mysparebrain.com Privacy Policy

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We have changed this privacy policy to be more explicit about our use of cookies and how this affects your choices.
These changes have been made to comply with UK and EU law on cookies.

mysparebrain Functionality

This Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use this service.

We hope this is clear and easily understood, but of course it includes quite a bit of terminology - our intent is as follows:

You use an account to protect your data from access by other users.
We use cookies for the following reasons:
- Analytical purposes - measuring unique visitors and visitor behaviour in order to improve our website
- Your account - we use cookies to track the identity of authenticated users, so we can remember the preferences of each user and give them access to their data (as opposed to data of other users)
- 3rd party integration - where a user activates the integration of 3rd party services such as twitter within mysparebrain, those 3rd party services will typically use cookies to identify and track the user according to the conditions of users' acounts with those services.
We consider these cookies to be essential to the offering of the service.
By continuing to browse the site and/or use the service you are agreeing to our use of cookies
(see Your choices below).
Google manage your account details such as username, email address, and password. We only see your username and email address from this account, and have no access to your email or password.
The data you enter when using mysparebrain belongs to you and is considered private to you (providing you protect your account properly) except where you explicitly share or otherwise transmit information (such as using mysparebrain to explicitly send messages or share your information with others).
We do our best to make life easier for you: this will often involve us storing extra information about you and how you use the system. We will treat the details of this information about you as confidential, but we may abstract it to improve the service we provide to you, and where the law requires us to do so, we may divulge certain details about users.
A major part of mysparebrain is how it helps you work with 3rd-party services such as Wikipedia, social media, and generic websites.
To do this, you need to know that we will not abuse your use of those services by virtue of using mysparebrain.
Where you use these features, we will read data from those services as directed by you on an as-required basis, while complying with the terms and conditions of those services.
We will not post content on your behalf except where you have expressly specified to do so.
For example, if you use mysparebrain with twitter, we include the ability to post messages and follow or unfollow people - we will not however post messages automatically as if they were from you. We will only post status updates for you where you expressly chose to do so.

Personal information

You need a Google Account to access mysparebrain.com. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your alternative contact information and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorised access. A Google Account allows you to use this service when you have been invited or otherwise registered.
We will identify you according to the authorisation process of your Google Account - if your account is compromised or you allow other people to use your account, they may be able to access your information in mysparebrain as though they were you. We have no way to identify the identity of who is accessing the service other than by the Google account authorisation process.
Google maintain a privacy policy with regards to your Google account at www.google.com/privacy.html
This service or application is hosted on the Google App Engine, so by using it your information is also treated as described under the User account activity and User account information and content sections of the Google App Engine Privacy Notice.
mysparebrain.com stores, processes and maintains the information you create in the application, including notes, titles, comments, bookmarklets, and links to other websites in order to provide the service to you.
When you use mysparebrain, the service automatically records certain information about your use of the application. Similar to other web services, it records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID and referrer URL).
We use Intercom to manage our relationships with users including the support feature within the app (which lets you ask us questions or send us other messages such as feedback). This uses your email address to identify your account, and it uses email to send and receive messages, so we maintain these details within Intercom's systems.
By default your account on mysparebrain is private as is all the content you create, but there is also a facility to make selected charts publicly visible. This involves choosing a publicly visible username for your account - we use this name to publish any charts that you then decide to make public. We don't publish your email address with such charts, but of course if you choose a username that is the same as your email address, or you put your email address or other details into the content that you make public, then other people will be able to see this.

Uses

Google maintains and processes your Google account.
The mysparebrain service maintains and processes the information you are using in the application. This service is currently hosted on google servers and uses certain details of your account and the information you maintain in mysparebrain to provide the service to you. The service includes adverts which are currently a fixed and unvarying set of sample adverts, but reserves the right to later include relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of charts and other information related to your use of mysparebrain.
mysparebrain's computers (currently actually servers belonging to Google) process the information in your charts for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering advertisements and related links, backing up your data and other purposes relating to offering you the service.
mysparebrain may contact you with information related to your account or other mysparebrain services. We will not spam you, and we will not pass on your details to others parties (with certain strict exceptions such as when we are required to do so by law - see below).

Information sharing and onward transfer

The mysparebrain service currently includes certain limited communication mechanisms such as the support feature: any communications you choose to send with this, and any collaboration features that we add over time, will include information such as your identity and email address, but messages including your email address will only be sent as a result of your direct actions.
mysparebrain includes features to integrate your data with external 3rd party services such as twitter and facebook. If you elect to use such integration then mysparebrain will gather information from those other services and, in some cases, will ask for your authorisation to enable you to perform actions in those systems via the mysparebrain application itself.
If you do this, mysparebrain will store as much information as the 3rd party requires we hold to identify your account on those systems and to record the authorisation you have given. We will only post updates to those sites under your direct control, and we will not directly store or maintain any information such as what you post (many of the external systems themselves forbid us to do so anyway), but in performing such actions on your behalf we will of course have to include information about you such as, but not limited to, your identity on that system.
You may change your account settings with these services by interacting with the services themselves, and your interactions with those services are of course bound by the privacy policies of those other services whether performed via mysparebrain or directly.
We reserve the right to provide advertisers only with aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

Your choices

You may change your Google account settings through Google services themselves.
You are welcome to configure your web browser to block some or all of the cookies that we refer to above, but you may find this blocks access to your account and/or considerable portions of functionality.
Where you have authorised mysparebrain to act on your behalf with regards to third party services, we will provide you with ways to logout or cancel such authorisations (should you need to do so) via the mysparebrain application, but ultimately you can alter authorisations and make full changes to your account (such as deleting your account) through the services themselves.
You may organise or delete your content through your mysparebrain account or terminate your account by contacting mysparebrain. Such deletions or terminations may take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in offline backup systems.

Google Analytics Functionality

This site uses Google Analytics to count visitors and track things like how you got here. As a condition of this, Google require me to publish a privacy policy as below with regards to how they gather statistics about visitors - makes sense really and it's all good stuff... most websites do this to some degree or another, so although the wording might sound a bit official it's just to make sure you understand what might happen when you visit even if you don't have an account and use the mysparebrain service itself.

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses “cookies”, which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyze how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States . Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. By using this website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.

Contacting Us

If you've registered your interest or got an account already, you should have received an email including contact details.
If you haven't got that message, or you're not registered (and while we're in stealth mode) you can contact the team via twitter as @schmerg or via the blog at schmerg.com.