Effective 03/01/09
We have created this Privacy Policy to let you know why we collect information from you and what we do with it. This statement discloses the privacy practices for Steps to the Altar (www.stepstothealtar.com). Because Steps to the Altar wants to demonstrate its commitment to respecting your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices.
Steps to the Altar has agreed to notify you of:
- What personally identifiable information of yours or third-party personal identification is collected from you through Steps to the Altar
- The organization collecting the information
- How the information is used
- With whom the information may be shared
- What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information
- The kind of security procedures that are in place to protect the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under Steps to the Altar control
- How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information
Contact Us
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact Steps to the Altar Support Services by emailing support@stepstothealtar.com and writing "Privacy Policy" in the subject line. You may also write to Steps to the Altar Support Services at 123 Altar Way, Floor 2, San Diego, CA 92101.
How We Collect Your Information
The first thing to remember about privacy is that there is only so much information that any website can collect without your answering of specific questions. Steps to the Altar logs IP addresses (in other words, the location of your computer on the Internet) for system administration, troubleshooting, and to examine overall traffic trends. (For example, IP addresses help us determine the percentage of people coming from various online gateways, such as Yahoo! or America Online.) This information, in aggregate form, is recorded for administrative purposes only. IP addresses are not linked to any personal information.
You can browse Steps to the Altar and read our editorial content without registering or providing any personal information. However, in order to take advantage of our personalized services, you are required to provide us with information such as your name, email address, real-world address, wedding date, and role in the wedding. We collect similar information from users who choose to participate in our contests and promotional events. We always let you know before we collect any personal information from you.
We offer message boards, chat rooms and blogs on our website. Any information you voluntarily disclose when you post to one of these areas becomes public and may be used by us for online and offline promotional and commercial uses. If you choose to post comments on our website, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit is public and can be read, collected, or used by other users of those areas, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for any personally identifiable information you choose to submit.
What We Do With the Information We Collect
Information we collect from your membership helps us to improve our content, customize certain pages for you, and update you about Steps to the Altar. From time to time, Steps to the Altar does share names, postal addresses, and demographic information with other pre-screened organizations that have specific direct mail product and service offers we think may be of interest to you. You may choose at any time to remove your name and address from these mailing lists by editing your privacy preferences (see paragraph below) or by letting us know via email to support@stepstothealtar.com (please include your name, address, and email).
We use third-party advertising companies to serve our ads on our Web site. These third-party advertising companies employ cookie and 1x1 pixel .gifs or web beacons to measure and improve the effectiveness of ads for their clients. To do so, these companies may use anonymous information about your visits to our website and other websites. This information can include: date/time of banner ad shown, the banner ad that was shown, their cookie, the IP address. This information can also be used for online preference marketing purposes.
If you want to prevent a third-party advertiser from collecting data, currently you may either visit each ad network's web site individually and opt-out or visit the NAI gateway opt-out site to opt-out of all network advertising cookies. Click here for the NAI gateway opt-out site. This site will also allow you to review the third-party advertising companies' privacy policies.
Changing Your Personal Information and/or Newsletter Subscription
You can access or update your personal information, including subscriptions to our email newsletters, at any time. To unsubscribe, you can follow the instructions on the bottom of each newsletter, or email support@stepstothealtar.com with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.
Other Sites
Steps to the Altar contains links to other websites. We cannot be responsible for their content or for private information that you may choose to share with them. Please note: Information you release directly to parties who provide services to Steps to the Altar, such as any vendors in Steps to the AltarShop or other sites you encounter on the Internet (even sites that are co-branded with Steps to the Altar) may be subject to different rules of use or disclosure. We encourage you to investigate and ask questions before disclosing personal information to third parties.
Our Security Procedures
Your privacy is very important to us, but due to the existing legal regulatory and security environment, we cannot fully ensure that your private communications and other personally identifiable information will not be disclosed to third parties. Under certain circumstances, the government or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Additionally, in the unlikely event we need to investigate or resolve possible problems or inquiries, we can disclose any information about you to private entities, law enforcement, or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate.
Finally, we use industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, such as firewalls and Secure Socket Layers (SSL) where appropriate. We also do everything in our power to protect user-information off-line. All of our users' information, not just the sensitive information mentioned above, is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, a Support Services representative) are granted access to personally identifiable information. Our employees must use password-protected screen-savers when they leave their desk. When they return, they must re-enter their password to re-gain access to your information. Furthermore, ALL employees are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. Every quarter, as well as any time new policies are added, our employees are notified and/or reminded about the importance we place on privacy, and what they can do to ensure our customers' information is protected. Finally, the servers that we store personally identifiable information on are kept in a secure environment, behind a locked cage requiring keys, photo ID key cards and biometric scans to access.
We hope this policy clarifies our procedures regarding your personal information. If you have any questions about the security at our website, you can send an email security@stepstothealtar.com.
Legal Disclaimer
Though we make every effort to preserve your privacy we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our Web site.
Notice of Changes
If at some point in the future, there is a change to our information usage practices that affect your personally identifiable information, we will notify you by email of the relevant changes. At the time of this message, you will be able to opt-out of this information usage by sending a message to support@stepstothealtar.com. We will also post the changes in our privacy statement 30 days prior to a change. You should also check this posted privacy statement for changes.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.
Steps to the Altar encourages you to learn as much as you can about your privacy on the Internet.