Privacy Policy

SmartyCard Privacy Policy

Welcome to the SmartyCard Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy was last updated on or about August 5, 2009.

SmartyCard is committed to providing a fun and safe website and Service for people of all ages. We are dedicated to safeguarding all personal information collected online and to helping our visitors learn how to exercise control over personal information while on this site. We do not ask children to disclose personally identifiable information and we take steps to prevent children from providing such information. As described below, we do collect and use personally identifiable information of adults.

Privacy is very important to us. As a website directed to children, many of whom may be younger than 13, this site and our privacy practices are governed by a law known as COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) for our interaction with children. For more information about COPPA, visit the Federal Trade Commission's FAQ at http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm. To better protect your privacy, and to help ensure a rewarding online experience for all visitors, we provide this Privacy Policy summarizing our online information practices and explaining the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used.

This Privacy Policy and the certification seal shown on this page confirm that our website submits to the terms of ESRB's Privacy Online Program. ESRB's Privacy Online Program is designed to ensure that a website's information disclosure practices are responsible and appropriate. To protect your privacy, we have voluntarily undertaken this privacy initiative and all of our websites have been reviewed and certified by ESRB Privacy Online to meet established online information collection and use practices. As part of this privacy program, we are subject to frequent audits of our websites and other enforcement and accountability mechanisms administered independently by ESRB.

I. Definitions

First, we need to define a few terms so that you can better understand this Privacy Policy.

"Child" or "Children" - COPPA applies to children under the age of thirteen (13), however for our site these rules are applied to all registered Child Account members.

"Parent" - This also includes legal guardians, whether or not a Child lives with them. For our site, no member under the age of eighteen (18) may register as a Parent.

"Personally Identifiable Information" or "PII" - this is information that can be traced directly back to and identifies an individual. PII includes first and last names, e-mail addresses, home addresses, telephone numbers, and Instant Messaging (IM) screen names when associated with a particular messaging service (e.g., AIM).

"Site" means the SmartyCard website (http://www.smartycard.com) and all related web pages.

"Service" means all of the activities and functionalities we offer through our Site. Service refers to the product that we provide to you.

"SmartyCard" is a trademark and tradename of Gazillion, Inc. Contact information for SmartyCard and Gazillion can be found below.

II. Scope of This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy applies only to PII collected on SmartyCard's Service where this Privacy Policy is posted (the "Site") and does not apply to any other information collected by SmartyCard and its affiliated entities through any other means. SmartyCard and its affiliated entities are collectively referred to in this Privacy Policy as "SmartyCard," "we," "us," "Service" or the "Site." It is important for you to understand this because SmartyCard allows you to select, through our Site as a part of our Service, "Rewards" that may require you to leave the SmartyCard website to visit one of our partner sites. When you click on one of those links, you leave the SmartyCard site, at which point our Privacy Policy no longer applies. We provide a notice warning our users when they are leaving our Site. We encourage you to review the Privacy Policies of any site you link to from SmartyCard.

III. The Information We Collect

There are two types of accounts on SmartyCard. "Child Accounts" are accounts that a Child or a Parent can set up that consist only of a first name, screen name (which may not be an identifiable Instant Messaging (IM) screen name), password, grade level and a parent e-mail address. We ask for a parent email address in order to provide notice to the Parent that his or her child would like to participate in our Site activities.

We do not ask children to disclose more information than is necessary for them to participate in a particular activity. We currently do not knowingly collect full names and e-mail addresses from Children, and we have safeguards in place to prevent children from providing us with PII. For some activities, such as online polls, leaderboards, or surveys, we may ask visitors to provide information that is not personally identifiable. This might include first name only, city or state of residence, age, gender, educational grade level, or a favorite color. If in the future it comes necessary to collect PII in order to participate in a particular activity, we will inform parents prior to so collecting and provide an opt-out mechanism (which may then preclude a child from participating in the particular activity).

"Parent Accounts" are accounts set up by Parents to link to their children's accounts. While we do not collect PII from children, we request PII from Parents. The PII that we collect from Parents include a full name, e-mail address, phone number and shipping address. We will also collect and store credit card and billing information if you make a purchase or choose to provide the information to us. It is necessary to collect PII from Parents, as we need to be able to verify that a Parent authorized the use of our Service for their children, and we require PII in order to provide fundamental aspects of our Service. Once a Parent Account has been linked to a Child Account we do not allow the two accounts to be separated (disassociated) except in instances where a parent can show valid cause for disassociation, based on compelling reasons, including, but not limited to, court-ordered restrictions on parent communications with child.

For other activities, such as sending an electronic postcard or e-mail to invite a friend to join SmartyCard, to request account funding from an approved list of adults provided by the Parent Account, or to send a SmartyCard as a gift via e-mail, we may also ask for personal information about other people. This is usually limited to a first name and e-mail address, and the use of this information by us will be limited to the specific activity the information was provided for. At the request of the e-mail address account holder, we will place the e-mail on an internal "blacklist" and prevent future communications per CAN-SPAM.

For specific requests we receive from visitors, e-mail addresses are collected and used only in connection with the specific request. For example, for sweepstakes and contests, e-mail addresses are collected for the purpose of entering the online sweepstakes or contest on a one-time basis and are used to notify winners of the sweepstakes or contest by e-mail. Winners will be required to return a completed prize acceptance form contained in the notification e-mail by facsimile or U.S. mail within a designated time period (along with the signature of a parent or legal guardian for all minors).

When visitors use our Service, we also may collect some non-personally identifiable information such as the type of computer operating system you are using (e.g., Windows or Mac OS), the type of browser you are using (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox), the domain name of the Internet service provider (e.g., Comcast, Earthlink), your activities while visiting and utilizing our Services.

IV. How We Use the Information

We use PII for internal and Service-related purposes only. We require PII to enable parents to approve their child's account, to mail out physical goods to a shipping address, to process payment information, and to allow people to enter our online contests or sweepstakes or to subscribe to an online newsletter or other various marketing alerts or notifications.

We use PII collected during Account registration to send commercial e-mails (with a predominantly marketing focus) regarding special offers, new partners, or other site notifications and reminders. We will not send commercial e-mails to customers who choose to opt-out. Every commercial e-mail we send out includes instructions for opting out of our mailing list.

Parents who have active SmartyCard accounts may still receive business-related (transactional) e-mails, such as payment receipts, disbursement notifications and account or site changes, even if they opt-out of marketing e-mails. Please see section IX of our Privacy Policy if you would like to have your PII or your child's information removed completely from our system.

Credit card information is used only for payment processing and fraud prevention. Credit card information and other sensitive personal information required to process a purchase is not used for any other purpose by our financial services providers or us and will not be kept longer than necessary for providing the services offered by us.

We do not use PII we obtain through a specific request, such as Beta notification, gift notification, newsletters, marketing notifications or contests for anything not in connection with that specific request, unless that PII is already connected to an existing customer account.

We never sell, rent, or otherwise share our visitors' personal information with third parties without appropriate consent. Sometimes, we use agents or contractors to provide services to our visitors, such as helping us conduct a sweepstakes, sending prizes to winners, shipping rewards, or providing customer service related to activities on the Site, such as for billing and some customer support functions. In these cases, we require the agent or contractor to keep the PII confidential and to use it only for the specific services they are performing. We sometimes use non-personally identifiable information that we collect to improve the design and content of our Site or services, and to improve our visitors' experience on the Site. We also may aggregate this information to analyze site usage, as well as to offer products, programs, or services.

We may disclose PII in response to legal process, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena. We also may disclose PII in response to a law enforcement agency's request, or where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service, to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Service and applicable laws, or as otherwise required or permitted by law or consistent with legal requirements. In addition, we may transfer PII about you if we or one of our business units are acquired by, sold to, or merged with another company.

We reserve the right to transfer all PII in our system in the event that SmartyCard or its parent company Gazillion, Inc., is sold, merged or otherwise assigned such that control rests with a different entity. We will not use or transfer PII in ways that are materially different from the ones described above without also providing parental notification of such practices and obtaining consent for any materially different uses.

V. Cookies and Web Beacons

Our Site uses a software technology called "cookies." Cookies are small text files that we place in visitors' computer browsers to store their preferences. Cookies themselves do not contain any PII. Although cookies could enable us to relate a visitor's use of our Site to PII that the visitor has provided, such as an e-mail address, we do not use cookies for this purpose with one exception: for some activities, we use session cookies to assist with our compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by ensuring that visitors under the age of 13 are not asked to provide PII. We do use cookies to determine how many visitors we have and how often they visit various sections of our Site.

"Web beacons" are small pieces of code placed on a web page to monitor the behavior and collect data about the visitors viewing a web page. For example, web beacons can be used to count the users who visit a web page or to deliver a cookie to the browser of a visitor viewing that page. We may use web beacons on our Site from time to time for this purpose.

VI. What Are Internet Protocol Addresses?

An Internet protocol ("IP") address is the unique number assigned to your server or Internet Service Provider ("ISP"). SmartyCard may track such IP addresses for system administration, to report aggregate information, site tracking, or to prevent our servers from being abused.

VII. Collection of Information by Third-Party Sites and Sponsors

Our Site contains links to other Web sites, including those of our partners and sponsors, whose information practices may be different from ours. Sometimes these third party websites might conduct contests or sweepstakes that are promoted on our Site and visitors are directed away from our Site in order to participate in such contests or sweepstakes. Visitors should consult those other third party websites' privacy notices, since those websites are not covered by our Privacy Policy and may follow different procedures.

VIII. Security

We have taken steps to assure that all information collected will remain secure and in its original form, i.e. free from any alteration. As such, access to all personal information is strictly controlled. We have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures in an effort to safeguard and help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data security, and correctly use the information we collect online.

We are particularly sensitive to visitors' security concerns regarding the use of credit cards to purchase a SmartyCard or "fund" a SmartyCard account. For orders placed on our Site, we use a technology that automatically encrypts credit card data while information is being transmitted over the Internet, provided that the visitor's browser supports the Secure Socket Layer protocol (SSL).

To verify the security of your PC's web connection at our Service, check the lower left corner of your browser window after accessing the server. If you see an unbroken or a closed lock, then SSL is active and the server is secure. You may also check by looking at the URL line of your browser. When accessing a secure server, the Site address will change from "http" to "https".

IX. What choices you have regarding the collection, use, and distribution of your personal information or that of your linked child

Parents, if for any reason you are concerned with the way we are using your personal information, or would like to change the way we use it, please send a letter or postcard to our SmartyCard Privacy Manager at the mailing address provided below and indicate which of the following you would like to do:

access PII that our Site has collected online from your child,
correct factual errors in such information,
request to have this information deleted, or
request that we no longer collect or maintain such information.

You may also send an e-mail to Privacy@SmartyCard.com with the subject field: "Collection of Personal Information."

Please be sure to include your e-mail address and a telephone number where we can reach you. To protect your child's privacy and security, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting you access to the personal information that we collect and maintain about your child.

Your California Privacy Rights
If you are a California resident, California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits you to request and obtain from us once a year, free of charge, information about the personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes in the preceding calendar year. If applicable, this information would include a list of the categories of personal information that was shared and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you do not want your name and contact information to be shared with any company or organization, you may notify us at any time by writing to us at the email and or regular mail address below.

X. Contact Us

If you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding our Privacy Policy and/or practices, or if you would like to correct or review your personal information, please contact us at the following e-mail address, mailing address and telephone number:

Email: Privacy@SmartyCard.com

Mailing Address (Postcards only, please):
Privacy Manager - SmartyCard
135 W 25TH AVE
PO BOX 6891
SAN MATEO, CA 94403

Gazillion, Inc. is a licensee of the ESRB's Privacy Online Program. If you believe that we have not responded to your inquiry or that your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, please contact the ESRB at http://www.esrb.org/privacy/contact.jsp.

ESRB
Attn.: Privacy Online Program
317 Madison Avenue, 22nd Floor
New York, NY 10017
privacy@esrb.org

XI. Updates & Effective Date

We reserve the right to change the privacy policy at our sole discretion. We will notify you about material changes in the way we treat personally identifiable information by placing an update on our Site. We will also notify all Parent Account holders via an e-mail to the e-mail address we have on file when there has been a material change to this Privacy Policy, and if necessary, give you additional choices regarding such change. We encourage you to periodically check back and review this Privacy Policy so that you always will know what information we collect, how we use it, and to whom we disclose it.

XII. A Final Note to Parents

We recognize a special obligation to protect personal information about young children. We urge parents to instruct their children to never give out their real names, addresses, or phone numbers without permission. Children should talk with their parents about using this Site before setting up a Child Account.

XIII. Agreement

By using this Website, you signify your assent to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please do not use this site. This Privacy Policy may change from time to time, so please check back periodically to ensure that you are aware of any changes. Your continued use of the SmartyCard website will signify your acceptance of these changes.

XIV. Kids' Privacy Policy

Introduction
Collection, Use, and Disclosure of Information
Electronic Postcards
Technical Methods
Sweepstakes and Contests
Parental Consent
Links to Other Sites
Amendments to this Policy

1. Introduction

Building on our general Privacy Policy, SmartyCard recognizes the need to provide additional privacy protections when children under the age of 13 visit the SmartyCard Websites. Our Kids' Privacy Policy describes how we collect and use personal information collected online from children. It also describes how parents can review the personal information that we have collected.

For your convenience, the Kids' Privacy Policy uses terms that are defined in our general Privacy Policy, shown above. A link to our privacy policies is also posted at the bottom of each SmartyCard Website.

2. Collection, Use, and Disclosure of Information

We allow children to surf the SmartyCard Websites, look at content, and play some games without giving us any personally identifiable information.

During registration for the SmartyCard Websites, SmartyCard requests and collects from children their first name, grade level, a screen name, a password and a parent's e-mail address. We collect a parent's e-mail address to let parents know that their child has signed up with the SmartyCard Websites, to verify their consent and send future notices about their child's account.

Please note that any sites directed at children under 13 are prohibited by law from conditioning a child's participation in an online activity on the child's providing more personal information than is reasonably necessary.

SmartyCard does not sell, market, trade, or otherwise distribute personally identifiable information to third parties outside of our company. We will not use any of the information we collect from any registrant of the SmartyCard Websites for any purpose other than to access the website, e-mailings as described above and for the purposes of contacting the parent. Situations in which we may share a child's personal information with third parties would include those in which it is reasonably necessary to: protect the security of integrity of the SmartyCard Websites; to take precautions against liability; to respond to judicial process; or to the extent permitted under provisions of law, to provide information to law enforcement agencies, or for an investigation related to public safety.

For additional information about how SmartyCard safeguards the personal information of its members please see our general Privacy Policy above.

3. Electronic Postcards

All electronic postcards accessible on the SmartyCard Websites request that users furnish an e-mail address. This is necessary to send the postcards electronically. The e-mail addresses are deleted from our servers and not distributed to third parties or used for any other purposes than sending the postcards.

4. Technical Methods

If a parent allows their child to register with the SmartyCard Websites and for us to collect personal information about their child, we may link certain Technical Methods to that personal information. These Technical Methods allow us to operate the SmartyCard Websites more effectively, make them more interesting and useful to you and are beneficial for various purposes related to our business. We do not however collect any additional personally identifiable information via these Technical Methods. For further information about the particular Technical Methods used on the SmartyCard Websites, please see our general Privacy Policy under the sub-headings: "V. Cookies and Web Beacons" and "VI. What are Internet Protocol Addresses."

5. Sweepstakes and Contests

If a child enrolls in a sweepstakes or contest, only enough information as is required to enroll in the sweepstakes or contest will be collected. After the drawing or contest is concluded, we will not retain any additional personally identifiable information collected beyond the information already provided at the time of registration for the SMARTYCARD Websites. If a child wins a sweepstakes or contest, we notify the parent at the parent's e-mail address provided to us during the registration process and request that the parent provide their postal address for purposes of delivering the prize. We may publish a winner's first name, first initial of last name, city, and state of residence on the SMARTYCARD Websites.

6. Parental Consent

We require that parents give us express permission for their child to register with the SmartyCard Websites. Additionally, at any time parents can refuse to permit us to collect further personal information from their child and can request that any personal information we have collected be deleted from our database. The parent will need to have their child's member name and password. If the password has been lost or forgotten, there are instructions on the SmartyCard Parent Account page explaining how to recover or set a new password for access. There are three methods for a parent to access, change, or delete the personally identifiable information that we have collected from their children:

Using the e-mail first sent to them by SmartyCard, a parent can click on the link provided to take them to the SmartyCard Parent Account page. Once linked to this page a parent will be able to log in to their child's account, review, change or delete any of their child's personal information, as well as update their child's password.
A parent can access their child's account information using the following link: https://www.smartycard.com/tp/login.html, which will direct them to the SmartyCard Parent Account page. Once linked to this page, a parent can log in to their child's account, review, change or delete any of their child's personal information, as well as update their child's password.
A parent can also visit www.SmartyCard.com. By clicking the link at the top of the home page entitled "For Parents" they will be provided with informative text. A link to the SmartyCard Parent Account page is provided under the subheading "Parent Account" By following the link, a parent will be able to use their information to review, change or delete any of their child's personal information as well as update their child's password.

7. Links to Other Sites

When children click on links from the SmartyCard Websites to other sites, we may open the other sites in a new browser window. We make every effort to only link the SmartyCard Websites to appropriate outside sites for children, and will advise a user when leaving the SmartyCard Websites. Unlike the SmartyCard Websites, however, these outside sites may collect personal information, which is outside of the control of SmartyCard.

8. Amendments to this Policy

We may amend our Kids' Privacy Policy at any time. We will provide parents notice by e-mail in the event of any material changes in the way we intend to collect, use, and/or share a child's personal information. Please note that, at all times, parents should keep their personal information updated and provide us with current e-mail addresses. SmartyCard will only apply material changes to the Kids' Privacy Policy in conformance with applicable law, including any applicable provisions of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that require parental consent.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this Kids' Privacy Policy or our information collection practices, please contact our Privacy Policy Administrator at:

Privacy Manager - SmartyCard
135 W 25TH AVE
PO BOX 6891
SAN MATEO, CA 94403.
Privacy@SmartyCard.com

You can also contact ESRB Privacy Online directly at http://www.esrb.org/privacy/contact.jsp or at:

ESRB Privacy Online
Attn.: Director, Privacy Online
317 Madison Avenue, 22nd Floor
New York, NY 10017
privacy@esrb.org

This Kid's Privacy Policy was last updated on August 5, 2009.

1.11.10774