Privacy Policy
We care about your privacy. We will not sell your name or email address to any third party advertisers without your permission. Please read our privacy policy below for further details. As a general rule of thumb, we won’t use your private information in any manner that we wouldn’t want our own private information used.
Children’s Privacy
Children should always get permission from their parents before sending any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet. In most cases, we do not allow anyone under 13 to register with our site or to provide any other personally identifying information. In certain circumstances, with parental permission, we may allow limited use of Atlas Quest for children under 13.
Please note that if it comes to our attention through reliable means that a registered member is a child under 13 years of age, we will suspend or terminate that member’s account.
Parents are allowed to create accounts to keep track of their child’s plants, finds, and carvings, but the account belongs to the parent. If a child under 13 is found to be using the account, we will suspect or terminate the account.
Types Of Information We Collect
The information we gather falls into two categories: (1) information (for example, your name and address) that you voluntarily supply when you register or initiate transactions, and (2) information gathered on usage patterns and preferences while navigating through our sites and using our services. In some cases, an agent or affiliate of ours collects the information on our behalf. Third party providers featured on or linked to by our site, such as vendors of products and services offered through our site, may be gathering the same kinds of information.
Personal information collected such as your name, address, and other details associated with an individual account are considered confidential. Administrators and webmasters can access the information, but we do not sell such information. We may provide it to a third party such as PayPal to complete a transaction that started on Atlas Quest, but we will only provide that which is necessary to complete such transactions. In many cases, we use services such as the Google geocoder to map addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates, but the third party services will not know who is making such a request or how it will be used. If we receive a query from landowners about a letterbox you planted, we may provide contact information for them to contact you.
Unless you voluntarily identify yourself such as through the registration process, we will not know who you are. Atlas Quest does use a browser feature called “cookies” to track your movement throughout the website, but the cookie does not identify who you are and cannot read data off your hard drive. To create an account and log in, you must have cookies enabled.
Browser Level Information and IP Addresses: Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer configuration when you visit our site, including the type of browser software you use, the operating system you are running, the resolution of your computer monitor, the website that referred you, and your IP address. Your IP address is a numerical address that is used by computers connected to the Internet to identify your computer so that data (such as the web pages you want to view) can be transmitted to you. We also use IP address information for systems administration and trouble shooting purposes. Your IP address does not tell us who you are.
Clues Hosted on Other Websites: While clues may be hosted externally on Letterboxing North America (www.letterboxing.org), personal websites, and other locations, Atlas Quest may collect and store information about the clue to verify the link stays valid and other advanced features. Atlas Quest will never crawl beyond the original link specified in a given clue.
Disclosure Of Information
Why we want to know: As with any business, it’s important for us to know our customers—their needs, their likes, what they want and expect from us. We use this information to update and improve this website to better fit your needs.
Advertisers: Without your permission, we will not share the personally-identifiable information you provide when registering on our site with advertisers. In the future we may, however, take the information you provide and aggregate it with data from all the other people that use this site and associated services. Then we will use that pool of information to inform advertisers about our audience without identifying you personally. For example, we’ll be able to say to an advertiser: “We have 3,470 users in this ZIP code,” which happens to be your location.
We do display Google ads (except to premium members who are logged into their account), and Google will certainly track and follow you, but they do have settings you can adjust to control which information they can collect and how they can use it. Read more about it on their site at How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.
Statistical Information: Much of the information we collect is in the form of aggregated statistics, such as the traffic that visits various pages within our sites, and the habits and preferences of our audience. Such aggregated information does not include any information that would identify you personally. We may use such aggregated information and disclose it to third parties as we see fit.
Sites to Which We Link: Our site includes links to many other websites, provided by ourselves or our members, and we have no control over the privacy policies of these websites. When you access another site to purchase products or services or conduct other transactions, use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you’re visiting.
Other Disclosures: We may occasionally release information about our visitors when release is appropriate to comply with law, to enforce our Terms of Service, or to protect the rights, property or safety of visitors to our site, the public, or our customers.
Please also keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information online—for example through email or in your profile—that information can be seen, collected and used by others besides us. For example, email could be intercepted by third parties and your profile can be viewed by any members on Atlas Quest. We cannot be responsible for any unauthorized third party use of information that you disclose online.
Opting Out
If you register with us, you will have the opportunity to review, update, or delete the information you have provided us at any time (assuming we stored the information in the first place). If you remove your registration information completely, you may not be able to continue using certain services that require registration. You agree that we may use your information to contact you for customer service or any communications relevant to your use of our site. If you do not wish to receive these notices, you will have the option to opt out.
Storage Of Information
All information gathered on our site is stored within a database operated by us or by a contractor on our behalf. Sensitive information, such as your password, is encrypted for storage. However, as effective as encryption technology is, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won’t be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
Atlas Quest Mail
Atlas Quest mail, also called AQ Mail, is readable by all administrators and webmasters. While we do not regularly monitor Atlas Quest Mail, it is stored within a database and we reserve the right to examine your mailbox at any time for any reason. Any mail in the archive folder will be stored indefinitely as long as the mail stays in the archive folder, but all other Atlas Quest mail is regularly purged from the database at regular intervals. We respect your right to privacy and generally refrain from reading or monitoring Atlas Quest mail unless a matter of some importance is brought to our attention regarding you or your account. If we happen to learn of some unspeakable crime that you have committed or plan to commit, we will not think twice about providing the mail to the proper authorities. The safety and well-being of the public, our members, and their letterboxes comes before your privacy.
Changes To This Privacy Policy
The Web is an evolving medium. We may need to change our privacy policy. Minor changes that we feel are of little significance may not be officially announced, but the current policy will always be readily available.