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We at Meedan, Inc. and Meedan Labs, Inc. are trying to help the world understand itself a bit better, in our services and in the ways we engage with our users. We’re creating our products and services with the hope that they might help create a more credible and inclusive web. To better do that, we need to collect some personal information and data from and about our users. This privacy policy clarifies the kinds of personal information we collect, what we use it for, and how you can exercise your rights and otherwise manage our use of your personal information.
We are so excited that you’re reading our Privacy Policy, and we think it’s great that you’re interested in our work and making the world a better place. Unfortunately, you cannot and must not use our services, create an account, or share personal information with us if you are under 18. If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 18 who you believe has submitted personal information to one of our services, please contact us immediately at privacy@meedan.com so we can remove the content and delete the account.
We store data on servers around the world, with Check data stored exclusively in Ireland. So, your information might reside on a server in another country, and that country might have laws that provide for different levels of data protection than where you live. Where applicable law, such as the EU’s GDPR, restricts the international transfer of personal data, our practice is to only transfer covered personal data where we have met legal standards for safeguarding the transferred data, such as under an adequacy decision or through use of Standard Contractual Clauses.
We collect information from and about users of our services directly from you when you provide it to us, as well as automatically when you use the services.
When you download, register with, or use our services, we may ask you to provide information that can identify you individually. This includes your name (whether actual or pseudonymous), email address, telephone number, and other personal or professional details which you may provide through our form fields, uploaded files, and any free-form text in your profile description, and any other identifier by which you may be contacted online or offline. We do this to build a community of collaborators, and your credentials may be an important part of that community.
We also collect information that is about you but does not individually identify you. This information includes:
One of the most important parts of the Meedan services is the collective production of knowledge. By engaging with other Meedan users through your content and verifications, you are contributing to a growing body of knowledge and information. As such, other Meedan users may be entitled to such information you provided even in the event you choose to delete your account or otherwise request deletion of your personal information.
We may also gather annotation and communications content, including but not limited to text, images, videos, or audio, you create on the services. It includes the metadata that describes when this content was submitted, people you may have collaborated with on the content, and various other types of data that help us contextualize this content. We will also gather information about the clients, projects, channels, topics, languages, or people whose content you choose to annotate.
We do not intentionally collect your sensitive personal information such as personal information specifying medical or health conditions, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership or information specifying about sexual preferences or practices.
When you download, access, and use the Meedan internet services, you are constantly sending information about your use to our servers, called “log data.” A partial listing of these types of data includes:
We collect this information to monitor, secure, and improve our services.
Much like our own communities, the Meedan services couldn’t operate without interacting with other services and products, such as Google. We may ask you for your permission to retrieve some information (such as email address, profile photo, or social graph) from a third party if you integrate with and/or authenticate through another service. When you authenticate through another service, we will never receive nor store your passwords.
If you use such a service, that service will have its own terms and privacy policies, and that service will not be covered by our policies. Additionally, these third parties may use tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use these services or any Meedan Check or any other Meedan services. The information they collect may be associated with your personal information or they may collect information, including personal information, about your online activities over time and across different websites, apps, and other online services websites. While we will never use your information to target content or advertisements, these third-parties may use this information to target content toward you. Although we wish we could get everyone onboard with our efforts, we do not control these third parties’ tracking technologies or how they may be used.
We collect personally identifying data and information for a few reasons. First and foremost, we collect data to provide you with services. We also may use this data to improve the quality, security, and reliability of our services, respond to your questions and communicate with you about our services, and prevent misuse of our services.
Personal information like your name and credentials can help establish validity and reliability of your verifications on Check. We collect your name and login credentials to verify your identity and validate your Check account. We also collect technical data from your device (such as operating system and browser type) to ensure our apps work properly and to guide our platform compatibility decisions.
We are committed to sharply limiting the disclosure of personal information, and are responsible for ensuring that the onward transfer of your personal information to third parties is consistent with legal requirements. We do not share personal information with advertisers, and we do not sell personal information in any circumstances. However, there may be instances when we disclose your data. These include:
When we transfer your information to third-parties, such as our service providers, we use contracts that limit the use of your personal information and provide us rights to take steps to remediate unauthorized use of personal information.
We and our service providers may use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies for the purpose of gathering information and analytics on the use of our services, securing our services, improving the usability of our services, and other legitimate business interests. Cookies are small text files sent by a server to your app or web browser and stored locally on your device, which allow the server to uniquely identify you.
While some cookies that we use are necessary for our services and website to function, others are optional. You can use the cookie consent management tool on our website to view all the cookies that we place and manage your cookie preferences at any time. You can also set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. If you disable or refuse cookies or block the use of other tracking technologies, some parts of the services may then be inaccessible or not function properly.
Your browser may offer you a "Do Not Track" option, which allows you to signal to operators of websites and web applications and services (including behavioral advertising services) that you do not wish such operators to track certain of your online activities over time and across different websites. Our services do not support Do Not Track requests at this time.
You may have certain rights to your personal information provided by law, such as those provided by the EU’s GDPR. Even if local law does not provide you privacy rights, we provide the following privacy rights to anyone whose personal information we have collected:
You can review and change your personal information by logging into the Meedan services and visiting your account profile page. For other privacy requests, please email us at privacy@meedan.com.
Please note that we provide the rights above subject to certain exceptions as provided by law or our own policies. If we're unable to process a privacy request because of one of these exceptions, we will let you know in our response to your request. Please note, in particular, that the co-creation of public knowledge is a core element of our services. Because of that, your public-facing inputs into the Meedan services, such as any translations or verifications you provide, will generally remain on the site despite any deletion request. These public-facing inputs may also have been copied or stored by other Meedan users or the general public. If you believe that you are endangered by a contribution you have made to our site, you should contact us immediately, and we will evaluate the situation to determine if takedown is necessary.
We hope you’ve noticed by now that we take your safety and security in using our products very seriously. We are committed to ensuring the integrity and security of your personal information that you share with us when using our services, but we want to be realistic about the vastly complicated, hackable, and significantly flawed digital ecosystem of the Internet at both a systems and governance level. We cannot make your data totally secure. However, we try to do our best to secure your data.
We’ve seen recently and throughout history occasions of sovereign governments (and corporate actors alike), those whose laws and rules we must abide by, surveilling, persecuting, and imprisoning people simply for speaking their truth. If you do want to use our services to speak truth to power (and we hope you do!), or even just use lots of Arabic and Chinese keywords that might land you on a government surveillance list, we cannot prevent your data from being collected by those agencies. We hope you take this risk seriously and educate yourself on the risks, but even then, total security is never possible.
Still, some of the security is also up to you – make sure you use a strong, secure password, and don’t share it with others! Be careful posting personal identifying information in our services, as well – data you share and post can become publicly viewable.
Though we cannot promise security, we have put into place some mechanisms to maintain your data security, to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. We employ robust security measures, and undergo regular third-party penetration testing and audits to ensure the protection of your data. We encrypt your account content when stored on our servers, and use OAuth for authentication and HTTPS to encrypt the data between you and our servers. Our log data may be stored indefinitely, however, we take appropriate security precautions to protect the data in those logs. In the event that we experience a data breach, we will follow proper procedures to notify the appropriate authorities, as well as reaching out to you to clarify which data has been gathered and our own steps to address the breach.
We may from time to time change our Privacy Policy. This page will always reflect the most recent version of our policy, and we’ll include the date it was last revised. If we think the changes are substantial, we’ll notify our users and provide conspicuous notice on our website ..
Archived versions of this Privacy Policy are kept at: https://github.com/meedan/meedan.com
If you have any questions or comments about this policy, we want to hear from you! We want to build our trust and respect with you, the user, and we are always excited and grateful that you are using our tools to help us make a positive change in the world. You can contact us at privacy@meedan.com.