Scuba Nation and its employees take your privacy very seriously. To make it easier for you to read and understand our privacy policy, we’ve written it in plain language and tried to keep it to a reasonably short length.
The key points of our privacy policy are:
- We give you choices about the personally identifiable information you share with Scuba Nation and other Scuba Nation users.
- You can end your membership at any time.
- We only disclose information from which you may be personally identifiable to selected third parties in accordance with this privacy policy.
- Scuba Nation does not spam.
- By participating in the Scuba Nation community, you agree to this privacy policy.
- Information Collected On the Scuba Nation Service
We collect the following types of information about you when you use the Scuba Nation Service:
- Information provided by you. We collect personally identifiable information, such as your name and email address, when you register to become a Scuba Nation member. This information is needed to set up your personal profile. As part of your personal profile, you may choose to submit or incorporate additional information, such as your age, your hobbies and interests, as well as other content, such as photos, music and videos.
- Information collected automatically. Scuba Nation receives and stores information which is transmitted automatically from your computer when you use the Scuba Nation Service. This information includes information from cookies (which are described below), your IP address and browser type. Your IP address is the unique address of your computer which is automatically provided to other computers when your web browser or email application requests a web page or email from those computers on the Internet. We also collect information about how you use the Scuba Nation Service, including information about the features you use and where you go on the Service.
- Information about you as a Scuba Nation member may be supplemented with additional information, including publicly-available information and information from other companies.
Use and Disclosure of Information
We use this information in order to operate the Scuba Nation Service and improve your experience:
- We will display your personally identifiable information on your profile according to the preferences you set. We will use your name so that you are recognizable on our database and so that we can personalize your experience. We will use your email address to contact you from time to time and may also use it for security reasons to confirm that you are who you say you are. You can control the types and frequencies of certain emails you receive in your email preferences.
- We may use the information collected automatically, such as your IP address, information stored via cookies, and information about how you use the Scuba Nation Service to develop statistics and aggregate information about the number of people who visit the Scuba Nation Service and to customize Scuba Nation’s content, layout and services. We may share this information with third parties to help us improve the Scuba Nation Service and better serve our users.
- Advertisements that appear on the Scuba Nation Service are delivered to you by Scuba Nation’s advertising affiliates, partners and service providers. Scuba Nation may transfer information about you and your use of Scuba Nation, such as your IP address, information stored via cookies, and other demographic information about you, to our advertising affiliates (such as Advertising.com), partners (including Yahoo! and its affiliates) and other third parties. This information may be used to provide advertising, promotions and other products and services that may be of particular interest to you. It may also be used to provide you with a tailored choice of content and media products. Please refer to the Cookies section below to find out about the choices that Scuba Nation offers in connection with advertising targeting.
- Our advertising and promotions partners have no access to your name or personal contact information stored by Scuba Nation unless you choose to share it with them. Scuba Nation does not provide your name or personal contact information to an advertising partner when you interact with or view a targeted advertisement.
- We may provide your personally identifiable information and the data generated by cookies and the aggregate information to the vendors and service agencies that we may engage to assist us in providing our services to you. Such third party entities will be obligated to use your personally identifiable information solely to provide the services to us.
- Personally identifiable information about you as a Scuba Nation user, including the contents of your online communications, may be accessed or disclosed in response to legal process (for example, a court order, search warrant or subpoena); in other circumstances in which Scuba Nation believes the Scuba Nation service is being used in the commission of a crime; when we have a good faith belief that there is an emergency that poses a threat to the safety of you or another person; or when necessary either to protect the rights or property of Scuba Nation and its affiliates, or for us to render the service you have requested.
- Personally identifiable information collected in connection with your use of the Scuba Nation Service may be stored in the United States, or other countries where Scuba Nation or its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries or service providers maintain facilities. By using the Scuba Nation Service, you expressly agree to the transfer to the United States and elsewhere of the personally identifiable information you provide Scuba Nation. By publicly posting information on the Scuba Nation Service, you also certify that your posting conforms to all local data protection laws.
- We reserve the right to transfer your personally identifiable information in the event of a transfer of ownership of scubanation.com, such as acquisition by or merger with another company. If an acquiring company should plan to materially change this privacy policy, we will notify you beforehand.
Tell-A-Friend
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about Scuba Nation, we will ask you for your friend's name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit Scuba Nation. Scuba Nation stores and only uses this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program.
Your friend may submit a request that we remove this information from our database via the contact us page or by emailing info@scubanation.com.remove requests of this nature will be completed within 30 days.
Testimonials
We post customer testimonials on Scuba Nation which may contain personally identifiable information such as your name. We obtain your prior consent to post your name along with your testimonial.
Cookies
- Cookies are a common Internet technology. Many web sites use cookies to provide useful features for their users. Cookies are small files that are written or downloaded to your computer’s hard drive when you access a site. They allow Scuba Nation to store and quickly retrieve login information on your computer and provide data that we can use to improve the quality of our service. Most Internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Safari) are initially set up to accept cookies. If you prefer, you can set your browser to refuse cookies, although you may not be able to take full advantage of Scuba Nation if you do so. You can disable cookies by going to Tools on your top menu bar. This will bring up the "Internet Options" dialogue box. On the top of the dialogue box, click on "Privacy". This will bring up the "Settings" box. Scroll up using the slide bar on the left-hand side of the box, until the wording in the box states Block All Cookies. Then click on the "OK" button on the bottom of the menu box. If you follow these instructions, your computer will not accept cookies in future.
- Scuba Nation may link information stored in cookies such as your age, gender and country with your personally identifiable information and we may use such information to gather statistics about the number of people who visit Scuba Nation and to customize Scuba Nation’s content, layout and services for delivery to you.
- Scuba Nation and its advertisers may set and access cookies or use other technologies such as web beacons (which are electronic files that allow a web site to count users who have visited that page or to access certain cookies) in order to present advertisements on Scuba Nation. Scuba Nation and its advertisers may also use third party ad networks to help present and manage advertisements. These ad networks use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies on your computer to help present, better target, and measure the effectiveness of their advertisements, using data gathered over time and across their networks of Web pages to determine or predict the characteristics and preferences of their audience. Scuba Nation may share certain non-personally identifiable information about you (such as user age and zip code) with ad network providers, to help them deliver more relevant advertisements through their ad networks.
You control who sees your profile information on Scuba Nation
- Your profile information on the Scuba Nation Service will only be shared with people you have specifically agreed to share such information with, and to other members of groups (such as universities) you choose to belong to. You can limit who can view certain personal information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Please bear in mind that if you choose to share your personal information (including any comments, videos, photos or any other information) to other people on Scuba Nation, you do so at your own risk. Scuba Nation recommends that you don't share your personal contact information.
- You can choose to make your profile visible to non-members of Scuba Nation by editing your profile and opting in to accessible profile.
- For users under the age of 18, the default setting for profiles is private.
Sharing Information with Applications Providers
Scuba Nation allows you to share your profile or other Scuba Nation information with applications created by third parties.
- These third party applications providers have their own privacy policies and terms for how they use the information you’ve chosen to share with them.
- While Scuba Nation has Policies and Guidelines for these providers, we can’t control how they may use your information - and so you should review these application providers’ policies carefully.
Reviewing, deleting and changing your Profile
You can review, delete, correct and revise your privacy settings and personal profile, including who has access to your personal profile in your account at any time or contact us for assistance via the Contact Us page or via email to info@scubanation.com; requests of this nature will be completed within 30 days.
Internet awareness
Whenever you voluntarily post personal information in public areas, like journals, weblogs, message boards and forums, this information can be accessed by the public and can in turn be used by others to send you unsolicited communications. Scuba Nation recommends that you exercise discretion in deciding what information you disclose on the Internet.
Children
- Children under the age of 13 are not eligible to use Scuba Nation and must not attempt to register with Scuba Nation and/or submit any personal information to us. Scuba Nation does not knowingly collect personal information from any person who is under the age of 13 or allows them to register. If it comes to our attention that we have collected personal data from a person under the age of 13, we will delete this information as quickly as possible. If you have reason to believe that this has occurred, please contact us via the Contact Us page, and we will delete any such information.
- We recommend that children between the ages of 13 and 17 should not send any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet without asking their parents or legal guardians for permission beforehand.
Security and confidentiality
- Scuba Nation uses a variety of safeguards to help protect your personal information, including technical, administrative and physical controls. Please bear in mind though, that it is impossible for Scuba Nation to guarantee that impenetrable security measures are in place. For example, we cannot control any illegal and/or unforeseen activity of other users that may allow them to get around the privacy or security settings on Scuba Nation. Consequently, you acknowledge that there are circumstances in which your personal information may be accessed by unauthorized persons.
- The security of your personal information depends in part on your protection of your account password. Please do not disclose your account password to unauthorized people.
- We limit access to your personal information only to employees that we authorize to access that information in order to do their jobs in connection with the Scuba Nation service.
- If you become aware of any breach of data security or have any other questions about the security of our website, please contact us via the Contact Us page.
Changes in Privacy Policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the home page, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
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.
Additionally, we may send registered users an email notifying you of the change. IF ANY MODIFICATION IS UNACCEPTABLE TO YOU, YOU SHALL STOP USING THE SCUBA NATION SERVICE. YOUR CONTINUED USE OF THE SCUBA NATION SERVICE FOLLOWING OUR POSTING OF A CHANGE NOTICE OR ON OUR WEBSITE OR BLOG OR RECEIVING OUR EMAIL NOTIFYING YOU OF THE CHANGE WILL CONSTITUTE YOU’RE BINDING ACCEPTANCE OF THE CHANGE.
Canceling membership
You always have the option to cancel your membership at any time. If you are a member and no longer wish to participate in Scuba Nation you can sign in to the site and click on the My Account at the top of the page; then select cancel membership and follow the simple instructions.
Co-Branding
Scuba Nation may be co-branded with our affiliates & partners.
Contact
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact us on the Contact Us page or via email to info@scubanation.com.
Effective Date and Last Revision Date
This Privacy Policy was first posted on February 1, 2009
This Privacy Policy was last revised on February 1, 2009.
