Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Gnowsis we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are an Austrian company working under European and Austrian privacy jurisdiction. Your data is not accessible by government authorities unless a court issues a search warrant. If we pass the data to third parties, we are obliged to tell you before. Our policies are reviewed by the Austrian Data Protection Commission (“Datenschutzkommission”). All this keeps your data safer than in countries with less restrictive law (such as the U.S.A.).
• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.
• Before your data is passed to third parties, you have to agree to it. third parties add the sugar on top of our service, so we let you decide what you allow them to do and what not.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals:
(Note, that this privacy policy is licensed under a Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, which means you’re more than welcome to repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you. Also, publish your statements under the same license. We based this on the Automattic Privacy Policy. They spent a lot of money and time on the below, we also, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.
gnowsis e.U. Leopold Sauermann, Rudolf Sallinger Platz 1/423 A-1030 Wien (“Gnowsis”) operates the websites gnowsis.com, and the website and web-service cluug.com. It is Gnowsis’ policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites and services.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Gnowsis collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Gnowsis’ purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Gnowsis’ visitors use its website. From time to time, Gnowsis may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.
Gnowsis also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Gnowsis does not use such information to identify its visitors, however, and does not disclose such information, other than under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information, as described below.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Gnowsis’ websites choose to interact with Gnowsis in ways that require Gnowsis to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Gnowsis gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for an account at cluug.com to provide a username and email address. Those who engage in financial transactions with Gnowsis are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Gnowsis collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Gnowsis. Gnowsis does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

Gnowsis may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Gnowsis may monitor the most popular public Things on the cluug.com service or use usage statistics to measure how our user base grows. Gnowsis may display this aggregated, non-personalized information publicly or provide it to others. However, Gnowsis does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Personal Information

With “Personal Information” we understand potentially personally-identifying, personally-identifying information and Content which you created and that you stored on our services. Gnowsis discloses Personal Information only to those of its employees and contractors that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Gnowsis’ behalf or to provide services available at Gnowsis’ websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others.
All Gnowsis contractors and employees are working from within the European Union and are thus subject to the restrictive EU privacy laws. The Austrian Data Privacy Law §15 requires employees to keep your data secret, and we conform to this requirement. This is true for direct employees and we bind contractors who work on our core services to the same requirements. The policy for third parties using our API to build their services on top is different and described below.
Some of those employees and contractors may be located outside of your home country; by using Gnowsis’ websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Gnowsis will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Gnowsis discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Gnowsis believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Gnowsis, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Gnowsis website and have supplied your email address, Gnowsis may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Gnowsis and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Gnowsis takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Protection of Shared and Public Content

We would like to protect shared content the same way as Personal Information is protected. As we cannot control what the recipients of your shared content do with the content, this is not possible. From our side, we restrict access to shared content the same way we restrict your Personal Information.
Content which you published for the general public to see can be retrieved by the public.

Third Parties Using the API to Access Your Content

You can use third party software on top of our Service and Website. You explicitly have to give each service the permission to read your Content. By giving this permission, you authorize Gnowsis to pass on your Content to third parties. By default, no third party can access your data.
There is currently one exception: to give you good recommendations, we are using the service “OpenCalais” and we analyze your content using their service, thus also transferring your content to them. If you want, read their Terms of Service. They are similar to ours. OpenCalais is trusted by many companies and organizations worldwide and we expect that they respect the privacy of the data we transmit to them. Nevertheless, to give you a choice, we are currently working on a version of our service which lets you deactivate the OpenCalais integration.Some services will want to change your data – add content, delete content, or modify your content. The permission to change data is separate from reading and otherwise works by the same conditions as in the previous paragraph.
To help you make a decision, we give you links to the jurisdiction information and privacy policies of third parties.

Analyzing the Data to Optimize the Service

We are continually optimizing and improving the service for you. For example, we want to provide good recommendations of “related Content”. To analyze the data, we are using our own software and software by third parties. Your data is not transferred to third parties for this analysis. Instead, we run the analysis.
To improve the software and to gain scientific insights, anonymous statistical information will be passed on to third parties, especially to providers of software which we use. This statistical information is not “Personal Information” under above definition, especially it is not potentially personally-identifying and not your Content.
For example: we will pass on the fact that “40% of all tags are verbs”, or “the top recommendation is accepted 60% of all times” but not the actual words you use.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Gnowsis uses cookies to help Gnowsis identify and track visitors, their usage of Gnowsis website, and their website access preferences. Gnowsis visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Gnowsis’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Gnowsis’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Gnowsis may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Gnowsis’ sole discretion. Gnowsis encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a cluug.com account, you should also check your personal profile for alerts to these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.