IT.COM

Privacy policy

Spaceship Spaceship

Last revised March 20, 2023 (effective date)

This privacy policy covers how and why NamePros (“NamePros.com”, “we”, “our”, or “us”) collects, protects, uses, and shares information about you when you (“your”, “yourself”, “user”, “visitor”, or “accessor”) access or use NamePros; 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 you placing a checkmark in an unticked “agreement” checkbox and submitting.

You may choose to create an account with us using one of your social media accounts that we support (e.g., Facebook or Twitter), in which case it would provide us with the required information to create your account on NamePros, 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 an image or providing your Gravatar email address), and specifying other profile information (e.g., your time zone and your parking email address).

Content and activity

We collect and store the information that you choose to produce on NamePros, such as when you react to content (e.g., a happy face or thumbs up), like content, compose messages in our editor (drafts), post in sections or on profile pages, use the chatroom, or send direct messages to other members, which can include comments, questions, answers, links, and uploaded photos (“content”).  

We also collect and store information when you perform certain actions on NamePros, such as bookmarking content, adding or removing points from content, editing content, reporting content, voting in a poll, viewing a page, following another member, or indicating you are online by interacting with NamePros.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.

Contact forms and communications

We ask you for the following required information (unless listed as optional)   and action when you submit a contact form on a parking page (“parking contact form” or “parking contact forms”):

  • Name
  • Email address  
  • Company name   (optional)
  • Telephone number   (optional)
  • Social media accounts (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn)   (optional)
  • Instant messaging accounts (e.g., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram)   (optional)
  • Your consent to us processing your personal data as described in this privacy policy,  which is stated on each parking contact form as  given by you continuing (e.g., when you press any button to submit the form).
    • Parking contact forms use various techniques (e.g., CAPTCHA technology) to deter and limit accidental, fraudulent, and automated submissions.

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 services (e.g., your name, email address, and IP address if you use our general contact form), send us an email (e.g., your 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., your name, username, and your URL on Facebook and Twitter), instant message us (e.g., your username and telephone number on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp),  and/or contact us on other websites.

Supplemental information

We may receive, collect, and store additional information about you from other sources, including public information from third parties (e.g., publicly-available databases, such as public records), social media platforms, third parties from whom we have purchased data, and other reasonable resources.

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 may be stored when you perform certain actions on our services, which includes when you: visit a parked domain name or web page, register for an account, submit contact forms (e.g., parking contact forms), manage your account details, write a direct 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 and maintain 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; 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);  and  other services as described in this privacy policy.

Domain name parking

We process (e.g., collect and use) your personal data to provide and operate our domain parking services, such as to connect the inquirer (e.g., the interested party, buyer, lead, prospect, or, analogously, pedestrian) of a parked domain name (“parking inquirer” or “parking inquirers”) with the present and future custodian (e.g., the registrant, owner, seller, broker, lister, agent, or, analogously, driver) of a parked domain name (“parking custodian” or “parking custodians”).

The exchange of your contact information through our services and email messages enables the parking inquirer and the parking custodian to communicate with each other, such as by way of email and telephone calls, about the parked domain name.

Cookies and browser storage

We, the service providers that 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 advertisement (“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, such as 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 personal data 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 direct message 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, provide insights to our users (e.g., about parked domain names), and to focus our efforts on changes that users may find more valuable.

Advertising

We, our advertisers, and the service providers that 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 and showing you news; newsletters; special offers; promotions; and other information, products, and services that may be of interest to you.

Supplemented data

Supplemental information may be combined with existing information that we already have about you for reasonable purposes,   including the detection and prevention of fraud; improvement of our records in terms of accuracy and completeness; assessment of your eligibility of community groups; evaluation of candidate qualifications for employment; to provide you with support (e.g., account recovery); to determine whether our terms and rules are being followed (e.g., you may not bid on your own auctions); identification of new customers; in the interest of Know Your Customer (KYC), such as additional email addresses, telephone numbers, and your domain names; and other purposes as described in this privacy policy.

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 that 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 NamePros. The majority of sections on NamePros are public for everyone, including members and visitors that are not logged in (guests, bots, and search engines) to see, and you should assume that all of your actions, activity, and content on NamePros 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 NamePros (e.g., a direct 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 NamePros that forbids it from being shared elsewhere on NamePros (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, such as your profile page, the news feed of your followers, on the right side of each page ("sidebar widgets"), the New Posts page, the Discover 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.

Parking contact forms and parking inquiries

We may share information about you through various channels (e.g. our services and email messages) with present and future parking custodians after you visit a parked domain name, including the information that you submit on parking contact forms (e.g., name and email address) and other information about you (e.g., about your visit or submission) that we deem relevant or helpful (e.g., the approximate location of an ISP that you use to submit the form) or as described in this privacy policy.

We may share information about you through various channels (e.g. our services and email messages) with parking inquirers when you use our domain (name) parking service, including your parking email address that you entered for inquiries from parking pages; your name; your NamePros member ID, avatar, and username; and other information about you that we deem relevant or helpful (e.g., your feedback score) or as described in this privacy policy.

Analytics and metrics

We may share certain information with users and/or advertisers that cannot reasonably be used to identify you, for example, aggregate statistics and summary metrics about the performance of content or ads on NamePros, such as the total number of views and clicks over a period of time, the number of people who saw a particular piece of content (e.g., an ad), and the demographics about the visitors that saw the content or ads on NamePros.

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, such as the page you saw their ad on, whether you clicked their ad, and your IP address.

Quantcast, one of the service providers that 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 personal data (e.g., IP address) where we believe it is necessary to protect NamePros, 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), such as 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 NamePros, but we have made them available to you because they may contain clauses that are of interest to you:

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 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., Apple Music, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, GIPHY, Imgur, Instagram, Liveleak, Pinterest, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube).

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 personal data 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, court orders, and legal disputes).

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 account details with a blank value, and if you like a post, then unlike it to remove your like), for example, on the following pages:

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 NamePros 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 direct message determines the permission on your activity and your content on NamePros.

You may also request to close your account.

Billing

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

Parking pages and related emails

Similar to exchanging email messages, details about you are part of submissions on parking contact forms and shared with email recipients (e.g., parking custodians and parking inquirers).

We do not have control over information shared with email recipients (e.g., parking custodians and parking inquirers) in email messages; you may contact them directly or contact their email providers (e.g., Gmail) about the information that you have shared with them. We cannot do this on your behalf.   Do not share information with them that you want to control (e.g., manage).

You may contact us to redact your personal information from our domain parking services for present and future parking custodians. This redaction cannot affect data about you, such as your personal information, that has already been sent in emails, as described in this privacy policy.

Notifications and direct marketing

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

You may adjust your Email options 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 (e.g., “Stop receiving these emails”) in any email messages 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 personal data on popular social networks and similar services (e.g., Twitter, 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 NamePros, 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 authenticate your request and 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 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 data in a manner that is materially inconsistent with our privacy policy at that time).

You may not use or interact with NamePros if we do not have your consent to process your personal data (e.g., after you withdraw consent) because NamePros 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 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 contact us to request an electronic copy of your personal information 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).

You are solely responsible for maintaining accurate records of the content that you create (e.g., posts in threads, comments on blog posts, profile posts, status updates, member feedback, and conversation messages) in which you include your personal information, as we have no technically-feasible way to know which user-generated content of yours that you have chosen to include your personal information.

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 NamePros or our services, we process (e.g., collect, store, display, and share) your personal data 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 must not share special categories of your personal data (“sensitive data”) with or on NamePros (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 NamePros 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://www.namepros.com/ rather than http://www.namepros.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 NamePros 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, such as 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

Requests that involve specific personal data must be authenticated. You may begin to authenticate your request by submitting it to NamePros Privacy Support. We may also need you to verify your identity before we can fully validate your request. This is for your protection and to protect your personal data from unauthorized access, manipulation, and deletion.

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

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