The Privacy Policy below governs your Linuxvillage account and any information you provide on this site.

1. Overview
2. Information We Collect
3. Our Use and Disclosure of Information
4. Information Security
5. Accessing and Changing Your Information
6. Contacting Us

1. Overview

   In order to operate the Linuxvillage.ca service and to reduce the risk of fraud, Linuxvillage Inc. ("Linuxvillage" or "we") must ask you to provide us information about yourself like your address, your email and telephone number. This Privacy Policy describes the information we collect and how we use that information.

   Linuxvillage takes the privacy of your personal information very seriously and will use your information only in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information or a list of our customers to third parties. However, as described in more detail in Part C below, there are limited circumstances in which some of your information will be shared with third parties, under strict restrictions, so it is important for you to review this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies to all services that are hosted on the Linuxvillage.ca Web site, whether the services are offered by Linuxvillage Inc., or by its subsidiaries.

   If you have questions or concerns regarding this Privacy Policy, you should first contact Linuxvillage using contact us.

   By accepting the Privacy Policy and User Agreement in registration, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in the manner described in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the terms of the Linuxvillage User Agreement. This Privacy Policy will take effect on 1 November 2006. This Privacy Policy was last updated on 12 November 2006.

   Please note that your personal information will be stored and processed on our computers in Canada. The laws on holding personal data in Canada may be more or less stringent than the laws of your country but Linuxvillage will hold and transmit your personal information in a safe, confidential and secure environment. If you object to your personal information being transferred or used as described in this Privacy Policy, please do not register for the Linuxvillage service.

   Notification of Changes

   This policy may be revised over time as new features are added to the Linuxvillage service or as we incorporate suggestions from our customers. If we are going to use or disclose your personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time we collected the information, you will have a choice as to whether or not we use or disclose your information in this new manner. Any material changes will be effective only after we provide you by e-mail with at least 30 days notice of the amended Privacy Policy (if you have closed your Linuxvillage account, you will not be contacted to notify you of the amended Policy and your personal information will not be used or disclosed in this new manner).

   We will post the amended Privacy Policy prominently on our Web site so that you can always review what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. Please check the privacy page at Linuxvillage.ca Web site at any time for the most current version of our Privacy Policy.

   Linuxvillage and PayPal Web site include links to third party Web sites. These sites are governed by their own privacy statements, and Linuxvillage is not responsible for their operations, including but not limited to their information practices. Users submitting information to or through these third party Web sites should review the privacy statement of these sites before providing them with personally identifiable information.

   A Special Note About Children. Children are not eligible to use our service and we ask that minors (under the age of 18) do not submit any personal information to us or use the service.

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2. Information We Collect

   Required Information

   To open a Linuxvillage account, you must provide your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. We collect these information for delivery purposes, identification purposes and in the event we need to contact you. Linuxvillage do not collect or store financial information on our website. For security reasons, we have chosen PayPal for all our payment processing. If you should choose to pay by cheque or money order, no bank account information will be store in our website or in webiste operated by PayPal. If you pay by credit card, PayPal may require bank account information (bank account information is required to make payments totaling more than $1,750). PayPal also ask you to choose two different security questions to answer (such as your city of birth or the name of your pet) This required information is necessary for PayPal to process transactions, issue a new password if you forget or lose your password, protect you against credit card fraud and checking account fraud, and to contact you should the need arise in administering your account.

   Information About You From Third Parties

   In order to protect ourselves against potential fraud, we verify with third parties (e.g.PayPal) the information you provide. In the course of such verification, they receive personally identifiable information about you from such services. In particular, if you register a credit card or debit card with PayPal, they will use card authorization and fraud screening services to verify that your card information and address matches the information that you supplied to PayPal, and that the card has not been reported as lost or stolen.

   Additional Verification

   If we cannot verify the information that you provide, we may ask you to send us additional information by fax (such as your driver license, credit card statement, and/or a recent utility bill or other information linking you to the applicable address), or to answer additional questions online to help verify your information.

   Web Site Traffic Information

   Because of the way that World Wide Web communication standards work, when you arrive at or leave Linuxvillage.ca Web site, we automatically receive the Web address of the site that you came from or are going to. We also collect information on which pages of our Web site you visit while you are on the Linuxvillage site, the type of browser you use and the times you access our Web site. We use this information only to try to understand the preferences of our customers better and to manage the load on our servers, so as to improve our service and your experience with Linuxvillage. We do not track the Web sites that you visit before or after you leave the Linuxvillage site.

   Our Use of "Cookies"

   "Cookies" are small files of data that reside on your computer and allow us to recognize you as a Linuxvillage customer if you return to the Linuxvillage site using the same computer and browser. We send a "session cookie" to your computer if and when you log in to your Linuxvillage account by entering your e-mail address and password. These cookies allow us to recognize you if you visit multiple pages in our site during the same session, so that you do not need to re-enter your password multiple times. Once you log out or close your browser, these session cookies expire and no longer have any effect.

   We also may use longer-lasting cookies to display your e-mail address on our sign-in form, so that you do not have to retype the e-mail address each time when you log in to your Linuxvillage account. In addition, we use cookies to process our referral program, described in Section C below. Our cookie files are encoded so that your e-mail address and other information can only be interpreted by Linuxvillage. We may, however, share cookie information regarding whether or not a certain user is already registered with Linuxvillage with certain merchants with whom we have an official co-marketing relationship.

   Customer Service Correspondence

   If you send us correspondence, including e-mails and faxes, we retain such information in the records of your account. We will also retain customer service correspondence and other correspondence from Linuxvillage to you. We retain these records in order to measure and improve our customer service, and to investigate potential fraud and violations of our User Agreement. We may, over time, delete these records if permitted by law.

   Questionnaires, Surveys and Profile Data

   From time to time, we offer optional questionnaires and surveys to our users for such purposes as collecting demographic information or assessing interests of users and needs. The use of the information collected will be explained in detail in the survey itself. If we collect personally identifiable information from our users in these questionnaires and surveys, the users will be given notice of how the information will be used prior to their participation in the survey or questionnaire.

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3. Our Use and Disclosure of Information

   Internal Uses

   We collect, store and process your personal information on servers located in the Canada. We use the information we collect about you in order

   1. to provide our services and process your transactions,
   2. to provide customer service,
   3. to determine your eligibility to receive offers for special features or products, and
   4. to improve our products and services. At your option (as indicated in your account Profile settings), we use the information you provide to sent you newsletters or product notifications.

   We give access to individually identifiable information about our users only to those employees who require it to fulfill customer service requests.

   Disclosure to Third Party

   If you are a registered Linuxvillage user, your name, address, e-mail address, phone number (if applicable) date of sign-up and purchase history will NEVER be revealed to anyone except with your express permission or if we are required to do so pursuant to a subpoena or other legal process.

   If you are buying goods or services and paying through PayPal, Linuxvillage may request that you provide a mailing address that PayPal has confirmed as matching the billing address in the credit card system. You do not have to provide this information. If you do not provide the information, however, Linuxvillage may choose not to accept your PayPal payment and not to complete the transaction.

   We work with PayPal to accept PayPal or Credit Card payments from you. Linuxvillage will share personally identifiable information you provide to PayPal to validate the status of your ability to pay with PayPal or the existence of your account. You permit PayPal to return verification results of the validity of the personally identifiable information passed to PayPal.

   PayPal does not store the personally identifiable information provided by Linuxvillage to validate the existence of your account.

   Disclosure to Third Parties

   Linuxvillage will not sell or rent any of your personally identifiable information to third parties. Linuxvillage will not share any of your personally identifiable information with third parties except in the limited circumstances described below, or with your express permission (and with PayPal payment processing as described above). These third parties are limited by law or by contract from using the information for secondary purposes beyond the purposes for which the information is shared.

   1. We share information with companies that help us process the transactions you request and protect transactions from fraud. i.e. PayPal may sharing your credit card number with a service that screens for lost and stolen card numbers.
   2. We disclose information that we in good faith believe is appropriate to cooperate in investigations of fraud or other illegal activity, or to conduct investigations of violations of our User Agreement. For example, this means that if we conduct a fraud investigation and conclude that one side has engaged in deceptive practices, we can give that person or entity contact information (but not bank account or credit card information) to victims who request it.
   3. We disclose information in response to a subpoena, warrant, court order, levy, attachment, order of a court-appointed receiver or other comparable legal process, including subpoenas from private parties in a civil action.
   4. We disclose information to your agent or legal representative (such as the holder of a power of attorney that you grant, or a guardian appointed for you).
   5. We share aggregated statistical data with our business partners or for public relations. For example, we may disclose that a specific percentage of our users live in Toronto. However, this aggregated information is not tied to personally identifiable information.
   6. As with any other business, it is possible that Linuxvillage in the future could merge with or be acquired by another company. If such an acquisition occurs, the successor company would have access to the information maintained by Linuxvillage, including customer account information, but would continue to be bound by this Privacy Policy unless and until it is amended as described in Section A above.
   7. We share your information with our parent, subsidiaries and joint ventures to help coordinate the services we provide to you, enforce our terms and conditions, and promote trust and safety.

   Our Contacts with Linuxvillage Customers

   We communicate with users on a regular basis via e-mail to provide requested services, and we also communicate by phone to resolve customer complaints or investigate suspicious transactions. We use your e-mail address to confirm your opening of a Linuxvillage account, to send you notice of payments that you send or receive through Linuxvillage (including referral payments described below), to send information about important changes to our products and services, and to send notices and other disclosures required by law. Generally, users cannot opt out of these communications, but they will be primarily informational in nature rather than promotional.

   We also use your e-mail address to send you other types of communications that you can control, including our Periodical newsletter or product notifications. You can choose whether to receive some, all or none of these communications when you complete the registration process, or at any time thereafter, by logging in to your account on the Linuxvillage.ca Web site and changing your preferences in the Profile page of the My Account tab. You can also change your choices at any time through the same procedure.

   In connection with independent audits of our financial statements and operations, the auditors may seek to contact a sample of our customers to confirm that our records are accurate. However, these auditors cannot use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.

   Internet Address Information

   We use IP addresses, browser types and access times to analyze trends, administer the site, improve site performance and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.

   Your Information and Our Services

   In order to facilitate the purchase, payment processing and delivery transactions, our service access users contact or shipping information. We do not have your credit card information. We use PayPal for credit card payment processing and as such rely on PayPal to secure this information.

   Linuxvillage agree that, with respect your personally identifiable information we will only use this information for: (a) Purchase-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using services offered through Linuxvillage (e.g. insurance, shipping and fraud complaints), and (c) any other purpose that such user expressly agrees to after adequate disclosure of the purpose(s).

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4. Information Security

   Linuxvillage Inc. is committed to handling your customer information with high standards of information security. Your credit card and bank account information (if provided to PayPal) are never stored in our website. PayPal will stored it only in encrypted form on computers that are not connected to the Internet. PayPal and Linuxvillage restrict access to your personally identifiable information to employees who need to know that information in order to provide products or services to you. PayPal maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to guard your nonpublic personal information. PayPal test their security systems regularly and also contract with outside companies to audit our security systems and processes. For more information on PayPal security practices, please visit the PayPal Security Center.

   The security of your PayPal account also relies on your protection of your PayPal password. You may not share your PayPal password with anyone. PayPal will never ask you to send your password or other sensitive information to us in an e-mail, though we may ask you to enter this type of information on the PayPal website, which will always have a URL beginning with https://www.paypal.com/.

   Any e-mail or other communication requesting your password, asking you to provide sensitive account information via email, or linking to a website with a URL that does not begin with https://www.paypal.com/ should be treated as unauthorized and suspicious and should be reported to PayPal immediately. If you do share your PayPal password with a third party for any reason, including because the third party has promised to provide you additional services such as account aggregation, the third party will have access to your account and your personal information, and you may be responsible for actions taken using your password. If you believe someone else has obtained access to your password, please change it immediately by logging in to your account at www.paypal.com and changing your Profile settings, and also contact PayPal right away as described below.

   402-935-7733 Monday through Friday between the hours of 4am and 10pm PST, or write us at PayPal, P.O. Box 45950, Omaha, NE 68145-0950.

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5. Accessing and Changing Your Information

   You can review the personal information you provided us and make any desired changes to such information, or to the settings for your Linuxvillage account, at any time by logging in to your account on the Linuxvillage.ca Web site and changing your preferences in the Profile page of the "My Account" tab. You can also close your account by contacting Linuxvillage.ca. If you close your Linuxvillage.ca account, we will mark your account in our database as "Closed," but will keep your account information in our database. This is necessary in order to deter fraud, by ensuring that persons who try to commit fraud will not be able to avoid detection simply by closing their account and opening a new account. However, if you close your account, your personally identifiable information will not be used by us for any further purposes, nor sold or shared with third parties, except as necessary to prevent fraud and assist law enforcement, or as required by law.

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6. Contacting Us

   If you have any questions about this privacy statement, information practices by Linuxvillage, or your dealings with Linuxvillage, you can contact us using contact us.

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