privacy policy

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SoCalHoops Privacy Statement

Your privacy and confidentiality is of the utmost importance to us. Presently we don't have advertising, but when and if we ever do, we're sure that your privacy will be equally important to any of our advertisers too. Our reputation and integrity is directly related to how we serve you, our readers. We therefore thought we'd tell you what our policies are with regard to your privacy.

User Information

Anyone who visits SoCalHoops actually retains their anonymity, at least for so long as you don't abuse our site. Simply by visiting our site, or participating in the message forums, we don't acquire or collect any personal information about you. Your name, address, phone number, and email address all remain private as far as we are concerned, and unless you choose to share them with us, we don't even know about them.

We are able to, and do collect certain information (at least our webhost providers do) which enables us to identify the server you are logged onto, the geographic location of the ISP you use, the type of browser you use, and your IP (Internet Protocol) address. This information is obtained solely for the purpose of calculating the number of pages which have been viewed during a given reporting period. If we offer ads in the future, we've been told that the banner companies use this information to target ads and measure a given ad's effectiveness. But we won't offer ads by anyone who uses your private information without your consent.

Cookies

We don't currently send or use "cookies", but it's possible that if we choose to put ads on the site that those supplying the ads might use cookies. The way this works is that when you are first "served" an ad, the company may temporarily store some codes within your browser that allows them to respond in a certain way, giving you ads they think you'll like or which will motivate you. Hey, that's why it's advertising. . . These codes are commonly known as "cookies". For example, these codes let somone keep track of how many times you view an ad, or help to determine where to send you when you click on an ad. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can set your browser to prevent that use if you desire by selecting "disable cookies". If you do, you'll miss out on some stuff, but that's your choice.

Links

SoCalHoops contains links to other sites. Actually, we've got a ton of links, and we have no control over any of those sites, no control over their content, nor how they treat you, nor do we have control over what they do with any information they might collect about you or which you might give them which you consider to be private and/or confidential. It's fairly obvious and probably doesn't need to be said, but we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage you to read the privacy practices of each and every web site that collects your personally identifiable information.

Public Forums

SoCalHoops makes forums available to you. The rules are displayed in those forums. Just like the rest of the site, we don't use the forums to collect information about you either. But please be aware, that whenever you post personal information online on a message boards or in email, this information can be collected and used by others. We will take all reasonable precautions to protect your privacy, but always keep in mind that when you are in a public forum, you control the information you disclose to others. Again, if you abuse the forums, we do have methods of identifying your ISP, server and geographic location of your access point, and from there, if necessary we can also initiate procedures which will require your ISP to let us know accessed their server at a given time. . . in other words, we can find out who you are, but we generally won't unless you do something really outrageous like post something defamatory or offensive.

We reserve the right to change our policy from time to time. We doubt we'll change our policies, but if we do, we'll post it here.

Have fun.