Chinese Downhill Privacy & Security Policy

First, let's make something clear: We hate it when people sell our personal information to others without asking first, so we're not going to do that to you. Got that? Good.

We take a pretty common sense approach to privacy and security here. To make things really clear though, we're going to spell out all of the things that people usually get a little freaked out about, and hit them one by one below. Ready?

  1. Personal Information

    We do ask you for some personal information on your profile page. This is voluntary. Among this information you may be asked for your physical location (not your address, just city, state and zip). Why? There are really two reasons - the first is that it lets us do clever things on the site, such as suggesting potential friends in your area. The other is that we do sometimes work with resorts and other companies to do giveaways. Especially with resorts, these may be targeted to specific locations. In order to be part of that (think things like free lift tickets), we need your address. Don't want to give the info away? Totally cool with us.

  2. Date Of Birth

    So yeah, this is probably Personal Information. But people get weirded out by this kind of thing. Well, it's not really something we want to do in this case. US law requires that social media sites like this take steps to protect children under the age of 13 from online predators. In order to do this, we have to follow pretty onerous rules, such as collecting what amount to permission slips from the parents of kids under 13. Honestly, we don't want to deal with that, and most of our users will be over 13 anyway, so, we ask for your date of birth in order to verify that in fact, you're old enough to register to use Chinese Downhill. On the plus side, it lets us wish you a happy birthday once a year.

  3. Email addresses

    As we mentioned above, we've got zero interest in making you deal with more spam. Any emails that are sent from the site, you can control on the site. If you receive an offer from a sponsor of the site, it was not sent *directly* to you via email, but through the site. In other words, unless we tell you otherwise when we collect it, we don't give out your email address to anyone other than a judge with a warrant (let's please not go there), we act as a filter for emails going to you. You can choose your preferences for how notifications are delivered (email or via private message on the site) in your user profile page.

  4. Security

    Well, we're not collecting your credit card, and we're not asking you for any kind of sensitive information. Of course we take all reasonable precautions with your passwords, but in this case, we're going to lay the responsibility on you a little bit - don't post information that you don't want people to see. That's a pretty simple rule that will keep you out of trouble on the web, so you're welcome.

  5. Exceptions

    In the case of giveaways or promotions, you may be asked to fill out a form with some contact information. In those cases, the info is passed on to whatever company is giving away whatever they're giving away. We'll let you know when you're filling out the form that that info will be passed along to them, and if you want out, you can just not fill out the form. simple enough?

What data do we collect?
Whatever you see in your profile and account pages are pretty much it in terms of personal information - the stuff mentioned above, basically.

What might we do with this data in the future?
We reserve the right to use aggregate data that we collect, for a variety of purposes, some of which we haven't thought up yet. This might mean research reports and demographic analysis, which we may sell to third parties. Bottom line, though, that data will never be tied to you personally - it will be about trends we see among our users, not about you personally. You may safely put away your tinfoil hat now.

Cookies:
Cookies are delicious. We use cookies, like practically every other web site on the planet, to do important stuff like keeping you logged in. Most of these cookies only exist while your session is active, so when you log out, all that's left are one or two that let us know who you are when you get back. Third parties may also issue cookies to your web browser, including Facebook if you're using the Facebook Connect functionality to log in and link Chinese Downhill to your Facebook account. There's also Google, who provides our nifty maps in the resorts section of the site, as well as some of the advertising that helps support the site. Their privacy policies cover what they do, links below.

Third Party Privacy Policies: