alt concepts Privacy Policy

Last updated: December 23, 2021—Updated the company name and contact information, reflecting our move to Canada. Removed references to eSellerate (which no longer exists), added mentions of Paddle, and changed the maximum data retention time from 8 years to 3 years. Corrected a few links and made other very minor adjustments.

Previous update: December 31, 2018—Updated the bullet point "Billing information" under "How long we retain your data" to reflect our new practice of purging billing data that is no longer available from our payment processors.

Introduction

alt concepts is committed to protecting your privacy. Please read the following to learn more about our privacy policy, which applies to the following sites:

Note: If you’re wondering whether you should trust privacy policies at all, read FlippedBITS: Do Privacy Policies Mean Anything? by alt concepts publisher Joe Kissell. We also urge you to take additional steps to protect your privacy, as covered in his book Take Control of Your Online Privacy.

What personal information we collect and why

We collect a small amount of personal information from you when you view our websites, purchase or use our products, or interact with us in other ways. We do not use third-party advertising on any of our websites.

Comments

If you leave a comment or review on one of our sites, we collect all the information you enter (including the text of the comment and the name and email address you provide), your IP address, and information about your browser and operating system. (Some of our sites use the Disqus commenting system, which is subject to its own privacy policy.)

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service (see Gravatar’s privacy policy) to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Contact forms

If you use the contact form on one of our sites, we receive the name and email address you provide, the contents of your message, your IP address, and information about the browser and platform you used to submit the message.

Marketing communication

If you sign up for the Interesting Thing of the Day or joeMail mailing list, you’ll receive the corresponding content by email. You can change your preferences or unsubscribe at any time by using the links at the bottom of each message.

If you made a purchase from Take Control Books, you may also have opted in to receive email messages. In some situations, a person can also ask to receive email from us without having made a purchase. In either case, you can modify your email preferences by clicking the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email message you receive from us; by visiting your Take Control Account page, logging in, and clicking your account name at the top of the page; or by contacting us using our contact form. You can opt to receive no email; only messages about free updates to products you purchased from us; or other marketing messages, which can include notices of free and paid updates, new titles, and special offers.

Cookies and web beacons

Our websites use cookies to improve your experience by reducing the frequency with which you must log in and remembering certain preferences, including coupons, affiliate codes, and other codes that help us understand how you learned about our products and special offers. Except as described in the next topic, we do not use cookies to track you across other sites (including our own). If you disable cookies in your browser, some features of our websites may not function properly.

Some of the email messages we send out include tiny, invisible graphics, often known as web beacons. By loading these images, your email client tells us that you opened the message, enabling us to tell who reads our messages and clicks links in them. Most email clients have an option to disable the loading of remote images, and we suggest you enable that option (even though it will result in less data for us).

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on our sites may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves exactly as if the visitor has visited the other website. Some of our sites also include social media buttons and links, which can send personal information to the sites in question if you click or tap them.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Portions of the Take Control Books website use Google Analytics to collect data about our visitors. The other alt concepts websites don’t use outside analytics, but rather use software called Matomo to analyze and display data from our server logs.

Who we share your data with

Aggregate, anonymized information about alt concepts web visitors and mailing lists (such as the total number of subscribers) may be reported publicly. In addition, some of your personal information may be visible to employees and contractors (including authors and editors), to the extent necessary to operate our business.

We share certain types of data with third-party processors because they provide essential services we cannot perform ourselves:

Otherwise, alt concepts does not rent, sell, or share your personal information with other people or companies, except if:

How long we retain your data

What rights you have over your data

If you have made a purchase, left comments, or signed up for one of our mailing lists, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

To request your personal data, fill out our contact form and supply the following information:

We may ask for additional information as a security measure to confirm your identity.

We will make every effort to complete requests for data within a month. If, after reviewing your personal data, you want us to delete it from our servers, you must submit a second request, in the same manner. Deleting your data may require an additional month.

Where we send your data

Our offices are located in Canada, while our servers are located in the United States, and two of our email providers are located in Canada, so your information may be transferred to, stored in, or processed in the United States or Canada.

How we protect your data

Changes to this privacy policy

alt concepts may update this policy. We will notify subscribers about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to you by email or by placing a prominent notice on our site.

Questions, comments, and complaints

If you have questions or other feedback, please contact us using this form or at:

alt concepts
419 8B-3110 8th Street East
Saskatoon, SK S7H 0W2
Canada
+1 (306) 400-6887