Terms of Service

The Gist

We (the folks at PrepareALot.com) are on a mission to make the web a better place. We hope you love our products and services – from our digital eLearning courses and eBooks to our educational articles to the next great idea that we haven’t even thought of yet — as much as we love creating them. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) describe our commitments to you, and your rights and responsibilities when using our services. Please read them carefully and reach out to us if you have any questions. We’ve decided to make these Terms available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, was the original source of these terms. They have been adapted for use by PrepareALot.com. PrepareALot.com is not affiliated with Automattic in any way or form. Feel free to copy, adapt and repurpose this text, from this page, for your own use. You can grab a copy of the original source of these Terms and other legal documents on Github. You’re welcome to copy them, adapt them, and repurpose them for your own use. Please just make sure to revise the language so that your Terms reflect your actual practices. Also, if you do use these Terms from this page, we’d appreciate a credit and link to PrepareALot.com somewhere on your website. If you use the original source of these Terms, according to the Creative Commons Sharealike license, Automattic would appreciate a credit and link to Automattic.com somewhere on your website.

Terms of Service

These Terms govern your access to and use of PrepareALot.com, as well as all content and PrepareALot.com products and services available at or through these websites (collectively, “Services”). For some of PrepareALot.com’s other products, services, and programs, additional Terms of Service may apply and will be posted on the respective websites. Our Services are offered subject to your acceptance, without modification, of all of the terms and conditions contained herein and all other operating rules, policies (including, without limitation, PrepareALot.com’s Privacy Policy), and procedures that may be published from time to time by PrepareALot.com (collectively, the “Agreement”). You agree that we may automatically upgrade our Services, and the Agreement will apply to any upgrades. Please read the Agreement carefully before accessing or using our Services. By accessing or using any part of our Services, you agree to become bound by the Agreement. If you do not agree to all the terms of the Agreement, then you may not access or use our Services.

1. Who’s Who

Throughout these Terms, “you” applies to both individuals and entities that access or use our Services. If you are an individual using our Services on behalf of an entity, you represent and warrant that you have the authority to bind that entity to the Agreement and that by using our Service(s), you are accepting the Agreement on behalf of that entity. We use the term “Designated Countries” to refer to Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and all countries located in the European continent. If you reside in the “Designated Countries,” your Agreement is with PrepareALot.com. If you reside outside of the “Designated Countries,” your Agreement is with PrepareALot.com. We refer to PrepareALot.com collectively as “PrepareALot.com” or “we” throughout these Terms.

2. Your Account

Where use of our Services requires an account, you agree to provide us with complete and accurate information when you register for an account and to keep the information current. This is important because sometimes we may need to send you notable updates (for example, about changes to our Terms of Service or Privacy Policy), or we may want to let you know about and make informed choices in response to legal inquiries or complaints.

You will be solely responsible and liable for any activity that occurs under your account. You are responsible for keeping your account information up-to-date and for keeping your password secure.

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and any contentyou provide, and you are fully responsible for all activities that occur under your account and any other actions taken in connection with our Services. You shall not share or misuse your access credentials. You must immediately notify us of any unauthorized uses of your account, store, or of any other breach of security. We will not be liable for any acts or omissions by you, including any damages of any kind incurred as a result of such acts or omissions.

When you create a PrepareALot.com account, we consider that to be an inquiry about our products and services, which means that we may contact you to share more details about what we have to offer. Don’t worry – if you aren’t interested in learning more, you can opt out of the marketing communication, whether it’s an email, phone call, or text message.

3. Minimum Age Requirements

Our Services are not directed to children. Access to and use of our Services is only for those over the age of 13 (or 16 in the European Union). If you are younger than this, you may not register for or use our Services. Any person who registers as a user or provides their personal information to our Services represents that they are 13 years of age or older (or 16 years or older in the European Union).

4. Responsibility of Visitors and Users

We have not reviewed, and cannot review, all of the content (such as, but not limited to, text, photo, video, audio, code, computer software, items for sale, or other materials) posted to our Services by users or anyone else (“Content”) and are not responsible for any use or effects of such Content. So, for example:

• We do not endorse any Content or represent that Content is accurate, useful, or non-harmful. Content could be offensive, indecent, or objectionable; include technical inaccuracies, typographical mistakes, or other errors; or violate or infringe the privacy, publicity rights, intellectual property rights (see our Copyright Infringement and DMCA Policy section to submit copyright complaints), or other proprietary rights of third parties.
• If you post Content, comment on a post, or otherwise make (or allow any third party to make) Content available on our Services, you are entirely responsible for the Content, and any harm resulting from, that Content or your conduct.
• We disclaim any responsibility for any harm resulting from anyone’s use, purchase, or downloading of Content. If you access or use any Content, you are responsible for taking precautions as necessary to protect yourself and your computer systems from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other harmful or destructive content.
• Any Content offered for sale through any of our Services are the seller’s sole responsibility, and you agree that you will look solely to the seller for any damages that result from your purchase or use of Content.
• We are not a party to, and will have no responsibility or liability for, any communications, transactions, interactions, or disputes between you and the provider of any Content.
• Please note that additional third party terms and conditions may apply to the downloading, copying, purchase, or use of Content.

We also have not reviewed, and cannot review, all of the material, including computer software, made available through the websites and web pages that link to, or are linked from, PrepareALot.com or our other Services. For example:

• We do not have any control over those websites and are not responsible for their contents or their use.
• The existence of a link to or from one of our Services does not represent or imply that we endorse such website.
• You are responsible for taking precautions as necessary to protect yourself and your computer systems from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other harmful or destructive content.
• We disclaim any responsibility for any harm resulting from non-PrepareALot.com websites.

5. PrepareALot.com Fees, Payment, and Renewal

Fees for Paid Services. Some of our Services are offered for a fee, such as eLearning services and some Ecommerce Services and products (collectively, “Paid Services”). By using a Paid Service, you agree to pay the specified fees, and fees associated with specific features. Depending on the Paid Service, there may be one-time fees, or recurring fees. For recurring fees, we’ll bill or charge you for in regular automatically-renewing intervals (such as monthly or annually), on a pre-pay basis until you cancel, which you can do at any time by contacting the relevant support team.

Taxes. To the extent permitted by law, or unless explicitly stated otherwise, all fees are exclusive of applicable federal, provincial, state, local or other governmental sales, goods and services, harmonized or other taxes, fees, or charges now in force or enacted in the future (“Taxes”). You are responsible for payment of all applicable Taxes relating to your use of our Services, your payments, or your purchases. If we are obligated to pay or collect Taxes on the Fees you’ve paid or will pay, you are responsible for such Taxes, and we may collect payment for such Taxes.

Payment. If your payment fails, Paid Services are otherwise not paid for or paid for on time, or we suspect a payment is fraudulent, we may immediately cancel or revoke your access to Paid Services without notice to you. If you contact your bank or credit card company to decline or reverse the charge of fees for Paid Services, we may revoke your access to our Services.

Automatic Renewal. To ensure uninterrupted service, recurring Paid Services are automatically renewed. This means that unless you cancel a Paid Service before the end of the applicable subscription period, it will automatically renew, and you authorize us to invoice you or use any payment mechanism we have on record for you to collect the then-applicable subscription fee (as well as any Taxes). By default, your Paid Services will be renewed for the same interval of time as your original subscription period. For example, if you purchase a PrepareALot.com annual plan, you will be charged each year for the following 12-month period. We may charge your account up to one month before the end of the subscription period. It is your responsibility to make sure you are checking your email (including any spam or other filters) in order to receive any reminder email we send to you in advance of renewal. The date for the automatic renewal is determined automatically based on the date of the original purchase and cannot be changed.

You can view your renewal date for PrepareALot.com Paid Services by visiting the respective Service’s site.

Cancelling Automatic Renewal. You can manage and cancel your Paid Services at the respective Service’s site.

Fee Changes. We may change our fees at any time, or start charging fees for Services that were previously free. When applicable, we may give you advance notice of the fee changes. If you don’t agree with the fee changes, you must cancel your Paid Service.

No-Show Policy. We may have a “no-show policy” for some Paid Services (for example, for Coaching sessions), which means that if you fail to show up or are late for a scheduled session, we may withhold the Service without a refund.

Refunds. While you may cancel a Paid Service at any time, refunds are issued in our sole discretion, unless otherwise required by applicable law.

6. General Representation and Warranty

You represent and warrant that your use of our Services:

• Will be in strict accordance with these Terms;
• Will comply with all applicable laws and regulations (including, without limitation, all applicable laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content, privacy, data protection, the transmission of technical data exported from the European Union or the United States or the country in which you reside, the use of financial services, notification and consumer protection, unfair competition, and false advertising);
• Will not use the Services for any unlawful purposes, to publish illegal content, or in furtherance of illegal activities;
• Will not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of any third party;
• Will not overburden PrepareALot.com’s systems, as determined by us in our sole discretion;
• Will not disclose sensitive personal information of others;
• Will not be used to send spam or bulk unsolicited messages;
• Will not interfere with, disrupt, or attack any service or network; and
• Will not be used to create, distribute, or enable material that is – or that facilitates or operates in conjunction with – malware, spyware, adware, or other malicious programs or code.

7. Specific Service Terms

a. PrepareALot.com User Accounts

PrepareALot.com enables you to create your own “user profile”, also known as “user account”, or “account”. A PrepareALot.com account also allows you to sign into some of our Services and to make comments. PrepareALot.com’s basic service is free. Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your user profile as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely. Be responsible in what you publish. In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items (like spam, viruses, or serious threats of violence) appear on your user profile or in any content you publish. If you find a PrepareALot.com user profile that you believe violates these Terms, please report this to abuse@PrepareALot.com as soon as possible.

License. By submitting Content to PrepareALot.com for inclusion on your user profile, including but not limited to comments, you grant PrepareALot.com a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to do the things we need to do to provide the Services, including but not limited to storing, reproducing, modifying, adapting, and publishing the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing, and promoting our website. This license also allows PrepareALot.com to make any publicly-posted Content available to third parties selected by PrepareALot.com so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

Removing Content. If you delete Content, we will use reasonable efforts to remove it from public view on PrepareALot.com, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

Content Guidelines. You are fully responsible for Your Content. You may not copy, upload, download, or share Your Content unless you have the appropriate rights to do so. It is your responsibility to ensure that Your Content abides by applicable laws, these Terms, and with our User Guidelines. By using PrepareALot.com, you represent and warrant that your Content and conduct do not violate the applicable laws, these Terms, and our User Guidelines.

Advertisements. We reserve the right to display advertisements on our website, including, but not limited to, your user profile.

Attribution. We reserve the right to display attribution text or links in your user profile, attributing PrepareALot.com or the theme author, for example. Some of these attributions may not be altered or removed.

8. Copyright Infringement

As we ask others to respect our intellectual property rights, we respect the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that material located on or associated with an PrepareALot.com product or service violates your copyright, please notify us at abuse@PrepareALot.com . We will respond to all such notices, including as required or appropriate by removing the infringing material or disabling all links to the infringing material. We will terminate a visitor’s access to and use of the website if, under appropriate circumstances, the visitor is determined to be a repeat infringer of the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of PrepareALot.com or others. In the case of such termination, we will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid to us.

9. Intellectual Property

The Agreement does not transfer from PrepareALot.com to you any PrepareALot.com or third party intellectual property, and all right, title, and interest in and to such property will remain (as between the parties) solely with PrepareALot.com.

PrepareALot.com, the PrepareALot.com logo, and all other trademarks, service marks, graphics, and logos used in connection with PrepareALot.com or our Services, are trademarks or registered trademarks of PrepareALot.com or PrepareALot.com’s licensors.

Other trademarks, service marks, graphics, and logos used in connection with our Services may be the trademarks of other third parties.

Your use of our Services grants you no right or license to reproduce or otherwise use any PrepareALot.com or third party trademarks.

10. Changes

We are constantly updating our Services and that means sometimes we have to change the legal terms under which our Services are offered. These Terms may only be modified by the posting by PrepareALot.com of a revised version. If we make changes that are material, we may let you know by posting on PrepareALot.com, or by sending you an email or other communication, such as Twitter or Parler, before the changes take effect. The notice will designate a reasonable period of time after which the new terms will take effect. If you disagree with our changes, then you should stop using our Services within the designated notice period, or once the changes become effective. Your continued use of our Services will be subject to the new terms. However, any dispute that arose before the changes shall be governed by the Terms (including the binding individual arbitration clause) that were in place when the dispute arose.

11. Termination

We may terminate your access to all or any part of our Services at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. We have the right (though not the obligation) to, in our sole discretion, (i) reclaim your username due to prolonged inactivity, (ii) refuse or remove any content that, in our reasonable opinion, violates any PrepareALot.com policy or is in any way harmful or objectionable, (iii) ask you to make some adjustments, restrict the resources your user profile uses, or terminate your Services, if we believe your user profile’s storage or bandwidth usage is out of hand and/or burdens our systems (which is rare), or (iv) terminate or deny access to and use of any of our Services to any individual or entity for any reason. We will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid.

If you wish to terminate the Agreement or your PrepareALot.com account, you may simply discontinue using our Services, or, if you are using a paid service, you may cancel at any time, subject to the Fees, Payment, and Renewal section in these Terms.

All provisions of the Agreement which by their nature should survive termination shall survive termination, including, without limitation, ownership provisions, warranty disclaimers, indemnity, and limitations of liability.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

Our Services are provided “as is,” “as available.” PrepareALot.com and its suppliers and licensors hereby disclaim all warranties of any kind, express or implied, including, without limitation, the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Neither PrepareALot.com, nor its suppliers and licensors, makes any warranty that our Services will be error free or that access thereto will be continuous or uninterrupted. You understand that you download from, or otherwise obtain content or services through, our Services at your own discretion and risk.

13. Jurisdiction and Applicable Law.

Except to the extent any applicable law provides otherwise, the Agreement and any access to or use of our Services will be governed by the laws of Norway, excluding its conflict of law provisions. The proper venue for any disputes arising out of or relating to the Agreement and any access to or use of our Services will be the courts located in Norway, and you hereby submit to the personal jurisdiction of such courts. You hereby waive any right to a jury trial in any proceeding arising out of or related to this Agreement.

14. Arbitration Agreement

Except for claims for injunctive or equitable relief or claims regarding intellectual property rights (which may be brought in any competent court without the posting of a bond), any dispute arising under the Agreement shall be finally settled in accordance with the Comprehensive Arbitration Rules of the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Service, Inc. (“JAMS”) by arbitrators appointed in accordance with such Rules. The arbitration shall take place in Oslo, Norway, in the English language and the arbitral decision may be enforced in any Norwegian court. The prevailing party in any action or proceeding to enforce the Agreement shall be entitled to costs and attorneys’ fees.

15. Limitation of Liability

In no event will PrepareALot.com, or its suppliers, partners, or licensors, be liable with respect to any subject matter of the Agreement under any contract, negligence, strict liability or other legal or equitable theory for: (i) any special, incidental or consequential damages; (ii) the cost of procurement for substitute products or services; (iii) for interruption of use or loss or corruption of data; or (iv) for any amounts that exceed $5 or the fees paid by you to PrepareALot.com under the Agreement during the twelve (12) month period prior to the cause of action, whichever is greater. PrepareALot.com shall have no liability for any failure or delay due to matters beyond their reasonable control. The foregoing shall not apply to the extent prohibited by applicable law.

16. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless PrepareALot.com, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees, and agents from and against any and all losses, liabilities, demands, damages, costs, claims, and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of or related to your use of our Services, including but not limited to your violation of the Agreement or any agreement with a provider of third-party services used in connection with the Services, Content that you post, and any activities conducted through your or another user’s user profile.

17. US Economic Sanctions

You expressly represent and warrant that your use of our Services and/or associated services and products is not contrary to applicable U.S. Sanctions. Such use is prohibited, and we reserve the right to terminate accounts or access of those in the event of a breach of this condition.

18. Norwegian Economic Sanctions

You expressly represent and warrant that your use of our Services and/or associated services and products is not contrary to applicable Norwegian Sanctions. Such use is prohibited, and we reserve the right to terminate accounts or access of those in the event of a breach of this condition.

19. Translation

These Terms were originally written in English (US). We may translate these terms into other languages. In the event of a conflict between a translated version of these Terms and the English version, the English version will control.

20. Miscellaneous

The Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between PrepareALot.com and you concerning the subject matter hereof. If any part of the Agreement is held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, that part will be construed to reflect the parties’ original intent, and the remaining portions will remain in full force and effect. A waiver by either party of any term or condition of the Agreement or any breach thereof, in any one instance, will not waive such term or condition or any subsequent breach thereof. You may assign your rights under the Agreement to any party that consents to, and agrees to be bound by, its terms and conditions; PrepareALot.com may assign its rights under the Agreement without condition. The Agreement will be binding upon and will inure to the benefit of the parties, their successors and permitted assigns.

Privacy Policy

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

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your user profile is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
• We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you (“Personally Identifiable Information” or “Personal Information”) when you use:

• Our website (PrepareALot.com);
• Our other PrepareALot.com products, services, and features that are available on or through our website.

Throughout this Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy” or “Policy”) we’ll refer to our website (“Website” or “Service”), and other products and services collectively as “Services.” Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy. Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Creative Commons Sharealike License

This Privacy Policy is adapted from Automattic’s Privacy Policy. We’ve decided to make this Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, was the original source of this Privacy Policy. They have been adapted for use by PrepareALot.com. PrepareALot.com is not affiliated with Automattic in any way or form. Feel free to copy, adapt and repurpose this text, from this page, for your own use. You can grab a copy of the original source of this Privacy Policy and other legal documents on Github. You’re welcome to copy them, adapt them, and repurpose them for your own use. Please just make sure to revise the language so that your Privacy Policy reflect your actual practices. Also, if you do use this Privacy Policy from this page, we’d appreciate a credit and link to PrepareALot.com somewhere on your website. If you use the original source of these Terms, according to the Creative Commons Sharealike license, Automattic would appreciate a credit and link to Automattic.com somewhere on your website.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

• Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a PrepareALot.com account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name — and that’s it. You may provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create a PrepareALot.com account.
• Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a PrepareALot.com account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
• Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us, you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made. If you use our eCommerce Services (including Store on PrepareALot.com, you’ll have to create a PrepareALot.com account or connect an existing account.
• Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
• Communications with us (hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Customer Support Gurus about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, PrepareALot.com comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log information: Like most online services, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access and operating system.
• Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, interactions with other parts of our Services, how much time you spend on each page, ). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
• Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also use the IP address information to block certain countries known for hacking or spreading viruses and spam.
• Interactions with other users: We collect some information about your interactions with other users while you are logged in to your account with us, such as the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend posts we think may interest you. As another example, we collect information about the comments users make while logged in and use that information to, for example, tally up statistics about your comments and display information about your comments in your profile.
• Information from cookies & other technologies: 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. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. PrepareALot.com uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, public databases and joint marketing partners.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
• To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.
• To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads on our website as part of our advertising program, and understand ad performance.
• To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
• To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of PrepareALot.com and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
• To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
• To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, recommending content through our post suggestions, and providing new essays and stories for your reading pleasure.
• To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our services, or keep you up to date on PrepareALot.com; or mailing you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your user account.)

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:
(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website;
or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation;
or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person;
or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you 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 consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below, as well as in the section called “”Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others” on this page:

• Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
• Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like PayPal, which powers Payments, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, our hosting provider; those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations; and companies that make products available on our websites, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. Other vendors are listed in our more specific policies (e.g., our Cookie Policy).
• Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
• To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of PrepareALot.com, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that PrepareALot.com goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
• With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so.
• Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
• Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails. We show ads on our website, and the revenue they generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services. Under a new California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), some personalized advertising you see online and on our services might be considered a “sale” even though we don’t share information that identifies you personally, like your name or email address, as part of our advertising program. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can ot-out and control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly. That means information like your public profile, comments, posts, other content that you make public on your user profile, are all available to others. For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar — get it? 🙂 Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, displays alongside the comments and “Likes” that you make on our website while logged in to your PrepareALot.com account. Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, premium services that carry an additional charge — may not be accessible.
• Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other necessary communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
• Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, PrepareALot.com does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using PrepareALot.com’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of PrepareALot.com’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. (Here are account closure instructions for PrepareALot.com accounts.) Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

• Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
• Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
• Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us);
• Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services;
• Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
• Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one); and
• Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section on this page. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section on this page. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

• Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
• Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
• Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

The CCPA & Personalized Advertising in Our Ads Program

Our mission is to inform people, and that means making our Services accessible to as many people as possible. We show ads on our website, and the revenue these ads generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services. As part of our advertising program, we do use cookies to share certain device identifiers and information about your browsing activities with our advertising partners, and those advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads on our website. The personal information we share includes online identifiers; internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address); and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address). These disclosures may be considered a “sale” of information under the CCPA. We do not sell (or share) information through our ads program that identifies you personally, like your name or contact information. We don’t knowingly sell personal information of those under 16. Learn how you can opt out by going to our Cookie Policy.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, you can send an email to tos@PrepareALot.com. When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us through our email.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because PrepareALot.com’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

• In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield; or
• In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver ads that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by PrepareALot.com and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party advertisers or analytics providers.

Third-Party Software and Services

If you’d like to use third-party plugins or embeds that enable services provided by third parties, or other third-party software or services (for example a third party commenting system), please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself to those third parties. For example, some third-party services may request or require access to your data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, PrepareALot.com may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. PrepareALot.com encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Translation

Our Privacy Policy was originally written in English (US). We may translate it into other languages. In the event of a conflict between a translated version of our Privacy Policy and the English version, the English version will control.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Updated:
22.12.2020