following purposes:

To run and operate our site.

To display content on the site correctly.

To improve customer service.

To help us respond to your customer service requests and support needs more efficiently.

To personalize your user experience.

To understand how our users as a group use the services and resources provided on our site.

To improve our site.To improve our products and services.

To run a promotion, contest, survey or other site feature.

To send information to you that you agreed to receive about topics we think will be of interest to you.

To send periodic emails, which may include electronic newsletters and/or autoresponder series of emails.

To respond to your enquiries, questions, and/or other requests.

Drought Smart Plants may collect personally identifiable information from you in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, when you visit our site, register on the site, or fill out a form, and in connection with other activities, services, features or resources we make available on our site.

If you complete a form, we will require your name and your email address, and will ask for information relevant to the purpose of the form.

If you submit content to us, we will ask for your name and email address. Photos you include with your submission, or details in your submission, may personally identify you.

If you request to be notified about comments on any content you submit to us, or request to be notified when others submit content, we will require your first name and your email address.

This site lets you share content with your friends and followers on various social media platforms. Below are links to the privacy policies of most of the social media commonly used;

https://www.reddit.com/help/privacypolicy/
https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/en
https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy
https://policies.google.com/privacy
https://twitter.com/en/privacy
https://www.facebook.com/policies/cookies/

Drought Smart Plants also uses Facebook commenting. Facebook stores all of your comments and may show them on your timeline, depending on your Facebook settings.

You can always refuse to supply personally identifiable information and visit our site anonymously. However, it may prevent you from engaging in certain site-related activities.

If we make material changes in the collection of personally identifiable information, we will inform you by placing a notice on our site. We will use personal information received from you for internal purposes only and will not sell it or provide it to third parties.

We also collect each visitor's IP address, which helps us combat spam and fraud. We do not use IP addresses for any other purpose.

Drought Smart Plants contains links to other websites that may be of interest to you. However, once you have used them to leave our site, we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information you provide while visiting such sites. These sites are not governed by this privacy statement. Always exercise caution by reviewing the privacy statement of the website in question before continuing to use it.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

This website is directed to adults; it is not directed to children under the age of 13. We operate our site in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and will not knowingly collect or use personal information from anyone under 13 years of age.

Non-personally Identifiable Information

We may collect non-personally identifiable information about you whenever you interact with our site. Non-personally identifiable information may include the browser name, the type of computer and technical information about your method of connecting to our site, such as the operating system and the Internet service provider you used, and other similar information.

In some cases, I may collect information about you that is not personally identifiable. I use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users' movements around the site and to gather demographic information about my user base as a whole. The information collected is used solely for internal review and not shared with other organizations for commercial purposes.

Release of Information

If Drought Smart Plants is sold, the information I have obtained from you through your voluntary participation in my site may transfer to the new owner as a part of the sale in order that the service being provided to you may continue. In that event, you will receive notice through the website of that change in control and practices, and I will make reasonable efforts to ensure that the purchaser honors any opt-out requests you might make of me.

Data Storage

Personally identifiable information and non-personally identifiable information collected by this site  is stored on our host's servers. That host is SiteSell Inc., located at 1000 Saint-Jean Boulevard, Suite 702, Pointe-Claire, QC H9R 5P1 Canada.

Updates and Effective Date

Drought Smart Plants reserves the right to make changes in this policy. If there is a material change in my privacy practices, I will indicate on my site that my privacy practices have changed and provide a link to the new privacy policy. I encourage you to periodically review this policy so that you will know what information I collect and how I use it.

Search Bar

The search box on this web site ("Search Box") is powered by Google Inc. ("Google"). You acknowledge and agree that Google's privacy policy (located at https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/) shall apply to your use of the Search Box and by using the Search Box you consent to Google using your personal data in accordance with its privacy policy.

Drought Smart Plants is a participant in the AddThis.com program, which provides online tools that leverage data to help publishers understand their audiences and drive traffic to their Sites. Your data may be transferred on a global basis.

Addthis.com will transfer this data to countries (including the United States) where data protection laws may differ from those in the originating country.

Transfers of personal information to countries outside the European Economic Area will be subject to the requirements of the European Union Standard Contractual Clauses.

If you do not wish your data to be collected by AddThis.com, you may opt out by visiting optout.aboutads.info  or the NAI opt out program.

You may have noticed over the past year that I've made some changes to the ads on Drought-smart-plants.com. Specifically, you've probably noticed that there are quite a few more ads than I've had in the past.

After hearing positive reports about a company called Mediavine, I've decided to trial their ads on my site. So far, I'm extremely happy with them.

Of course, whether on television or online, nobody loves ads, but ads are a tradeoff. Ads are what allow me to keep all of the information on my site free. To create a site with no ads, I'd need to charge people a monthly fee for access to premium (i.e. the best and most helpful) content.

For a lot of reasons, I don't want to go to that business model. I want to continue to put all of my very best information on the site for anyone to read for free.

So, while you will see more ads on my site, please know that those ads free me up to concentrate on providing the best content I can write for everyone who visits my site. They mean that you can be assured when you read an article on my site, you are getting my very best work, and I'm not holding back my most helpful ideas for "premium" customers.

I want all of my readers to be treated like premium customers, and Mediavine ads help me to do that."

How You Can Correct or Remove Information

We provide this privacy policy as a statement to you of our commitment to protect your personally identifiable information. If you have submitted personally identifiable information through our website and would like to update that information or have it deleted from our records, click on this link.

You can also request to edit, download or delete any of your information from the servers by clicking on this link.

Updates and Effective Date

Drought Smart Plants reserves the right to make changes in this policy. If there is a material change in our cookie and privacy practices, we will indicate on our site that those practices have changed and provide a link to the updated privacy policy. We encourage you to periodically review this policy so that you will know what information we collect and how we use it.

Agreeing to Terms

If you do not agree to Drought Smart Plant's privacy policy as posted here on this website, please do not consent to the setting of cookies and the collection and storage of your personally identifiable information.

Your explicit consent indicates acceptance of this privacy policy in its entirety.

Last updated: May 29 2018

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