Privacy Policy
25-August-2023 - Printable Version
Consent
By using our website or services, you consent to the practices described in this policy.
What We Collect
Website
When you visit our website (whether the members-only pages or the publicly available pages), we use some typical tools to understand our users' use of our site and services as well as to improve our services. As of the date of this privacy policy, our analytics provider is Fathom Analytics. You can review its privacy policy here and its compliance page here to understand its privacy practices. If you block Fathom Analytics, you will still be able to access the public or members-only portions of the site. But if you block all cookies, you will not be able to access the members' portion of the site.
Our website also uses services from Font Awesome, Google Fonts, and Cloudflare. These services may set cookies. You can review their respective privacy policies here, here, and here.
We use Disqus for comments. Disqus' privacy policy is here.
For any of our third-party service providers, you need to review their privacy policies to understand how your data is handled. The third-party service providers listed in this policy are current as of the date of this policy. Taproot will endeavor to update users when it changes service providers, but we cannot guarantee that our update will be contemporaneous.
We offer the option to sign up for one or more email newsletters. When you sign up to receive any of our newsletters, we collect the personal information that you provide in the sign-up process, such as your first and last name and email address. Our newsletters are managed by Mailchimp, which has a privacy policy here.
Members
When you sign up as a member of Taproot, we collect the personal information that you provide in the sign-up process, such as your first and last name, email address, physical address, and payment information. We use application programming interfaces (APIs) to transmit your non-payment related data to other third-party service providers including Auth0, Stripe, Mailchimp, and Postmark. You can review their respective privacy policies here, here, here, and here.
If you write or contribute to articles, we will ask if you want your name made public as the author or contributor. So, if you choose to make it public, it will be. And any personal information you include in your posts, will of course be public. Whatever content you contribute is stored by Taproot.
Members can submit questions, comments, and votes, and in the future we may expand the features available. In each case, your activity is stored by Taproot and you may be identified publicly as the contributor. For example, if you post a question, we give you the option to be acknowledged publicly as the question asker.
Use
We use your personal information for internal purposes only, such as to provide you with access to the members-only site, to send out email newsletters, and to otherwise communicate with you about Taproot. For example, if you register as a member, we will send you an email acknowledging your membership.
Sometimes, we may access a third-party service provider, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, to enhance your experience, such as using these providers to authenticate your identity for signing in to Taproot, with your permission and credentials that you have provided to us. You can remove those credentials and remove our access to those services. In such cases, your use of those services will be governed by their privacy policies and terms of service, and we cannot make a guarantee about what information they gather from use of their services.
We also use cookies (a small text file placed on your computer to identify your computer and browser) and Web beacons (a file placed on a website that monitors usage) to improve the experience of our site. Our service provider Fathom Analytics is an example of this. You can reset your Web browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. If you refuse all cookies, you will not be able to log into the members only portion of the site since cookies are used for authentication.
Purposes
In addition to the purposes above, we may use personal data to power other special features, such as micro-coverage of elections.
We Share With Whom
We also contract with third-party service providers to host our servers and databases and to provide other services to us. We use Microsoft Azure, which is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. You can review the Azure privacy policy here.
We require our service providers to agree not to access or use any information or data they may have access to while providing services to Taproot other than as specified by us.
If you make a payment (such as when becoming a member), we use a payment processor to process your payment. In order to do that, the processor receives the payment info you provide. Our current processor is Stripe. You can review the Stripe privacy policy here.
We use Zapier to help us automate our bookkeeping by transmitting your non-payment related data from Stripe to Intuit. This data is stored for up to 30 days. You can review Zapier's privacy policy here and details about its data privacy approach here. You can review Intuit's privacy policy here.
Do Not Track
Taproot does not track your web activity after you leave our site.
Security
We try our best to provide you with leading security practices, like using strong passwords to manage our network, enabling multi-factor authentication wherever possible, limiting admin access to our network to a limited number of humans, and encrypting all requests via a secure connection (HTTPS). Indeed, if you attempt to access our site using http, you will be redirected to an https address. However, no data transmission on the Internet or on a network is 100% secure, so we cannot make a guarantee. Take care to manage access to the computers and devices where you are logged in to our application.
We use https on our site exclusively, which means all your transmissions of data are encrypted in transit. We also currently use Okta's Auth0 to authenticate users. You can review Okta's privacy policy here.
What Data Is Sent Outside Canada and Where
To use third party service providers, we send your data outside of Canada, often to the United States. These service providers may additionally transmit data further.
Government Requests
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this policy, we may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, or legal request or to protect the safety, property, or rights of Taproot or others. However, nothing in this policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party or government request to disclose your information.
Data Retention
Taproot retains data only for so long as needed for the uses we identify above.
Data Access and Correction
You may review and correct for accuracy and completeness any data we are reasonably able to link to you based on a written request you make to us. You may contact us as detailed below. We charge an administrative fee to cover costs of any requests, which payment must be made in advance.
Change of Control
If Taproot is ever involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. The promises in this policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity, including your right to delete your account entirely from our databases and all of the data associated with it from within the application. Because many of our service providers are in the US so may continue to store your data, your contributions to the service may still appear but will be anonymized.
Changes and Contact Information
From time-to-time, we need to make changes to our Privacy Policy to account for new features or for other reasons. When such changes occur, you are able to access old versions as well as view the new document on our site. By continuing to use our service, you are consenting to the revised policy. If you have inquiries concerns about our policy, please forward them to our Privacy Officer and we'll try our best to respond promptly. We have appointed Mack Male as our Privacy Officer.
Mack Male
Taproot Publishing Inc.
10180 104 Street
#1201
Edmonton, AB
T5J 1A7