PRIVACY POLICY
CREATIVE COW PRIVACY POLICY
UPDATED: 12 MAY, 2021
Thank you for your interest in how Creative COW’s privacy policies work. While the complete policies are outlined in detail below, Let us begin by stating that in the more than 20 year history of Creative COW, we have never collected user data to compile user profiles, nor have we ever sold, traded, nor given away user data to anyone.
With that stated upfront, the complete privacy policy and your rights follows:
Your privacy has been our great concern and Creative COW LLC (hereafter known as Creative COW) for many years. To that end, we have worked hard to protect your personal data since 2001. In early 2003, we locked down our accounts so that crawlers could not harvest our membership. In our Services Offered section, we convert phone numbers into images so that crawlers cannot easily grab your phone number through your listing. There are many other things we do behind the scenes that help you keep your privacy, the biggest is that we are not building data tables on our members. Our cookies are for your convenience and empowerment in our site, they are not there to stalk you. As we said, we have been looking out for our members’ privacy for many years now.
In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, this Privacy Policy outlines our data collection and processing activities, as well as our efforts to protect your data.
Our overriding policy is explained in detail below but is encapsulated in the following:
- We never sell, trade, or give away your private data to anyone.
- We handle all our data processing in compliance with European GDPR privacy regulations.
- You are in control of your personal information at all times.
1. WHAT DATA IS COLLECTED, PROCESSED, AND USED BY CREATIVE COW?
Non-Member Anonymous Visitors: To visit or to read content at Creative COW, you are not required to state who you are or provide any personal data whatsoever. You are free to read our forum posts, read or watch tutorials, view reels, look at the Job Board, read blogs, and do most every other activity in the Creative COW website. Our site is unlocked for anonymous visitors and you are welcome here. The only tracking being done on anonymous visitors is by Google Analytics (more information on that in point six below) which helps us view an aggregate (not individual purposeful tracking) of all our visitors so that we can see which articles people think are great and which ones we missed the mark on, for example. These kinds of aggregate analytics help us best focus our limited time and efforts but it is not done to compile visitor profiles, per se, and if you wish to exempt yourself from even this degree of non-personalized aggregate data tracking, you can do so by following the instructions given in point number six below.
We Use Cookies To Provide Added Functionality during your visits but you are under no obligation to leave them activated and you are free to turn them off in your browser. Our cookies are not tracking you and they are not designed to build or facilitate constructing a user profile of who you are or what you do in Creative COW. Our cookies are there to aid in speeding your use of the website and allowing a smoother and more full featured use of our site. If you leave our cookies active, they will remember you only to the degree that they will help you surf our site faster and have access to all the features of our interface — but even that information is resident in the cookies on your local machine, not on our website. Our cookies are not “reporting back” to Creative COW in the sense of constructing user profiles, etc. Turning off the cookies, severs any and all connection that you have with our site. We do not recommend this as we cannot guarantee how the site will function in your browser under those conditions.
Becoming A Full Posting Member of Our Community: It is our policy to require a real name registration only if you wish to post in our forums, adding your own questions or other interactions to the boards. We ask for real names to keep people responsible for their words and to keep flame wars, etc., off our site as much as possible. There is a reason that our site has not self-destructed in the almost 20 years of its existence and we believe that having people responsible for their words is the biggest factor in this site’s success. Registration requirements are limited to your name and an email address that you must verify to activate your membership account. Even at this point we are not tracking you and as with the preceding anonymous accounts outlined above, the only tracking being done is by Google Analytics which tells us in aggregate (not individually) which articles people think are great and which ones we missed the mark on, for example. These kinds of aggregate analytics help us focus our time and efforts to best serve you but it is not done to compile member profiles, per se, and if you wish to exempt yourself from even this degree of non-personalized aggregate data tracking, you can do so by using following the instructions given in point number six below.
Areas Where Our Members May Elect To Voluntarily Expand What They Reveal About Themselves: There are areas of Creative COW that offer expanded member services for those who wish to take advantage of them. They include areas like our Services Offered section which helps promote their services to other members in the hope that they get work for themselves or their company. This necessitates additional information to be volunteered: this may or may not include your company name, address, telephone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses (see note just below regarding our efforts to protect your email address even in the Services section) or other contact data; it might also include information on products you use and skills you possess, your personal or company website, tools and configuration and other product-related data, as well as references to other identification particulars and details, including user profiles and scope of expertise. This expanded information beyond the basic name and email required to establish a user account with Creative COW, is strictly voluntary and no member is under any obligation to volunteer information. It can be deleted at any time by request. We are currently working on the means to give our members direct access to allow you to remove Service Offered listings directly and immediately, if you so wish. In the meantime, if you have a Service Listing and wish to remove it, please use our contact page and request removal. Please add the link to make sure we remove it correctly.
Email Addresses In Creative COW: We never make nor do we encourage our member email addresses to be made public. If you ever see any email addresses in a forums post or in a blog, etc., at Creative COW, the user in question has volunteered the information, as we do not in any area of our site encourage users to make emails public. Even if you as a member choose to use our Services Offered section to promote your business, we use a system that converts your email address to a graphic so that spam web crawlers are at a disadvantage to harvest the information. This does not guarantee that some spammers won’t hire people to manually harvest information but we do all we can to protect your information. If you choose to avail yourself of our Services Offered Directory and are concerned about your personal email address, we recommend getting a Gmail or other address to help negate any adverse effect that may arise.
Furthermore, for technical reasons and to comply with legal requirements of proving we are working within the legal limits and constructs, data may be collected by our website when you register with us, such as the date and time of registration, the IP of the referring website from which an account authorization occurred, the authorization date, ID code and log-in, which validate your membership and prove it was a legal request. (The data mentioned above is hereafter collectively referred to as personal data.) This data is not used to create ever-growing user profiles based on every click and visit, as is the case in some social networks.) We do not work nor do we have systems in place that are designed to watch our members.
Our members may cancel their memberships and remove themselves from our system completely, at any time. Doing so will wipe out all trace of your account, as if you were never a member of Creative COW. To do so, please visit our GDPR Service page.
2. USE AND DISCLOSURE OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA
Creative COW may collect, process and use your personal data to: • fulfill its obligations under the member agreements between you and Creative COW; • provide assistance and service, including services in connection with the business operations of Creative COW, such as support on software or hardware issues; • obtain your opinion on Creative COW products and services and conduct product surveys; • simplify and process your search transactions and your requests for data and for the products and services of Creative COW; • provide you with the latest information on Creative COW products and services, including suggestions and special offers that you may be interested in; • improve Creative COW’s products and services for you; • conduct competitions, contests and other promotional offers and marketing activities; • ensure that you are able to access this website by means of the interface provided by Creative COW for this purpose.
Creative COW stores your personal data solely in order to fulfill the herewith outlined purpose for which it was originally collected or in order to comply with the provisions of applicable laws and regulations.
Creative COW has never directly shared personal data with other Creative COW affiliated companies or advertisers in the USA, Europe or elsewhere in the world, either for money, trade, or other means. Personal data may be made available to them by advertising tracking technology resident within their advertising on our site. You may elect to use one of many ad blockers available online to protect your privacy. Search Google for “ad blockers” available for your computer system.
It may be necessary for us to access your personal data or disclose your personal data in order to comply with the provisions of applicable laws or court proceedings or to assert our rights or defend ourselves against legal claims. We will only then after a thorough search of server logs that will need to be then compiled, disclose personal data and all other available information if necessary in order to investigate unlawful activities, suspected fraud, potential threats to the corporeal integrity of persons or violations of the conditions of use specified by Creative COW, or to take preventive measures or countermeasures in this regard. Data may additionally be conveyed for other reasons to the extent required or permitted by law.
3. HOW CREATIVE COW COLLECTS PERSONAL DATA
Creative COW collects data about you in various ways. For example, we request your contact data when you correspond with Creative COW, when you register with us to create a membership account, or register in order to join an online contest, gain peer-to-peer support, or sign up for materials available for downloading, including our member and third-party newsletters.
The most common examples of how Creative COW collects your personal data are:
• When you register at Creative COW, we collect your name, email address, and other contact data you may wish to volunteer beyond the basic name and email needed to officially open an account with us. • When you request help from our forums, we use cookies and javascripts to compile user profiles that our members can visit, so that our leaders and members can get to know one another better and hopefully help one another more effectively.
Creative COW strives to respect the various preferences you have expressed at various times in order to process and manage your data appropriately. If you ever believe we have incorrect data for whatever reason, please contact Creative COW in order to correct the situation.
4. SECURITY OF COLLECTED PERSONAL DATA
Creative COW takes due care to protect your personal data against loss and misuse. Creative COW strives to the best of its ability to take all suitable technical and organizational measures and precautionary measures in order to protect personal data against unauthorized access, improper use, changes, loss or destruction. These measures comprise: • Restricting access to personal data. Only employees who need to know the data are allowed access. • Using physical, electronic and process-based security mechanisms conforming to regulations in order to protect your personal data. • Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for the collection and transmission of all sensitive data, including posts in our forums, in our blogs, our Services Offered and Job Board sections, and any other area of our site which might otherwise compromise our member private data. • To guard your private data, we employ Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), as our backbone provider because of their industry-leading technical abilities in security and systems support. Our website and web-associated online services are hosted at AWS and you can learn more about them at https://aws.amazon.com.
5. COOKIES
We use cookies to expand the functional scope of our web content and make it easier for you to use the site. These cookies can be used to store data on your computer (they are never collecting data and do not report anything back to us) when you visit our website and view our online content. It is possible to prevent the storage of cookies on your computer by configuring the settings of your browser accordingly, although this may restrict the functional scope of our website content. Again, our cookies function only to make your visit with us more convenient and functional. Our cookies are not gathering any personal data and we do not compile personal profiles on our members.
6. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. Google Analytics uses “cookies,” which are text files placed on your computer that enable an analysis of your use of the website. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is generally transmitted to and stored on a Google server in the United States. In case of your activation of IP anonymization on this website, Google will truncate your IP address beforehand within Member States of the European Union or other parties to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases will the full IP address be transmitted to a Google server in the United States and truncated there. On behalf of the operator of this website, Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity and providing the website operator with other services relating to website and Internet use. The IP address transmitted by your browser within the scope of Google Analytics will not be associated with any other data held by Google.
You may refuse the use of these Google originated tracking cookies by selecting the appropriate settings in your browser. Furthermore, you can prevent Google’s collection and use of data generated by the cookie and related to your use of the website (including your IP address) by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en.
For further information on terms of use and data protection/privacy, please see https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html or https://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html.
Please note that on this website, Google Analytics has been supplemented by the code “gat._anonymizeIp();” in order to ensure anonymized collection of IP addresses “IP masking”.
7. SOCIAL NETWORKS
This website uses plugins/functions from the Facebook and Twitter social networks. These are disabled by default for data protection reasons and must be activated explicitly by you to be used. Before activation, please note the following information on individual service providers:
This website uses social plugins from the facebook.com social network provided by Facebook Inc., 1601 South California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA. You can recognize the plugins by the Facebook logo and/or “Like” button. Provided you access a page with such a plugin when visiting this website, your Internet browser will establish a direct connection to the servers of Facebook Inc. The content of the plugin is transferred to your Internet browser and integrated by it into the page shown. At the same time, the information that you visited this website is transferred to Facebook Inc. If you are logged into your personal Facebook user account when accessing the relevant page, Facebook Inc. will assign the website visit to your user account.
When you use the plugin, e.g. by clicking on the “Like” button, this information is directly transferred to Facebook Inc. and stored there. In this way, Facebook can assign the information when you visit our pages to your user account. If you would like to prevent such data from being transferred, you must log out of your Facebook user account before visiting our Internet website.
Please note that we, as a provider of the pages, are not informed of the content of the transferred data and its use by Facebook. The active use of the plugin is subject to the data protection conditions and the terms of use of Facebook Inc. For more information on the collection, storage and use of your data by Facebook Inc., please see the Facebook data protection policies (https://www.facebook.com/policy.php) and the privacy policy (https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.)
With Twitter and Retweet functions, we use plugins from twitter.com provided by Twitter Inc., 795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. If you use the Retweet functions, the websites you visit are disclosed to third parties and are connected to your Twitter account. In the process, data is also transferred to Twitter.
Please note that we, as a provider of the pages, are not informed of the content of the transferred data and its use by Twitter. For information on the way your data is handled by Twitter Inc. as well as on your rights and setting options for the protection of your personal data, please refer to the data protection advice from Twitter (https://twitter.com/privacy/). You can change your data protection settings at Twitter under account settings.
8. MAILCHIMP MAIL SERVICES
For dispatching our newsletters, we use MailChimp, a service of The Rocket Science Group, LLC, 675 Ponce de Leon Ave NE, Suite 5000, Atlanta, GA 30308 USA. MailChimp offers extensive analytics tools for analyzing how the newsletters are opened and used. In addition, MailChimp uses the web analytics tool Google Analytics incorporating it into newsletters. For more information on MailChimp please refer to (https://mailchimp.com/features) and data protection at MailChimp to (https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/).You can revoke your consent to storage of data, the e-mail address as well as its use, by our newsletter, at any time. The revocation can be made via the unsubscribe notice at the bottom link in the newsletters themselves or by notifying our direct contact email at contact@creativecow.net. We will be happy to remove you from the list should you experience any difficulties in removing yourself using the unsubscribe link.
9. RIGHT TO RECEIVE INFORMATION, CORRECT, BLOCK, AND DELETE YOUR PERSONAL DATA
On request and with no need to state a reason, you may at any time receive information concerning your data stored by us. You may at any time block, correct or delete your data collected by us. You may at any time revoke the declaration of consent given to us for the collection, processing and use of personal data, with no need to state a reason. To do so, please contact Creative COW by email at gdprdelete@creativecow.net or by letter to Creative COW LLC, 1308 Stockton Hill Rd #321, Kingman, AZ 86401 USA.
On request, you will receive confirmation regarding the processing of your personal data with regard to modification, blocking or deletion. Creative COW will do everything within its power to fulfill these requests as quickly as possible.
If you wish to be deleted from an e-mail distribution list (such as for a newsletter), please use the Unsubscribe link and/or follow the instructions that are included in the footer of the e-mail message, or contact Creative COW by email, telephone or post.
10. LINKS TO OTHER SITES
Some Creative COW website pages may contain links to other websites that are not administered by Creative COW. Your personal data is not shared with these websites. Although Creative COW strives to offer only links to sites that comply with the same high standards as Creative COW in regard to your personal privacy, Creative COW does not bear any responsibility for the content, security or privacy practices of other sites and expressly disavows any liability in connection with the use of other sites and the content found on other sites.
11. CHILD PROTECTION (children aged 14 years or less)
Creative COW does not knowingly acquire or collect personal data from children or about children (aged 14 years or less) without the permission of their parents or guardians, and Creative COW does not knowingly market any products or services to children. If Creative COW becomes aware that a person whose personal data has been submitted via an Creative COW website is a child, Creative COW will do everything in its power to delete this personal data and lock the originating account as quickly as possible. Creative COW will do everything in its power to ensure that this personal data is not used for any purpose or disclosed to other parties.
12. CONTACT
If you need additional assistance or wish to submit a comment, request or declaration, please contact us at the following address or by means of one of the contact options stated below:
Address: Creative COW LLC, 1308 Stockton Hill Rd #321, Kingman, AZ 86401 USA
Contact data: Tel.: +1 (702) 803-2434
E-mail: contact@creativecow.net
Did You Know?
On May 2, 2019, Creative COW was ranked as the 6,430th most trafficked website in the world*, according to Amazon.com’s Alexa search engine. In the January, 2018 survey by Netcraft (the latest report they offer), they reported the number of active websites in the United States at over 200 million active sites. This means that Creative COW is in the top 2/100,000ths-of-One-Percent of active sites on the net, worldwide! And we’re in the Top 4,000 sites in the USA. That’s a lot of moos.
*Alexa.com had Creative COW ranked at 6,430 on May 2, 2019. Day ranks fluctuate.