HowILostMyHeart.com (HILMH, or us, or we, or our) knows that you value your privacy.

We value our privacy too, and yet -- here we are allowing you to come into our very own website. 

It's the Web, after all. 

What if they gave a Website and nobody came?  How random would that be?

Read this and make an informed decision about whether to use or continue using HILMH.  

If you don't like the terms here, scram.

The Information We Collect

• You may provide us with personally identifiable information (by this we'd guess that our lawyers mean your name and email address.  Some day we might ask for more information, and you might give it to us.  We can't figure out what, but this covers that.  Like by subscribing to newsletters or other mailing lists. 
• We will never sell or that information to unseemly spammers.  Ick.  And pointless.  That said, we reserve the right to give, or, if circumstances make it seem prudent to us and the Law allows, to the McCain presidential campaign or political or policy entities that are in our view consistent with the McCain Campaign.  We can't figure out why we'd ever want to, but I suppose someone smarter than us might come up with an idea, and if they do, now we can, legally speaking.  Also, once the presidential campaign is over, or I suppose even before, we may revamp the site into another place for people to tell others about How I Lost My Heart" -- to ... whomever.  If so, we reserve the right to send you our own, um, Spam.  If we do that, we hope it's classy.  If it's not classy, just unsubscribe.  We won't pester you.  We're not  total idiots.  (That would be some other campaign, but ... we're not going to tell you whose.)
• When you visit us we may send one or more cookies - a small text file of software code - to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser. We reserve the right to use both session cookies and persistent cookies. A persistent cookie remains after you close your browser. Persistent cookies may be used by your browser on subsequent visits to the site. Persistent cookies can be removed by following your web browser help file directions. A session cookie is temporary and disappears after you close your browser. You can reset your web browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some features of HILMH may not function properly if the ability to accept cookies is disabled.    Yada yada.
• When you use us our servers automatically record certain information that your web browser sends whenever you visit any website. These server logs may include information such as your web request, Internet Protocol ("IP") address, browser type, browser language, referring / exit pages and URLs, platform type, number of clicks, domain names, landing pages, pages viewed and the order of those pages, the amount of time spent on particular pages, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.  So, technically I guess we are spying on "you," but not by name.  And -- Everybody Does It.  Well, the smart Joomla!-enabled ones anyway, and lots of others.  
• When you use us we may employ "clear GIFs" (a.k.a. Web Beacons).  These are used to track the online usage patterns of our Users anonymously. In addition, we may also use clear GIFs in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients.  Candidly, we have no idea what this means.  We hope our tech guy does, but frankly it sounds like it's irrelevant to what we are doing. Still. "Web beacons!"  Sounds pretty cool to us, wonder what they are.  And the idea of finding out if you actually open your emails?  Intriguing.  But not really useful.
• We will never, ever, ever implant computer chips in your brain.  (Unlike some other campaigns which shall not be mentioned here.)  It's a cool idea but we consider it unethical.  Except if you are Microsoft.  Then, hey, all bets are off.  After all, they do it.  Or would, if they could figure out how.)

How We Use Information.

• Well, the most obvious thing is that if you subscribe to get our email we will send you an email whenever we send one out.  If you don't get it, check your spam filter and don't bug us.  If you don't like getting these emails, unsubscribe, dude.  If not, you'll be wasting scarce pixels.  Just spare us the Denial of Service attacks.  How infantile would that be of you?
• If you submit personally identifiable information to us then we can use your personal information to operate, maintain, and provide to you the features and functionality of the site, although frankly we are vague on why we might want to do this.
• Any personal information or video content that you voluntarily disclose online (on discussion boards, in messages and whatever) becomes publicly available.  Like, duh.  It can be collected and used by others. Any videos that you submit to us, which we may allow you to do at some point, may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels and may be viewed by the general public.  So keep it clean.  This means you, especially, Paris Hilton and Pam Anderson!
• We may use your email address to send commercial or marketing messages to you either embedded in other communications or by themselves. You will have the ability to unsubscribe and no longer receive these transmissions. We may use your email address without further consent for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as for customer service purposes).
• We may, if we can ever afford it, use both your personally identifiable information and certain non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous User usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve our quality and design and to create new features, promotions, and services by storing, tracking, and analyzing User preferences.  Until we can afford to do so, we'll just struggle along.
• We might use cookies, clear gifs, and log file information to: (a) remember information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit; (b) provide custom, personalized content and information; (c) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (d) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, etc.; and (e) track your entries, submissions, and status in promotions, sweepstakes, and contests.  If we haven't done it yet it probably just means that we decided it is either pointless or too complicated or expensive for us to bother with. 
  
• The Internet lags decades behind the Girl Scouts of America in this whole "cookie" thing.

When We Disclose Information

• If the cops or DA asks for it, or we get subpoened, we will absolutely sing like canaries.  OK, to keep our lawyer happy:  We may release personally identifiable information and/or non-personally-identifiable information if required to do so by law, or in the good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with state and federal laws (such as U.S. Copyright Law) or respond to a court order, subpoena, or search warrant.
• We may provide information about you to our subsidiaries, if we had any, which we don't, affiliated companies, whatever that means, or other businesses or persons for the purpose of processing such information on our behalf. If we do, we will sternly tell them to process such information in compliance with our privacy policy.  Maybe they'll listen.  Maybe they won't.
  
• We do have the right to share non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous User usage data, referring / exit pages and URLs, platform types, number of clicks, etc.) with interested third-parties to assist them in understanding the usage patterns for certain content, services, advertisements, promotions, and/or functionality.  We doubt that we ever will, but since we don't exactly know what this means, we reserve the right.
• We reserve the right to disclose any information we believe, in good faith, is appropriate or necessary to enforce our Terms of Use, take precautions against liability, to investigate and defend itself against any third-party claims or allegations, to assist government enforcement agencies, to protect the security or integrity of our web site, and to protect the rights, property, our personal safety, that of our Users or others.  But we're not legally required to protect your personal safety, so use good judgment about letting the world know who you are, please.  (Obama, and Hillary, This Means You Too.  We don't plan to vote for you but we wish you no ill.  Just ... go back to the US Senate where you belong, please.)

Your Choices

• You may, of course, decline to submit personally identifiable information. When and if we have profiles pages, for example, you may update or correct your personal profile information, if we ever let you put one up, and email preferences at any time. Media files uploaded by Users cannot be removed and remain subject to our Terms of Use.  Sounds vaguely scary, but probably is not, really.  Still, you decide.
  
• Please contact us with any questions or comments about this Privacy Notice, your personal information, your consent, or your opt-in or opt-out choices by emailing us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   If we aren't completely buried with other work -- and can understand your question -- someone may eventually get around to writing you back.  Or not.  But if you're seriously concerned about something in the privacy policy here just go to some other site instead with a privacy policy you like better.
• Finally, we reserve the right to change this privacy policy at any time in any way.  It's up to you to keep track of any new policies, even if they are less restrictive than this one.  As the US Supreme Court likes to say, although less colloquially: Tough Noogies.
  
• Although we have no way of enforcing it, we would really like you to call your mother more often.
• We stole and then adapted this privacy policy from Pnosis.com.  So if we missed any "Pnosis"es, just know that we hereby are defining any residual references to Pnosis contained herein as HILMH, legally speaking.  How amazing is that???