We place a high value on your privacy. We have a few key concepts at Sum SQ:
We take care of the personal information we request from you and the personal information we collect about you while providing our services.
We only save personal information for as long as we have a reason to.
We strive to make it easy for you to choose what content on your website is published publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently removed.
We assist you in protecting yourself from overbearing government demands for your personal information.
We strive for complete transparency regarding collecting, utilizing, and disclosing your personal information.
Our Privacy Policy, which integrates and clarifies these principles, is provided below.
What This Policy Covers and Who We Are?
Howdy! We are the people behind these little tools that enable anyone — from students to teachers, small business owners to companies — to fully use the potential and promise of math.
This Privacy Statement applies to information we gather about you when you use the following services: SumSQ.com website.
Below, we describe how we gather, use, and disclose information about you and your options regarding that information.
The Data We Gather
We only gather information about you if we have a cause to, such as to deliver our Services, contact you, or improve our Services.
We acquire this information from three sources: when you provide it, automatically when you use our Services, and from third-party sources. Let’s go over the data that we gathered.
We Use the Information You Give Us
It should be no surprise that we collect the information you directly supply to us. Here are a couple of such examples:
Information for your public profile: If you comment on any post, we gather the information you submit for your public profile. If you have a WordPress.com account, for example, your username is part of your public profile, as is any other information you include, such as a photo or an “About Me” statement.
Please remember that your public profile information is just that – public — so keep that in mind when determining what information to post.
You may supply us with information about yourself in the draft and published content (for example, a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you or any media or files you submit).
We collect demographic information in compliance with applicable law and do not request it in places where it is forbidden.
We will only use this sensitive information to accommodate a disability or sickness, to comply with legal duties, to protect our employees’ health and safety, and facilitate our internal diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination programs.
We Collect Data Automatically
We also gather some data automatically:
Log information: We collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information, as do most online service providers. We collect log information when you use our Services, such as creating or making updates to your WordPress.com website.
We may be able to detect the approximate location of your device based on your IP address. We gather and utilize this information to determine how many people visit our Services from specific geographic regions, for example. We may also collect information about your specific location via our mobile apps (for example, when you post a photograph with location information) if you grant us permission to do so using the permissions on your mobile device’s operating system.
Cookies and other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website maintains on a visitor’s computer and that the visitor’s browser gives to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also known as web beacons) are little pieces of code that are placed on websites and emails.
We employ cookies and other technologies, such as pixel tags, to assist us in identifying and tracking visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as tracking and understanding the success of email campaigns and delivering targeted advertisements.
Please read our Cookie Policy for additional information on how we use cookies and other tracking technologies, as well as how you can control the usage of cookies.
Why and How Do We Use Information?
Reasons for Using Information
We utilize information about you for the following purposes:
To offer our services. For instance, setting up and maintaining your account, hosting your website, backing up and restoring your website, providing customer care, processing payments, and purchases, and verifying user information.
To preserve safety, maintain quality, and improve our services. For instance, we may offer automatic updates and new versions of our Services. For example, we may monitor and analyze how users interact with our Services to develop new features that we believe our users will enjoy and assist them in creating and managing websites more efficiently or that will make our Services easier to use.
To manage and place advertisements in our advertising program. For example, as part of our advertising program, we may display ads on our users’ and certain of our own sites and analyze ad performance.
To sell our services while measuring, gauging, and improving the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, we can advertise our Services, analyze the results of our marketing campaigns (such as how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understand and forecast user retention by targeting marketing messages to groups of our users (such as those who have a specific plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time).
To resolve issues with our Services. Monitoring, debugging, fixing, and preventing problems, for example.
To tailor the customer experience. Personalize your experience, for example, by delivering relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, promoting content through our Reader post suggestions, and providing fresh essays and stories for your reading enjoyment through Longreads.
Legal Foundations for Information Collection and Use
For individuals in the European Union, please be aware that our legal reasons for processing information about you under EU data protection regulations are as follows: our use of your information is based because:
(1) The use is required to fulfill our obligations to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is required to administer your account — for example, to permit access to our website on your device or to charge you for a paid plan; or
(2) The usage is required to comply with a legal requirement; or
(3) The use is required to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another person; or
(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information, such as to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can provide you with an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or
(5) You have given us your permission, for example, before we put specific cookies on your device and later access and analyze them, as indicated in our Cookie Policy.
Information Exchange
How We Disseminate Information
We only share information about you in limited circumstances and with proper privacy precautions. These are detailed below and in the section titled Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others:
Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who require the information to assist us in providing our Services or processing the information on our behalf. For any personal information we disclose with our subsidiaries and independent contractors, we require them to respect this Privacy Policy.
Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who require the information to offer services to us.
To safeguard rights, property, and others: We may share information about you if we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect the property or rights of SumSq, other parties, or the general public.
For example, if we have a good faith judgment that there is an imminent danger of death or significant bodily harm, we may share emergency information without delay.
Information that you choose to make public is, as you might expect, made public.
That means your public profile, posts, and other content on our website, as well as your “Likes” and comments on other websites, are all accessible to others — and we hope they receive a lot of views!
Please consider all this as you decide what you want to post publicly.
How Long Do We Keep Data?
We normally discard information about you when it is no longer required for the purposes we collected and used it — as explained above in the section on How and Why We Use Information — and we are not required by law to maintain it.
Security
While no online service is completely secure, we try extremely hard and take reasonable precautions to protect information about you from unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction. We keep an eye out for any vulnerabilities and assaults on our Services.
We recommend that you enable our advanced security settings, such as Two-Step Authentication, to improve the security of your account.
Choices
When it comes to personal information, you have numerous options:
Limit the information you provide: If you have an account with us, you can opt out of providing optional account information, profile information, transaction and billing information, etc. Please remember that if you do not submit this information, many elements of our Services, such as premium themes that require an additional fee, may be unavailable to you. If you are a job applicant and choose not to supply us with some data components, we may be unable to continue the recruiting process.
Limit information access on your mobile device: Your device’s operating system should allow you to disable our ability to acquire stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you limit this, you may be unable to use certain features, such as geotagging for images.
Opt out of marketing messages: You can decline to receive promotional emails from us. Simply follow the directions in those communications or notify us. If you choose not to receive promotional emails, we may still send you account-related and legal notices.
Set your browser to refuse cookies: You can opt out of our internal analytics program using your user preferences. By opting out, you agree to stop sharing information with our analytics tool concerning events or actions after the opt-out while logging in to your WordPress.com account. Please visit our Cookie Policy for more information.
Your Legal Rights
Live in certain parts of the world, including some US states and countries covered by the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”). You may have certain rights to your personal information, such as requesting access to or deleting your data.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union
If you live in a country covered by the GDPR, data protection regulations grant you certain rights to your data, subject to any exemptions allowed by the law, including the right to:
- Request access to your personal information;
- Request that your data be corrected or deleted;
- Object to the use and processing of your personal information by us;
- Request that we limit how we use and manage your personal information; and
- Request data portability for your personal information.
Privacy Laws in the United States
Some US jurisdictions, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia, require us to provide additional information to people about the types of personal information we collect and share, where we receive that personal information, and how and why we use it. This section contains that information (if you are a California resident, please be aware that this is the Notice at Collection we must offer you under California law).
Depending on the Services utilized, we acquired the following categories of personal information in the last 12 months:
Identifiers (such as your name and contact information, as well as device and online identifiers);
Commercial information (for example, your billing information and purchase history);
Legally protected characteristics (for example, you might share your gender as part of a research poll for us, or you might voluntarily declare your ethnicity or veteran status as part of your employment application);
Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your use of our Services, such as the acts you conduct as a WordPress.com site administrator);
Geolocation data (such as your IP address-based location);
Audio, electronic, visual, or similar data (for example, your profile picture, if you have one);
Professional or employment-related information (for example, if you use Happy Tools, your firm and team information, or information you offer in a job application); and
Inferences we make (such as retention or attrition rates).
If you are a job candidate, we may have additionally gathered:
You have additional rights in various US states, subject to any exclusions allowed by your state’s law, including the right to:
Right to Refuse
We never sell your personal information in the traditional sense (for money).
We may share your information with third-party service providers as needed to provide you with our services. If we share your information with some advertising, marketing, or analytics vendors, this may be considered a “sale” or “share” in certain U.S. jurisdictions. States from which you may be able to withdraw your consent.
Click the “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link in the footer of our websites or the settings page within our applications to learn more about this sharing and how to opt-out. Please keep in mind that in some cases, this link will only appear to visitors to our sites from the appropriate states.
Because our opt-out is managed via cookies, if you remove cookies, your browser is configured to destroy cookies automatically after a specific period, or if you visit sites in a different browser, you’ll need to make this selection again.
We also recognize the GPC browser signal and will consider it a valid way of indicating your intention to opt-out.
We do not collect or process your sensitive (or potentially sensitive) personal information unless it is strictly necessary to provide you with our service, the processing is not for inferring characteristics about you or for other purposes that do not require a limit option under California law. We never sell or distribute personal information to children under 16.
Contact us
If you have questions, concerns, or suggestions, contact us through our contact page.