Last updated: January 4, 2011

Your privacy is important to us, so we’ve written a privacy policy that makes sense to everybody. Have a look, and if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us. We want you to enjoy Inkling with your friends and, at the same time, keep your personal information comfortably private.

So, what’s personal information? It’s anything about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, Facebook® or Twitter® account name, or phone number, that may not otherwise be publicly available or that publicly identifies you.

We collect some personal information about you when you use this website or Inkling software or when you contact us (whether for support help, to enter a promotion we may be conducting or for other reasons). We know your name, your university, your e-mail address and sometimes other sensitive info. If you elect to share information you post on third party websites, like Facebook®, with us, we may also collect that information as well. We use the information we collect from you to do all sorts of things within Inkling – like when you share your notes with friends or make your notes available to others for sharing.

Also, for purchases made through the Inkling Store, Inkling uses a third-party intermediary to manage credit card processing, and your credit card information is transmitted to them directly. Your full credit card number is never transmitted to or viewed by anyone at Inkling (however, we are given and may print a portion of your credit card information on your receipt to let you know what credit card you used to make a purchase). Except to process your credit card information for current or future purchases through the Inkling Store, this intermediary is not permitted to store, retain, or use your billing information.

There’s some other information we’ll be recording that you didn’t type in yourself. For example, we’ll record your IP address, some information about which devices you’re using, which version of Inkling you’re running and other technical data associated with your use of Inkling software or the Inkling website. This information isn’t usually personal to you, but we associate it with your name, so it’s about you nonetheless.

We may also gather some information about what you’re doing when you use Inkling so we can help you better learn something. For example, we might know that you didn’t look at a specific movie, and when you’re getting related questions wrong, suggest that you go view it. This information is stored by the device you’re using, such as an iPad®, and shared with our servers so that you can also benefit from that data on other devices you’re using. This information is never shared with anyone else unless it’s anonymized and aggregated with the information of other users, so nobody else will ever know what you’ve been doing - not even your professor.  Also, our software gives you the ability to opt-out of this type of data collection, and then we’ll stop doing so.

We also sometimes use "cookies" and obtain certain types of information when your web browser accesses inkling.com or advertisements and other content served by or for us. (To learn more about cookies, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.) For example, we use cookies to save items to your cart that you may have added during a previous visit to our website. We may also use cookies to determine if you’ve arrived at inkling.com via one of our affiliate partners or advertising partners and made a purchase. This allows us to know when to pay our affiliate or advertising partners a referral fee.

Also, we don’t knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If we learn that we have collected the personal information of a child under 13, we will take steps to delete the information as soon as possible.

Your first name, last initial, educational institution, user type (for example, student or professor), and profile photo are visible to others in a search directory within the Inkling App. For example, Matt MacInnis, a student at Harvard, would be “Matt M. at Harvard.” People can find you using your e-mail address. By default your notes and highlights are accessible by other users, but you’re offered the choice to disable this type of sharing by making your notes and highlights private.

Of course, we won’t sell or share your personal information with any third parties without your explicit permission. (Or a valid court order.) We will probably use your information to contact you about your account with us and to let you know of changes to our service. We will use your information to let you know about and to administer promotions or to offer you some products from time to time. (For example, we might offer you a review kit for a title you already own.) But we won’t let third parties who are not acting on our behalf market to you, and we’ll always let you manage your communication preferences with us. And we’ll leave you alone the minute you ask us to. Simply unsubscribe here if you do not wish to receive these types of communications from us.

Even our own employees are restricted from seeing your personal data. If they’ve got a legitimate reason to see it in the course of their jobs, they may get access. Otherwise, we’ve got electronic and physical safeguards to protect it.

And if we ever make any changes to this policy, we’ll notify you.

Thanks for using Inkling.