Our Privacy Policy

Gilmil.com ("Gil Mil", "GilMil", "Gilmil", "we", "us", or "our") takes the private nature of your information very seriously. This policy regarding our privacy practices (the "Privacy Policy") describes how we treat the information we collect when you visit and use GilMil.com (the "Site") and/or GilMil's other domains, products, advertising products, services, and/or content, including our iOS and Android mobile applications (collectively with the "website", the "Services"). GilMil is a subsidiary of Maxgen Energy Inc., a technology company that empowers people to build beautiful websites, tell their stories, and find and grow their audience. The way we handle your information hasn’t changed, so this Privacy Policy still governs when you are on GilMil, using a GilMil app or interacting with our products, services or technologies. We may share non-personal information with our family companies for purposes such as product improvements, research and analysis, and to help them provide you with more relevant experiences. When you use the Services, you also consent to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy; please read it carefully.

What This Privacy Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of information gathered when you are using or accessing the Services. This Privacy Policy also covers our treatment of any information about you that our partners share with us or that we share with our partners.

This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own, control, or manage, including but not limited to any third party websites, services, applications, or businesses (“Third Party Services”). While we try to work only with those Third Party Services that share our respect for your privacy, we don't take responsibility for the content or privacy policies of those Third Party Services. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of all Third Party Services you access.

This Privacy Policy doesn’t govern what our users do on their GilMil comments and we aren't responsible for the information collection and use practices of our individual comments and bloggers. When you visit a blog in our network, that blog may collect more information than we do, and may provide information to third parties that we have no relationship with, including to advertisers.

What We Collect and How We Use It

What We Collect and How We Use It Account Information: When you create an account on the Services (an "Account"), we’ll ask you for information such as your username, password, age, and email address (“Account Information”). We may use Account Information, alone or together with other information, to enhance and improve the Services, such as by personalization. We use your age to verify that you can lawfully use the Services. We use your email address to verify your Account and to communicate with you, as described in more detail below. We also allow users to look for their friends by email address; you can, however, opt out of email lookup through your Account Settings.

People that follow you can also find your comments. As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive email and other communications from us. Administrative communications relating to your Account (e.g., for purposes of Account recovery or password reset) are considered part of the Services and your Account. Note that we will never email you to ask for your password or other Account Information; if you receive such an email, please forward it to us.

Information about Your Accounts on Third Party Services:

You can link your post to other similar posts by adding #word or Hashtags.

User Content:

By default, all sharing through GilMil is public, and when you provide us with content it is published so that anyone can view it. GilMil is a public platform and so Comments, Likes, and reComments or replies are a matter of public record and viewing. Don't hold your self back to share things and your thoughts, but if you do, it cannot be completely removed from the internet once they’ve been put there.

Actions:

The Services allow you to perform actions that are integral to our products, such as liking a post, Commenting a post, re Commenting to a post, and following a person. They are public actions – anyone can expand the “Comments” view on a post, for example, to see who liked your post, or replied to your post. We use information about native actions to improve the Services, develop new Services, and, particularly, to personalize your GilMil experience. Personalization using this information may include presenting you with new posts relevant to what you’ve liked, providing you with better search results, and showing you advertising more relevant to your interests.

Information About User Content:

In some cases, we may collect information about content you provide to the Services. For example, when it's included as part of your images, we may collect information describing your camera, camera settings, or EXIF information. This information allows us to improve the Services and provide additional features and functionality.

Financial Information:

We will sometimes collect financial information, such as information related to your payment method (valid credit card number, type, expiration date or other financial information). This happens when you decide to purchase a paid Service. We do not, however, store that financial information; such information is stored by our payment processor (the "Payment Processor"), and use and storage of that information is governed by the Payment Processor’s applicable terms of service and privacy policy (the Payment Processor may also have other terms, and you are responsible for locating and familiarizing yourself with those terms, as applicable). We do receive certain information back from our Payment Processor to complete the payment process.

Information Related to Use of the Services:

We collect information about how people use the Services, including those with an Account. This type of information may be collected in our log files each time you interact with (i.e., make a request to) the Services. We use internal tools and third party applications and services (like Google Analytics) to collect and analyze this information. Some of this information may also be associated with the Internet Protocol Address (“IP Address”) used to access the Services; some may be connected with your Account; and some may only be collected and used in aggregate form (as a statistical measure that wouldn’t identify you or your Account). We also collect your IP Address when you make a post, particularly when you submit an anonymous “Ask.” We may use this information about how you and others interact with the Services for a number of things generally related to enhancing, improving, protecting, and developing new Services, including but not limited to: providing users with personalized content; providing users with targeted advertising; improving our search results; identifying trending or popular content; fighting spam, malware, identity theft and generally keeping our users and community safe; and for legal and safety reasons as set forth in “Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others.” We use information about how you interact with GilMil in order to personalize it for you, to keep both you and our community safe from harm, and to improve GilMil for everyone who uses it.

Information Related to Your Web Browser:

We automatically receive and record information from your web browser when you interact with the Services, such as your browser type and version, what sort of device you are using, your operating system and version, your language preference, the website or service that referred you to the Services, the date and time of each request you make to the Services, your screen display information, and information from any cookies we have placed on your web browser (as described below). We also sometimes detect whether you are using certain web browser extensions and store that information in a manner associated with your Account. We use web browser-related information to enhance and improve the Services.

Location Information:

In some cases we collect and store information about where you are located, such as by converting your IP Address into a rough geolocation. We may also ask you to provide information about your location, for example to use your geolocation information from your mobile device to geotag a post. We may use location information to improve and personalize the Services for you, for example by showing you relevant local content.

Information Related to Your Mobile Device:

We may collect and store information related to your mobile device. In some cases, we may receive, generate, or assign your mobile device a unique identifier for the purposes described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” We may also ask you to provide your phone number to enable new products and improve the Services, such as by enabling multi-factor authentication for Account login. We will always ask you whether it’s OK for us to collect and store your phone number.

Information Collected Using Cookies and Web Tags:

Cookies are text files that may be sent to and saved by your web browser when you access a website; your web browser stores these cookies in a way associated with each website you visit, and you can generally see your cookies through your browser settings, depending on what browser you’re using. A web tag is code or a pixel embedded in a web page, or email, that allows GilMil or a third party to see that you have looked at that page. We use cookies and web tags to enable our servers to recognize your web browser and tell us how and when you use the Services, as described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” Our cookies do not, by themselves, contain information that personally identifies you, and we don't combine the general information collected through cookies with other such information to tell us who you are. However, we do use cookies to identify that you have logged in, and that your web browser has accessed the Services, and we may associate that information with your Account if you have one. We may also store unique or near-unique identifiers that we associate with your Account in our cookies. This information, in turn, is sometimes used as described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” Most web browsers have an option for turning off the cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your web browser) allowing you to decide on acceptance of each new cookie in a variety of ways. If you disable cookies, you won't be able to log into your Account, and so won’t be able to use the vast majority of our Services; as such, we don't recommend disabling your cookies when using the Services. Some services that we use (including Third Party Services), such as Google Analytics, use web tags and may also place their own cookies on your browser, and individual comments on our network may contain code that places their own cookies. For more information about Google Analytics, click here. We also run limited-time studies using web tags, sometimes with third parties, to, for example, measure the effectiveness of our advertising or email. Note that, unless otherwise disclosed, this Privacy Policy covers our use of cookies only and does not cover the use of cookies by third parties. Being able to log into your account is one of GilMil’s many great features. Cookies make this possible. Cookies and web tags also let us learn how people use GilMil, which in turn helps us make a better product for you to use.

Derived Information:

As described above in “Actions” and “Information Related to Use of the Services,” we analyze your actions on the Services in order to derive or infer characteristics that may be descriptive of your Account (for example, what kinds of comments you follow or what kinds of posts you view, like, or recomment). We use this information for all of the purposes set forth in “Information Related to Use of the Services,” above.

Personalized Advertising on GilMil

In order to provide you with all of this GilMil content for free, GilMil selectively runs advertisements. We, and our parent company, Maxgen Energy Inc., work with online advertising companies to provide you with advertising that is as relevant and useful as possible. To make our ads more relevant and useful, we make educated guesses about your interests based on your activity on our sites and services. The ads we show you often reflect these interests and educated guesses. To learn more about how we select the ads you see, you can check out GilMil’s Advertising and affiliate policies. Managing your choices for personalized advertising experiences: If you do not prefer personalized advertising experiences, you may opt-out. Note that if you opt-out you will continue to see advertisements on GilMil, though they will be less relevant and useful to you. When using web-based versions of GilMil, you may opt-out of interest-based or personalized advertising by using the following industry opt-out pages: When using the mobile app version of GilMil on Apple iOS devices you can opt out of personalized advertising by selecting "Limit Ad Tracking" in the iOS settings. For more information about these iOS options: Maxgen Energy Inc. owns us and we share with it and the Maxgen Energy Inc. family of companies.

Information Shared with the Public Through the Services:

As noted in “User Content” and “Actions,” above, by default, content published through the Services and many actions you take on the Services are shared with the public. Because this kind of information can be seen by anyone and may be indexed by search engines, you should be careful about what you choose to disclose publicly and make sure it’s information you want to share with everyone. The content you create on GilMil is, by default, public. This means that anyone can see it, and that search engines can index it. If these things bother you, take a look at some of the additional privacy features we offer.

Information Shared Between the Services:

We may, if possible, aggregate information about your use of multiple Services and use that consolidated information to enhance and improve the Services, and to develop new Services.

Information You Share with Third Party Services:

You may access Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on externally-pointing links. You may also choose to share information that you provide to us, like blog posts, with those Third Party Services (for example, by sharing posts to Twitter or Facebook). This Privacy Policy only governs information we collect and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services' privacy policies. You can share the posts you make on GilMil to other sites (like Facebook or Twitter). That’s where our Privacy Policy ends and their policies begin. Make sure you’re cool with the policies of any services you’re considering sharing to before connecting them to your GilMil account. Information Shared with Our Agents in Order to Operate and Improve the Services: In some cases, we share information we store (such as IP addresses) with third parties, such as service providers, consultants, and other agents ("Agents"), for the purposes of operating, enhancing, and improving the Services, and developing new products and services. For example, we may share information with service providers that help us fight spam, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you (hey there!), analytics providers that help us understand and improve our services, and third party partners that pitch in on our marketing efforts (like identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services), along with third-party consultants who may have access to information in the process of improving our processes and technology. Agents with whom we share such information for these reasons are generally bound by confidentiality obligations and, unless we tell you differently, our agents do not have any right to use information we share with them beyond the scope and duration of what is necessary to assist us.

Information Disclosed Pursuant to Business Transfers:

In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell business assets. In these transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if we, or substantially all of our assets, were acquired, or if we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of us or our assets may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy. Should we happen to get acquired or go out of business, the transfer of assets from us to our buyer may very well include user information. They are allowed to use it only in the ways outlined here, in the Privacy Policy you are reading right now.

Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others:

We believe in freedom of expression, and, to the extent reasonable, we try to protect our community from baseless legal demands. That said, we also reserve the right to access, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary, in our sole discretion, to (i) satisfy any law, regulation, legal process, governmental request, or governmental order, (ii) enforce this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, trust and safety, or technical issues (including exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of improving security and preventing fraud, spam, and malware), (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect the rights, property, health or safety of us, our users, any third parties or the public in general, including but not limited to situations involving possible violence, suicide, or self-harm. We need to protect everyone who uses GilMil from harming us, each other, or themselves. We work hard to balance privacy and community, and we’re sure you can appreciate the challenges in that, and the seriousness with which we take those challenges. Information We Share with Your Consent or at Your Request: If you ask us to release information that we have about your Account, we will do so if reasonable and not unduly burdensome.

Information Shared with Other Third Parties:

We may share or disclose non-private information, Aggregate Information, or other non-personally identifying information with people and entities that we do business with.

Security and Retention of Your Information:

Your Account Information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. We may enable additional security features in the future, like multi-factor authentication. You need to prevent unauthorized access to your Account and information by creating a unique, secure, and protected password and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your Account on the Services. We seek to protect your information (including your Account Information) to ensure that it is kept private; however, we can't guarantee the security of any information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors may compromise the security of user information at any time. It’s really important that you have a unique password for all of your accounts on the internet, including your GilMil account. GilMil will retain your information only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, for as long as your GilMil account is active or as needed to provide you with the Services. Please note that this applies to information in GilMil group chats as well. Even though GilMil only makes group chat messages available to the public (i.e., the other chat participants) for a short amount of time before their expiration and deletion from public view, group chat messages and related information (e.g., list of chat participants) will be retained by GilMil for internal purpose (e.g., security audits), and/or as required by law (e.g., pursuant to a litigation hold notice) after they have disappeared from public view. If you no longer want GilMil to use your information to provide you with the Services, you may close your account and GilMil will delete the information it holds about you unless we need to retain and use your information to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, to enforce our agreements or as otherwise permitted by law.

What Information You Can Access:

If you are a registered user, you can access most information associated with your Account by logging into the Services and checking your Account Settings page. Registered and unregistered users can access and delete cookies through their web browser settings.

How to Delete Your Account and What Happens When You Delete Your Account:

If you want to delete your Account, you can do so from your Edit Profile page or by emailing us and providing proof of authority over the Account. What constitutes "proof of authority" will vary depending on the circumstances, but generally will require sufficient identifying information so that we can be confident you are the Account owner. Deleting your Account may not fully remove the content you have published from our systems, as caching of, backups of, copies of, or references to your Account Information may not be immediately removed. In addition, given the nature of sharing on the Services, some of the public activity on your Account prior to deletion (such as recomments of your blog posts) may remain stored on our servers and accessible to the public. You’ll do great things on GilMil, surely, but if it ever have to part ways, then you’re free to delete your account at any time and for any reason. The deletion will be effective immediately, for the most part, but it might take a little while to scrub everything from our archives and backups. What won’t get scrubbed are Recomments of your posts. Those will remain on whatever Comment you have recommented on. Once it goes out onto the internet, so be sure you’re only publishing stuff that you’re certain you want to publish.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time, using the process for modifications set forth in our Terms of Service. Use of information we collect is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is collected.

Where to Direct Questions or Concerns

If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, send us a detailed message.

Our privacy policy is always available at:

https://www.gilmil.com/privacypolicy.asp

Throughout our privacy policy, we describe the specific pieces of personal information we collect, the sources of that information, and how we share it. We also have to provide you with the "categories" of personal information we collect and disclose for “business purposes” (as those terms are defined by applicable law). Those categories are identifiers (such as username and email address); commercial information (such as transaction data); financial data (such as credit card and other financial account information); internet or other network or device activity (such as unique identifiers, browsing history or other usage data); geolocation information (general location); inference data about you; legally protected classifications (such as gender); physical characteristics or description (such as when you voluntarily submit a photo); or other information that identifies or can be reasonably associated with you. We use these categories of personal information consistent with the various business and commercial purposes we describe in this privacy policy. Check out “What We Collect and How We Use It” to learn more. We share this information with the categories of third parties described above in “With Whom Your Information Is Shared." We may also use the categories of personal information for compliance with applicable laws and regulations. We may aggregate the information we collect or de-identify it in order to limit or prevent the identification of any particular user or device.