Privacy Policy

Coonhound Central @ Coonhounds.Com and Hardlink Communications takes seriously the issue of safeguarding your privacy online. Please read the following to understand our views and practices regarding this matter, and how they pertain to you as you make full use of our publication. This statement discloses the privacy practices for our publication: "Coonhound Central" including:

1. What information this site gathers/tracks about you
2. What this site does with the information it gathers/tracks
3. With whom this site shares the information it gathers/tracks
4. This site's opt-out policy

Questions regarding these statements should be directed to the Coonhound Central's Editorial Staff at Support@Coonhounds.com

• Does Coonhound Central ask for personal information?
• How does Coonhound Central use any personal information it may gather?
• What about your advertisers or hosted merchants?
• Will Coonhound Central sell or disclose any of my personal information?
• Will Coonhound Central use any provided information for direct mailings?
• What about kids?
• Does Coonhound Central use cookies?
• Does Coonhound Central collect my "IP Address"?
• What is Coonhound Central's Opt-Out Policy?
• What else should I know about my privacy?

Answers


Does Coonhound Central ask for personal information?

In general you are not required to divulge any personal information in order to read the content on Coonhound Central (CC). However you may be asked for some information when accessing certain Coonhound Central's features as described below:

• CC Mailing Lists: When subscribing to a CC sponsored mailing list you will have to supply your email address in order to receive the Email. Lists of the subscribers and email addresses of the Email list are not sold or distributed by Coonhound Central.
• CC Bulletin Board System: You may be asked to supply a name, your email address and your POP3 host for the purpose of preventing abuse of our BBS system. This information is not used for any other purpose.
• CC Free Community Web Pages: You will be asked for detailed personal identifying information such as your name, address, phone number, email address, etc. CC gathers this information so we may identify the people who are posting web pages through our service, preventing abuse of this service and preventing illegal or detrimental activities. CC does not sell or disclose specific personal information about people who sign up for our pages.
• CC Contests or Sweepstakes: In order to enter any of Coonhound Central's contests or sweepstakes you will be required to enter certain personal identifying information such as your name, address and phone number and may be asked certain demographic information as well. In this instance the demographic information is separated from the identifying information. The necessary identifying information such as names and addresses may be supplied to the companies furnishing the prizes for these contests. The demographic information, without any specific personal identifiers, is used by Coonhound Central to develop summarized demographic information about our readership. Companies sponsoring contests or sweepstakes in direct partnership with Coonhound Central agree not to sell or distribute the information derived from that contest.
• CC Store Order Forms: When buying products from Coonhound Central's store you will have to enter personal identifying information and financial information such as credit card numbers. This is done via Coonhound Central's secure server. The information is used only to process your order and for no other purpose.
• CC Advertisers: Coonhound Central is an advertising supported commercial publication. A company may run ads on our publication and those ads may lead to company web site and/or product that company's order forms. Those sites, ads or order forms, whether hosted on our site or off of our site, may ask you for certain specific information. Coonhound Central has no control over what an outside company may do with the information that you supply them.
• Coonhound Central WORKS WITH A THIRD PARTY THAT SERVES ADS TO THIS SITE. TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HOW FLYCAST MANAGES THE PRIVACY OF INFORMATION IN CONJUNCTION WITH SERVING ADS ON THIS SITE, PLEASE GO TO: http://www.flycast.com/about_us/about-privacy.html
• Commercial Inquiries: Companies or individuals seeking information about advertising on Coonhound Central or entering a listing into our yellow pages database are asked to provide information about their business. The information collected is used by our marketing staff to respond to the inquiry. This information is not used outside of Coonhound Central

Coonhound Central's goal in collecting the limited personal information it does is to provide you, the user, with the best web experience possible and to prevent the abuse of our services.

If you place an order at a merchant site hosted by Coonhound Central or with a merchant advertising on Coonhound Central they may collect information from you, including your credit card and contact information. This information will be used by the merchant. Coonhound Central does not own these businesses and all transactions and use of any customer information are the sole responsibility of the merchant. For further information regarding the merchant's use of customer information, contact that business or merchant directly.

Will Coonhound Central disclose any of my personal information?

Coonhound Central will not disclose any of your personal information, except as described above, or when we believe in good faith that the law requires it, or to protect the rights or property of Coonhound Central.

Coonhound Central does disclose personal information in some limited circumstances, but this is specifically described to you when we collect the information, such as in a Terms of Service or Use Agreements, or in the rules or entry forms of sweepstakes or other promotions.

Coonhound Central may disclose aggregated user or demographic statistics (for example, 85% of our users are male) in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes.

If you make a purchase from a site hosted by Coonhound Central, or from a merchant advertising on Coonhound Central, the information obtained during your visit to those sites, and the information that you give such as your credit card number and contact information, is provided to the merchants. These merchants have separate privacy and data collection practices. Coonhound Central has no control, responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding the merchant, their sites or stores, and their privacy policies, contact them directly.

Will Coonhound Central use my information for direct mailings?

In general, Coonhound Central will not, however if you enter a contest or sweepstakes the contact information from your entry form may be provided to the sponsor of that contest. These contest sponsors may use it to mail you further information about their products or services, but they have agreed not to distribute or sell these lists. If you have signed up for Coonhound Central's mailing lists you will be sent that mail and may receive mail from other users of the list. If you sign up for Coonhound Central's advanced services, such as our free web pages, we may mail you information that is necessary to maintain your account. If we ever do collect information for direct mailings or to provide to others for direct mailings any such use will be disclosed on any form that we use to collect that information.

Naturally, the safety of children is very important to us. There is a law called "Children's Online Privacy Protection Act" (COPPA) of 1998. It specifies that any child under the age of 14 must have "verifiable parental consent" before collecting personal information on that child. This law is designed for child targeted websites, but could effect our site even though it is targeted at adults. We do not have a method of optaining "verifiable parental consent" and are forced to deny permission of any child under the age of 18 years to post, chat, or upload any data to our site. Children under the age of 18 are welcome to browse and read the site, but not post, chat or upload.

Does Coonhound Central use cookies?

Yes, Cookies may be used on Coonhound Central in various ways:

• At this time cookies are primarily used to control the delivery of various media including banner ads to our readers. These benign cookies are used to keep you from seeing the same rotating advertising over and over again. These cookies may be set when entering our site, a specific section or each page and should be erased when you have left our site.
• Coonhound Central does not use cookies to collect any personal identifying information about you or your computer except that it may attempt to determine your browser family, screen size and display information for purposes of showing you web pages in the best format possible.
• Cookies may be used in Coonhound Central's stores to help create and maintain a personalized shopping cart.
• Cookies and/or IP Addresses are also used to estimate our audience size and page traffic statistics. Each browser accessing Coonhound Central may be given a unique cookie, which is then used to determine repeat usage versus initial usage, and to help analyze traffic patterns.
• In the future Coonhound Central may use cookie-based technology to provide personalized services, to remember login information or to provide more advanced features.
• Advertisers or merchants, either on or off of our site may use cookie-based technology. We have no control over their use of cookies.
• Lastly, advertising networks that serve ads onto Coonhound Central may also use cookies.

Coonhound Central collects IP addresses for the purposes of system administration and to track and report readership and site performance statistics.

What is Coonhound Central's Opt-Out Policy?

Reading Coonhound Central and using our services is an entirely voluntary action. On any form where you are asked to submit any personal information that you are not comfortable submitting you may elect not to fill out the form and/or utilize the service. Where appropriate, we may also provide an Opt-Out or Opt-In option, or options, that let you elect how parts of the information you are providing is used. Any such option will be clearly indicated. We have no control over how our advertisers or sites linked to or hosted by Coonhound Central use information that they may collect, or their privacy policies.

Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily post or disclose personal information online - for example on message boards, through email, or in chat areas - that same information can be collected and used by others. In short, if you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages from other parties in return.

Furthermore, while we endeavor to take all reasonable precautions to protect your personal information, Coonhound Central cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

In addition, Coonhound Central's advertisers, merchants, partners, and third party Internet sites and services accessible through or linked to Coonhound Central or parties whom we inform you are collecting data in connection with sweepstakes, promotions, etc., have separate privacy and data collection practices, independent of us. Coonhound Central has no control over, or responsibility for or liability in regards to these independent policies or actions.

REMEMBER: You are solely responsible for protecting your personal information and the secrecy of your passwords and/or any account information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you're online. We will do the best we can to help you, but you have to take reasonable precautions and have reasonable expectations as well.

We do not have any control over sites that may advertise with us, or merchants that may have various forms of advertising, sites, or storefronts on our servers, or sites which may be linked to us. However, if you become aware of any privacy abuses by any of those merchants, sites or services please inform us so we can take any action we deem appropriate.