This privacy policy covers how and why namecrowdfunding (“crowddomains.com”, “we”, “our”, or “us”) collects, protects, uses, and shares information about you when you (“your”, “yourself”, “user”, “visitor”, or “accessor”) access or use namecrowdfunding; access or use our website, its features, our support, or any thing provided, created, or generated by us (“our services”); or interact with us directly or indirectly.

What information we collect (and how we collect it)
Account and profile
We ask you for the following required information (unless listed as optional) and actions when you create an account:

Your name or username (always public)
Your email address
Your date of birth
Password
Gender (optional)
Your explicit agreement to our Terms of Service
Your consent to us processing your personal data as described in this privacy policy, which is given by placing a checkmark in an unticked checkbox and submitting.
You may choose to create an account with us using one of your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, or Google+), in which case it would provide us with the required information to create your account on namecrowdfunding, and it may also provide us with additional account information (e.g., a link to your profile page on that social network).

You may choose to provide additional information to us (e.g., your skills, custom title, and signature) by filling out fields on your profile (“profile fields”), setting your profile photo (e.g., uploading a profile picture or providing your Gravatar email address), and specifying other profile information (e.g., your time zone).

Content and activity
We collect and store the information that you choose to produce on namecrowdfunding, such as when you compose messages in our editor (drafts), post in sections or on profile pages, use the chatroom, or send messages to other members, which can include comments, questions, answers, links, and uploaded photos (“content”).

We also collect and store information that you produce on namecrowdfunding when you perform certain actions, such as liking content, editing content, reporting content, voting in a poll, viewing a page, following another member, or indicating you are online by interacting with crowddomains.com in anyway (“activity”).

Billing
We collect information from you and store information about your transaction when you purchase our products or services (e.g., a Gold Account), such as your name, address, date of the transaction, status of payment attempts, and information about the product or service you are purchasing.

We may ask you to enter financial information (e.g., credit card details) for billing purposes (e.g., to complete your purchase), which is stored, protected, and processed by Stripe, a secure service provider that we use. Your sensitive financial information is not stored by us.

Communications
We may collect and store information about you and our interactions with you when you communicate with us, which includes when you contact us through our service (e.g., name, email address, and IP address if you use our contact form), send us an email (e.g., message, name, email address, and IP address), start a conversation with us using our support chat (i.e., Reamaze), send us a message on social media (e.g., username), and/or when you contact us on other websites.

Public information from third parties
We may use public sources (e.g., social media and public records) to collect and store additional information about you in the interest of Know Your Customer (KYC), such as additional email addresses, phone numbers, and your domain names. This information is used for reasonable purposes, including the detection and prevention of fraud, assessment of your eligibility of community groups, to provide you with support (e.g., account recovery), and to determine whether our terms and rules are being followed (e.g., you may have only one account that is not a Gold account).

Technical information automatically
We use third-party service providers (e.g., Google Analytics, Cloudflare, Quantcast, Reamaze, and New Relic) in addition to our own internal tools (e.g., ELK) to collect and store certain information automatically as you browse and use our services, such as your IP address, geographical location, device details, how you found our site, browsing activity, and page load speed.

We may receive information about you from cookies and other browser storage options, which let us store pieces of data in your web browser that it sends back to us when it makes requests.

Your IP address is stored when you perform certain actions on our services, which includes when you register for an account, manage your account details, write a message or public post, or perform any other action that causes data to be transferred to or from your computer and our services.

Why we collect the information (and how we use it)
Provide our services
Most of the information that we collect is used to provide and operate our services, including communicate with you about your account or use of our services, send you email notifications for your content subscriptions (e.g., watched threads, sections, tags, and new blog posts), support (e.g., provide troubleshooting), account management, features and functionality (e.g., the ability for you to login using a social media account and post content), keep you informed about our services (e.g., notification of maintenance), research and development of new services, internal record keeping, and billing purposes (e.g., charge you for your purchases, manage subscriptions, purchase confirmation, send invoices and receipts, and keep you informed about your billing status, such as a failed charge or expiring credit card).

Cookies and browser storage
We, the service providers we use, and our advertisers may use cookies and other browser storage options (e.g., JavaScript local storage) to store information in your web browser on your computer, which can be used in many ways, such as to help us provide certain functionality (e.g., remember your preferences and the ability to login), improve your experience (e.g., personalization), know who has viewed or clicked an ad, detect misuse (e.g., through persistent identifiers to prevent fraud and abuse), and analyze website traffic. We have a detailed cookie policy that provides more information.

Improve and support our services
We use some information to improve our services, create new features, and keep everything up and running, including the recording and analysis of visits to detect website errors and slow pages, direct marketing and promotion of our services, monitoring and blocking intrusion attempts, and showing ads to support the cost of offering our services.

We may use your information to support your access to the resources, data, and features of our services, which includes the ability for you to secure your account (e.g., security questions to confirm it is your account), regain access to your account (e.g., verify your identity first), reset your password, stay informed by email of activity on our site that you may reasonably expect to be notified about (e.g., someone replies to a conversation that you initiated; service, product, or policy updates; and security alerts or information that may affect you), and other relevant communications.

Analytics
We use analytical data for assessment, analysis, and evaluative purposes, which include to understand how our services are used, improve our services, and to focus our efforts on changes that users may find more valuable.

Advertising
We, our advertisers, and the service providers we use (e.g., Google Ads and DoubleClick) may use information about you (e.g., ads viewed, ads clicked, and demographics) for legitimate and reasonable purposes, such as improving the relevance of ads you see, the frequency of ads you see (e.g., ad rotation), learning the value or quality of an advertisement, and to decide whether to purchase or renew an advertisement.

Marketing and promotions
We may use certain information about you for marketing and promotional purposes, which includes sending you news and newsletters, special offers, promotions, and other information we think may interest you.

Protect our services and prevent misuse
We may use the information that we store (e.g., your IP address and log data), the information that we can access from the service providers we use (e.g., PayPal and Stripe), and the information that we can collect from other means (e.g., public records) to automatically and manually protect our services, protect our legal rights and interests, and/or prevent misuse of our services, which includes risk assessment and investigating, detecting, preventing, and dealing with suspected or apparent fraud; spam; violations of our rules, policies, or terms; threats and attacks (e.g., malicious hacking); scams; and other illegal or abusive activities.

For example, we may review your content and activity for reasonable and legitimate purposes, such as determining whether the rules are being followed and during investigations (e.g., fraud reports that involve you, someone you have interacted with, or someone who has interacted with you). We use the same technologies that banks have used for state-of-the-art fraud prevention (e.g., ETag headers and browser fingerprinting).

Comply with the law
We may collect and use any information necessary to comply with legal obligations (e.g., your birthday to confirm that you are of a necessary age to use our services).

How we share information
Account and profile
Your account and profile information may be visible and used to provide details about you to others based on your privacy settings and use of our services (e.g., your posts and messages will display information about you, such as your username, default/custom title, and in certain sections like the marketplace will display a local time based on the time zone of your account). Some of your profile information is hidden by default (e.g., your birthday), but you may share it by adjusting your privacy settings.

Content and activity
Your content and activity may be visible to anyone with permission to view it, which you grant by performing actions (e.g., liking content or voting in a poll), by posting within specific sections or on profile pages, using the chatroom, or by direct messaging others on namecrowdfunding. The majority of sections on namecrowdfunding are public for everyone to see, including members and visitors that are not logged in (guests, bots, and search engines), and you should assume that all of your actions, activity, and content on namecrowdfunding are public or may become public.

We do not have any control over the sharing, processing, or protection of your content or activity that is copied by a third party (e.g., person or bot) with permission to access it. Once you grant access to information, it may be reproduced or posted elsewhere on namecrowdfunding (e.g., a message that you send to John may be shared by John in a public forum) unless the content resides (or the activity took place) in a section on namecrowdfunding that forbids it from being shared elsewhere on namecrowdfunding (e.g., certain groups).

In general, once you post content publicly or to a large group of people, it will become very difficult (or impossible) for you to remove all records of that content because people could manually save a copy of your content, or they could ask an archive service (e.g., the Wayback Machine) to archive it.

Your content and activity may be visible anywhere to anyone with permission to view it, including your profile page, the news feed of your followers, on the right side of each page (\”sidebar widgets\”), the New Posts page, the Overview page, the Activity page, or selected for inclusion in articles (e.g., Top Topics).

Billing
Payments that you make to us, whether solitarily or through subscription, are processed by secure third-party payment processors (e.g., Stripe and PayPal) that store most of the information we collect from you for billing purposes.

Analytics and metrics
We may share certain information with advertisers that cannot reasonably be used to identify you, including aggregate statistics and summary metrics about the performance of ads or content on namecrowdfunding, such as the total number of ad views and ad clicks over a period of time, the number of people who saw a particular ad, and the demographics about the people who saw the ads or content on namecrowdfunding.

We sometimes allow leading advertisers (e.g., Verisign, Inc.) to use a page tag to collect information about the performance of their ads, which can be used to identify you, including the page you saw their ad on, whether you clicked their ad, and your IP address.

Quantcast, one of the service providers we use, publicly shares general information about our analytics if you have an account with them, but the summary information they share cannot be used to identify you.

Protection and prevent misuse
We may share your information (e.g., IP address) where we believe it is necessary to protect namecrowdfunding, our services, or our users; where it may be necessary for reasons of public interest; or to prevent misuse of our services (e.g., by using StopForumSpam and DNSBLs); including when it may be necessary for our safety or the safety of others (e.g., fraud prevention and personal threats), for the protection of rights or property, where we suspect a threat (e.g., financial scam) and seek investigative assistance, when we believe it is necessary to respond to claims against us, and where we believe your actions are in violation of our rules, policies, or the law (e.g., to discourage illegal activities).

Third-party service providers
We only share the information necessary with these service providers, and only at the time necessary, for the purposes of providing our services to you, supporting our services, protecting our services, or providing the third-party’s services to you (e.g., Gravatar if you choose to use it). For example, SendGrid needs your email address in order to send you email notifications on our behalf. You may indirectly provide information to these service providers by accessing our services, such as Cloudflare receiving your IP address when you visit our website because Cloudflare helps us quickly deliver content to you.

Our privacy policy may not apply to personal data that you share with other service providers (e.g., you enter your email address on StatusPage’s service to subscribe to updates about our scheduled maintenance), and you must refer to their privacy policies in those instances.

The privacy policies of the service providers that we use apply primarily to namecrowdfunding, but we have made them available to you because they may contain clauses that are of interest to you:

Cloudflare (web services and security)
SendGrid (email)
PayPal (billing)
Stripe (billing)
Reamaze (support)
Intercom (support)
Google Analytics (analytics)
Quantcast (analytics)
Google Ads (advertising)
DoubleClick (advertising)
New Relic (monitoring our services)
Datadog (monitoring our services)
Amazon Web Services (cloud services)
StatusPage (website status and reporting)
StopForumSpam (spam and fraud prevention)
Gravatar (optional profile photo service)
AddThis (social sharing option)
Social media and similar service providers
We offer third-party buttons (e.g., Tweet and AddThis) on many pages that allow you to share content on popular social networks (e.g., Twitter, Google+, and Facebook) and similar services (e.g., Gmail and LinkedIn).

We also offer embedded media (e.g., YouTube videos) on many pages that allows you to seamlessly view content from approved third-party services (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Imgur, and Liveleak).

These third-party services usually log information (e.g., the webpage you are viewing) for various purposes (e.g., to allow you to quickly share a link to one of our webpages or to provide viewing statistics on video playback). We do not deliberately provide them with information, but your browser may be providing them with information automatically as you use our services.

Legal
We may share any or all of your information if we are required to do so by law (e.g., for law enforcement or national security purposes) or to comply with legal process (e.g., to respond to subpoenas, warrants, and court orders).

Change of control or similar event
We may share and/or transfer your personal data as part of a merger, sale, or transfer of our assets, an acquisition, financing, dissolution, divestiture, bankruptcy, reinvention, restructuring, reorganization, or similar event.

Control of the information we collect
Account, profile, content, and activity
You may view and update most of your personal information (e.g., your occupation and email address on your account), content (for a period of time), privacy settings (also known as privacy controls), and account preferences in the same way or similar to how you added them or set them (e.g., replace your personal details with a blank value, and if you like a post, then unlike it to remove your like), including:

Personal Details
Signature
Contact Details
Time Zone
Alternatively, you may choose to hide certain information about you (i.e., limit who may view it) rather than remove it. You may also control who may contact you on namecrowdfunding with the exception that staff may always contact you.

You may request to change your username (free) from your real name to any available and allowed alias, which will update the username on all of your past posts to an alias.

You may remove profile posts made by others (comments) or yourself (status updates) from your profile page.

Where you decide to perform an action (e.g., post or like content) and whom you decide to message determines the permission on your activity and your content on namecrowdfunding.

You may also request to close your account.

Billing
We provide you with a secure billing area for you to update your billing information.

Notifications and direct marketing
You may control the notifications that you receive from us (e.g., disable all email notifications).

You may adjust your Messaging Preferences to opt-in or opt-out of receiving certain emails from us about news, updates, and promotional messages.

You may also use the unsubscribe link in any emails that you receive from us.

Social networks and similar services
We do not have control over the security practices, the privacy policies, or the collection, use, or storage of your information on popular social networks and similar services (e.g., Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn), but they typically offer some form of opt-out that you can find by visiting their respective websites, viewing their privacy policies, and adjusting your settings with them.

Cookies
Many web browsers accept cookies by default, but you can typically set your browser to block, remove, or reject cookies. If you choose to block or reject cookies on namecrowdfunding, it will hinder the availability and functionality of our services for you. We do not have the ability to access, read, or write cookies set by third parties that we use.

Consent
At any time, you can use the Do Not Sell My Personal Information page to easily withdraw your consent of us selling your personal information, but we may continue to process (e.g., share without exchange) your personal information as described in this privacy policy. At any time, you can contact us to easily withdraw your consent of us processing your personal data, but consent is not the only basis by which we may process your personal data as described in this privacy policy.

Withdrawal(s) of consent may not be absolute (e.g., will be decided at our sole discretion if applicable laws do not apply to you, if not obligated by law, or for change of control or similar events as described in this privacy policy unless we deem that the third party materially changes how it uses or shares your personal information in a manner that is materially inconsistent with our privacy policy at that time).

You may not use or interact with namecrowdfunding if we do not have your consent to process your personal data (e.g., after you withdraw consent) because namecrowdfunding and our services cannot fully operate or function for you without the processes described in this privacy policy. Furthermore, allowing you to use our services without collecting personal data about you could significantly impede our ability to combat fraud, abuse, and other illegal activities.

Access and data portability
We provide you with direct access to a secure account area with multiple pages to view and manage your personal information that you have provided us for your account.

Additionally, you may contact us to request access to your personal information, free of charge and when technically feasible, including the purposes for which it is used, what we have done with it, and what we are currently doing with it, such as what kind of information about you we have shared (if any) with third parties for their direct marketing purposes, along with the names and addresses of those third parties and examples of the products or services they have marketed if it is reasonably unclear from their names and addresses.

You may also request an electronic copy of your personal data that is attached to your account in a structured, commonly-used, and machine-readable format, free of charge, which can be provided to a different service. However, there may be certain information (e.g., technical metadata) that we will not share with you (e.g., for security reasons or when technically infeasible).

Data care and management
We retain and/or process certain information (e.g., remnant data and IP addresses) for long periods of time (e.g., for research, statistical analysis, journalism, abuse prevention, and as required by law) or as long as necessary for the essential purposes described in this privacy policy (e.g., sometimes, indefinitely for security purposes or reasons of public interest) because it is vital to the safety and operation of our services (e.g., our marketplace), and it is a legitimate and important use of information to detect and prevent misuse (e.g., fraud and other illegal activities) of our services. We make a substantial effort to keep this information secure, protected, and only used as it is necessary or permitted for the entire retention period.

You may contact us to request that we complete or correct your personal information that we hold for you, free of charge, if you are unable to change it yourself and you believe it is incomplete or inaccurate.

You may contact us at any time and free of charge about our processing of your personal data (e.g., to ask a question, request that it be restricted, object to it, request cancellation and erasure, lodge a complaint, or request assistance). Each request must be clear, specific, and technically feasible.

Data processing
When you use or interact with namecrowdfunding or our services, we process your information (e.g., collect, store, display, and share) as described in this privacy policy. We may rely on a number of legal bases in order to process your personal data, such as when:

you have given consent to it for one or more specific purposes, which you may contact us to revoke at any time;
it is necessary for the performance of contractual obligations in our Terms of Service, this privacy policy, or in order to provide our services to you, including to operate, improve and support, and/or protect our services as described in this privacy policy;
it is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation or to defend legal claims;
it is necessary in order to protect the public interest or to protect the vital interests of you or others;
it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, such as misuse and fraud prevention, network and information security, direct marketing and promotion of our services, research and development, and indicating possible criminal acts or threats to public security;
or you have expressly made information public.
You must not share special categories of your personal data (“sensitive data”) with or on namecrowdfunding (a public forum by trade), such as the kind of personal data that reveals your racial or ethnic origin, philosophical or religious beliefs, genetic or biometric data, political opinions, or data concerning your sexual orientation, sex life, or health, unless you understand and agree that by doing so:

you have obviously made that sensitive data of yours public, which means it could be viewed by and transmitted to a third country without an adequate level of protection;
and you have given explicit consent to us to process that sensitive data of yours for the purposes described in this privacy policy.
Security and data transfers
We are committed to protecting your personal data to the best of our ability, but we need your help. We encourage you to take the necessary steps to help keep your personal information safe, such as choosing a strong password, not sharing your password with others, and always logging out of namecrowdfunding on computers that may be accessed by someone else.

We take reasonable measures to secure your personal data that we collect and safeguard it from theft, loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Compliance with the principles of data protection by design and by default are important to us, and we are committed to conducting Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) in the initial stages of new projects and processes involving personal data.

We keep your personal data in a safe environment by using reputable service providers that have matching commitments to security and offer an adequate level of data protection to store, use, and transfer your personal data as described in this privacy policy.

We transfer data from the location where it is submitted to data centers in the United States (limited to the Privacy Shield framework) and Canada (commercial organizations) on the basis of adequacy, as they have been recognized as providing adequate protection and appropriate safeguards.

We make every effort to ensure that information is secure during network transit no matter your location. We require that connections to our services use industry-standard encryption (e.g., TLSv1.2 or TLSv1.3), and we have requested that modern browsers connect to our services exclusively through HTTPS by way of HSTS preloading (i.e., using https://crowddomains.com/ rather than https://crowddomains.com/). In the event that we identify a data breach that involves your personal information, we will notify you within 72 hours of discovery.

Links
While using namecrowdfunding or interacting with us, you may be linked to other websites and other services (third parties) that have their own policies (e.g., privacy policy), practices, and procedures that we do not have any control over. We are not responsible for the protection or privacy of information that you provide to a third party under any circumstances.

Changes and notices
We may change our privacy policy from time to time, and we will notify you when we do by updating the “Last revised” date at the top of this privacy policy. We will make an effort to provide you with reasonable notice of any changes to this privacy policy that, at our sole discretion, materially change how we process your personal data, such as sending you a website alert, adding a notice to the front page of our services, or sending a message to the email address on your account.

You consent to our updated privacy policy if you continue to use our services after the changes go into effect, as indicated by the effective date at the top of this privacy policy. You may also be asked for your explicit consent through a manual action such as checking an unticked checkbox.

You may contact us to request a previous version of our privacy policy.

Acceptance and consent
You must not use our services if you cannot or do not accept and consent to this privacy policy. By continuing to use our services, you are signifying that you legally can and do accept this privacy policy and consent to us processing your personal data, including your personal information. Your continued use of our services is considered an acceptance of our updated privacy policy.

At registration, we require acceptance of this privacy policy, which includes your explicit consent to our processing of your personal data as described in this privacy policy. If you cannot or do not accept this privacy policy, then you must not register or use an account.

You must not provide your personal information to us if you are under the age of 13 years, or the equivalent age in your jurisdiction (e.g., you must be aged at least 16 years in many locations), whichever is greater, unless consent is given or authorized by your holder of parental responsibility. Our services cannot operate securely without personal data; therefore, you cannot use our services if you are underage.

Contact Us
If you have any questions about our policies or inquiries about our data practices, please contact us at [email protected] anytime.