E-Cards believes information privacy is an important issue. Recognizing this we have developed the following policy. This policy may be updated, revised and re-posted from time to time. This policy applies to site visitors and members who comply with the E-Cards.com Terms of Service.
We send emails to recipients of E-Cards. We do this so they may access cards that have been sent to them. We ask Card Senders to respect Card Recipient's privacy and only send cards to people who are family, friends, colleuges or individuals that have expressly shared their email address with the Card Sender. People who do not wish to receive E-Cards may request that we block mailings to their email address.
We do not enjoy unsolicited e-mails or paper mailings ourselves and therefore do not share our site users' email addresses with advertisers or marketing companies. We assume individuals who have signed up for our newsletters would like to hear from us and so may e-mail these people from time to time. We also may email Card Senders, Card Recipients and E-Cards Members: (1) Enforce site policies and security. (2) Contact users to assist and address Customer Support.
We do not use the e-mail address contained in E-Cards for direct marketing purposes, nor do we compile e-mail address to build mailing lists to sell to or share with marketers. These addresses are saved in cards until cards are destroyed.
E-Mail addresses are used to power and identify My E-Cards accounts and My E-Cards card sends. Visitors registered as Newsletters Subscribers may also receive e-mail news from us.
We do collect certain individual information to facilitate card sends, card pickups, and the personalization of our site. Personal information is also used to power the features of My E-Cards. We also may agregate this information to better understand our member and user base and improve E-Cards.
Card Senders share certain information with Card Senders beyond their card notes (for example: e-mail addresses, IP addresses). This is a necessary to facilitate card delivery and to protect the privacy rights of Card Recipients. IP addresses of card senders are printed on cards to help protect Card Recipients from anonymous abuse or harassment. E-Cards is not intended to be used as an anonymous mailing service.
Demographic and profile data is also collected at our site. We use this data to tailor a visitor's experience at our site -- displaying content that might interest visitors, and displaying content according to visitor preferences.
We do share summary demographics. Such summaries are compiled from individual information but do not include specifics on individuals. This information is gathered via cookies, card sends, surveys, newsletter signups, and My E-Cards' subscriptions. These summaries highlight broad demographic trends on our site (for example: browsers used, geographic breakdowns...). This information is used to improve our site and business, it is also used to attract site advertisers and new business opportunities. Best efforts are made so this information can not be used to identify specific individuals.
Cookies may be placed in user's browsers during site visits by E-Cards.com and its site advertisers. Our site uses cookies to track user sessions and to gather site usage statistics. We also use cookies to allow membership sessions and to save site customization preferences.
Our site's registration forms require users to give us contact information and demographic information. Contact information is used: (1) during registration to ensure credit card validity (2) to contact site members and visitors if necessary (3) To compile site demographic information to better understand our membership pool and improve our site.
We do have opt-in e-mail newsletters. We ask individuals to only sign themselves up for these newsletter mailings. Site functionality is supplied that allows users to remove themselves from our various newsletter subscription.
This site makes chat rooms, forums, message boards, and/or news groups available to its users. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information. We ask individuals to use these forums responsibly: people who post to these forums should stringently preserve the privacy of others and only disclose information about themselves they wish to be public.
E-Cards conducts surveys from time to time. Unless stated otherwise, these surveys are used to identify site usage trends and demographics so that we may improve our site to better meet user needs or to attract site advertisers and new business opportunities.
E-Cards does contain advertising and content links to other sites. We do not police the privacy practices of these linked sites nor are we responsible for the privacy practices or the content of these web sites. Individuals visiting these links should be attentive to the policies and practices of these sites and act with discretion.
We often use outside ad companies to display ads on our site. These ads may contain cookies. While we use cookies in other parts of our website, cookies received in conjunction with ads are collected by our advertisers, and we do not control or have access to this information. We do not share any personalized information with these ad companies. These companies may have acceess to information that can more specifically identify you based on information share and privacy practices of other sites you may have visited, shared info with or joined.
E-Cards Card Senders may save or download their cards so long as these cards have not been recycled and deleted. My E-cards members may also download their Address Book info and Calendar info.
My E-Cards members may request that their personally identifiable data be erased/deleted. Upon such request we will delete this information from our active databases and servers. This data may remain on backup media until that media is rotated into backup schedule deletion.
E-Cards truly believes in securing private user information from hacking and theft. Developing and implementing preventitive measures to enforce data security are a company focus. We also regularly perform security and data protection reviews.
Should E-Cards be acquired by or merged into another company its My E-Cards membership account information will be transfered to the acqiring/merging company. The aquiring/merging company may have different privacy practices than our own. E-Cards members will be notified via acoount emails should an aquisition or merger happen and be given the option to download and delete any personal information they dont wish transfered to the aquiring/merging company.
E-Cards may release individual information to legal authorities when requested with reasonable cause. E-Cards may release individual information to legal, corporate or internet authorities if there is reasonable suspicion that an individual has not complied with our Terms of Service. Examples of such non-compliance includes the use of our card system for harassment, SPAM, profanity, pornographic dissemination or illegal activity.