Privacy Policy

Effective June 2023 (v1.12)

Quick, Plain-English Summary

• Kodeco collects personal information from you and places cookies on your browser.
• We use Google Analytics, Facebook, and other tracking cookies, but only when you consent. You may withdraw your consent at any time.
• We use other cookies for payment processing, error monitoring, personalized avatars, and site management without your consent.
• We host our videos on Vimeo, which also collects personal information from you.
• We will not send you direct marketing e-mails without your consent.
• You may download, correct, or erase the data we collect.
• We encrypt your information and limit access to it in order to protect you.

Who are we?

This page is maintained by Kodeco, Inc, a Virginia incorporated company (“Kodeco” or “We”). Our address is 1520 Belle View Blvd #4171 Alexandria VA 22307. We do not maintain a business phone number. You may reach us via e-mail at support@kodeco.com or through the form located here.

What sort of personal information do we collect about you?

Kodeco collects the following basic information from you:

• Name
• E-mail address
• Twitter handle
• Biography
• Username
• Book Information (see below)
• In some instances, country and postal or zip code

When you use the Website's online book reader, we will record information related to your use of the book. This information includes your highlights, bookmarks, and notes within the book, as well as the fact that you read the book, and when.

Similarly, when you view a tutorial, we record the fact that you viewed it, and when. This information as well as the book information, is necessary in some instances to compensate our Content creators properly.

If you request us to delete your account, we anonymise the viewing information so that it is no longer traceable to you.

In addition, Kodeco tracks your use of kodeco.com (the “Website”). This means that Kodeco monitors and logs which pages on the Website you have visited. As part of this process we may record your computer’s IP address and browser information, the date and time of your visit to each page of our Website, and time you spent on each page.

Kodeco also will collect credit card or other payment information if you make a purchase on the Website.

In collecting this information, sharing it, and using it, Kodeco is committed to complying with the European Union’s Global Data Privacy Regulation and all other applicable law.

What about cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. Cookies are considered personal information, because it is possible to coordinate them across websites and create a profile of a particular user’s activities. For more information about cookies, visit https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies/.

We, and the third parties with whom we share your information, use cookies for the following purposes:

1. Authentication. Authenticating and identifying you on our Website so we can provide you the Content you requested or have purchased, or so that you can use the Website’s forums.
2. Keeping track of information you have provided to us. For example, we’ll track your progress through the videos you watch.
3. Personalization. We store user preferences in cookies to personalize your user experience.
4. Site Improvements. We use cookies to measure your site usage to help us understand your needs as a user and make improvements to the Website.
5. Analytics. We have implemented third party tracking tools, detailed below, which use cookies to track usage and implement Website features.
6. Advertising. We work with various third party providers (such as Facebook, Google, Bing, etc.) to display banner advertising on other selected websites. This means that you may view a product on the Website and see an advertisement for that product on other websites later. These cookies help us to monitor and improve the effectiveness of our advertising and to refine the targeting of these campaigns so that we are displaying the most relevant content for each individual.

As we explain below, we will not implement cookies for some of these purposes unless you have agreed that it’s OK for us to do so. Others are implemented automatically.

What about on-site advertising?

We do run banner advertisements on select Kodeco sites that display advertisements served up through our BuySellAds network that generate revenue for us. In displaying these ads to you, BuySellAds collects some behaviour data to optimize the delivery and display of those ads. BuySellAds does not partner with third party data companies, and BuySellAds does not sell data to others. The basic information collected by BuySellAds is only used in three ways: to allow very basic campaign targeting, calculate campaign pacing, and detect fraud across BuySellAds's advertising network. In all cases, data is kept anonymous to maintain user privacy.

The data is used in the following ways:

• Basic campaign targeting: Advertisers can use geographic information derived from IP addresses to reach a specific traffic segment based on country, state, or city. User agent strings provide basic browser information that can be used for campaign targeting or to provide further insight to publishers about where traffic is coming from and what devices are being used to navigate ad content. BuySellAds does not use this information to profile users, and does not use a user’s traffic history or advertisement interactions to build a profile or sell targeting based on that generated profile.

• Calculating campaign pacing: Additionally, BuySellAds uses aggregate data to pace ad delivery during campaigns. BuySellAds offers basic targeting based on geography, browser, operating system, and segment. In order to support these choices, BuySellAds tracks geographies (through IP addresses), browsers (through user agent strings), operating systems (through user agent strings), and segments for any hits to a page that could load an ad, whether or not there is an ad to show. BuySellAds needs this for the following reasons: For certain ad types, BuySellAds provides aggregate stats to the publisher and advertiser on the basic demographics (country, browser, OS) of the people who viewed the ad. Whether or not ads load, BuySellAds needs to be aware of how much traffic is available so BuySellAds can sell no more than the available impressions. This same availability data is also used to serve ads at an even pace over the course of the campaign.

• Fraud detection and prevention: The data BuySellAds collects is also used to detect unusual behavioral patterns across their network and remove abnormal traffic. Any traffic source that generates suspicious impressions or clicks is identified and marked for fraud evaluation. Further analysis is then run on the offending traffic. BuySellAds uses a third-party vendor list to compare the suspect traffic to a list of offenders already known to be associated with fraudulent traffic online. If the data matches, BuySellAds then marks the traffic as suspicious and removes it from their network before the traffic can influence campaign results and show up in campaign statistics.

For more information, please visit https://content.buysellads.com/publishers/what-data-does-buysellads-collect.

Do you share my personal information with third parties?

Yes. We share some personal information with third parties without your consent in order to fulfill contracts we have with you, or because we have a legitimate interest in doing do. Other personal information we will not collect or share without your consent. Once information is shared with third parties, it is also subject to their privacy policies.

In addition, remember that any information you choose to include in your account profile will be available for other Users to view, except for your email address which will not be displayed. When choosing a username, we strongly suggest that you not use your email address as your username, as because your username will be displayed on any posts you either create or respond to on the Website’s forums.

What personal information do share when I consent?

We share personal information with the following third parties only when you consent. You express this consent by clicking on the pop-up box that appears on the Website screen. You may withdraw your consent at any time by clicking here and following the instructions.

Any information you choose to include in your Account profile will be available for other Users to view, except for your email address which will not be displayed. When choosing a username, we strongly suggest that you not use your email address as your username, because your username will be displayed on any posts you either create or respond to on the Website’s forums.

Google Analytics: When you consent, we install cookies related to Google Analytics which keeps track of your browsing activity on the Website. We use this information to analyze traffic on our Website, as well as to market our products to you on other websites. If you do not consent, Google Analytics will not track this usage and you will not see targeted ads for Kodeco products. In addition to withdrawing consent for Kodeco's Website using the link above, you may disable Google Analytics generally by using the tool at Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on Download Page .

Facebook: When you consent, we install a cookie that shares with Facebook that fact that you have visited our Website, the pages you visited, and other information about your visit. This will result in Facebook showing you ads for Kodeco products or other products targeted to Kodeco Website visitors when you are on Facebook.

We advertise Kodeco services on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Ads. To facilitate this, we share the fact that you have visited the site, the pages you visited and any ensuing purchase that you make with these companies if you arrive on our site via one of their ads.

What personal information do you share without my explicit consent?

In order to make the Website function efficiently, we share some of your personal information with other third party providers and without obtaining your explicit consent. We may install cookies or execute JavaScript libraries in your browser that convey this information to these third parties.

Our primary payment processor is Paddle (https://paddle.com). Older customers may have their payments processed through our previous payment processor, FastSpring (fastspring.com). We share your credit card, payment, and billing information with these parties when you make a purchase because it is necessary for us to do so to fulfill the purchase contact.

We share non-personally identifiable information about your subscription purchase with ProfitWell (profitwell.com) so that we can better understand our customers’ buying preferences. The only information we share is the order number, and ProfitWell does not share any of your data with third-party providers.

BugSnag (https://www.bugsnag.com/) is our error-detection software. When you are using our Website and have a malfunction or error, BugSnag will collect information about what you were doing when the error happened and relay it to us so we can fix it. This information may include information about your system and applications so we can track down the error.

Similarly, we use two services (Skylight, https://www.skylight.io/, and DataDog, https://www.datadoghq.com/apm/) to monitor the performance of the code on our Website and its efficiency. We do not believe that these services really receive any personal information except, perhaps, your IP address, but we mention them in the interest of transparency. This data is not used for advertising, marketing, or for any other commercial purpose than tweaking the Website.

In connection with BugSnag, Skylight, and DataDog, Kodeco has a legitimate interest in sharing this information without your explicit consent. Kodeco has a strong interest in a smooth-functioning, error-free Website. (And if you’re using it—especially if you’re paying for it!—we think you would want the Website to work well too.) To do this, we need error-checking software, monitoring software, and an appropriate and secure password authentication/account management system. None of this data is passed along further to any other third party. We do not use this data for advertising, marketing, or for any other commercial purpose than error-correction and Website management.

We share your personal information with Amazon Web Services, which is our cloud storage provider. Kodeco has a legitimate interest in doing so to avail itself of the benefits of cloud storage (which includes security, convenience, cost, and multiple redundant backups) as opposed to maintaining its own servers. AWS does not access the data for its own purposes and all data at rest is encrypted.

If you create an account on our web site, we share a hashed version of your email address with Gravatar (https://gravatar.com), a web site that allows you to create a globally recognized avatar image that can be used across multiple web sites. This allows us to automatically display the avatar image you have set up on Gravatar (if any) rather than requiring you to upload a separate profile image. We have a legitimate interest in sharing this data with Gravatar in order to provide users with a personalized and hassle-free experience. We do not use this data for advertising, marketing, or for any other commercial purpose than personalization of the web site.

For visitors that arrive to Kodeco sites via ads displayed on Reddit, we share select information about you, including log and usage data and cookie information, from third-party sites that integrate Reddit services, including embeds and advertising technology. As an advertiser that incorporates Reddit’s ad technology, Reddit may receive limited information about your activity on our site or app. You can control how Reddit uses this information to personalize the Services for you as described at Reddit: Your Choices - Controlling Advertising and Analytics.

HubSpot is our customer support and sales hub, with which we share limited data for the purposes of customer support, and marketing email communication. This data may include account information along with site behavior attributed to your account, including pages visited and content consumed at sites operating under the kodeco.com domain.

We share some basic on-site behaviour and events with Propensity, a service we use to better define our audience, and create appropriate and engaging targeted campaigns.

Finally, Vimeo collects certain personal information about you, and installs cookies, when you access a page of the Website that contains an embedded Vimeo video. For more information about this, see below.

If we are compelled by law to disclose personal information – for example, in response to a court subpoena – we will comply with the law.

Why do you share my personal information with Vimeo?

Kodeco uses Vimeo to display the videos on the Website. These videos are one of Kodeco's primary product offerings. Vimeo is an Internet video portal that enables video publishers like Kodeco to embed video clips, and which also provides viewing, review and commenting on them. Vimeo is operated by Vimeo, LLC, 555 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011, USA.

With each call-up to one of the individual pages Website on which a Vimeo video is integrated, a direct connection is established between the internet browser and one of Vimeo’s worldwide network of servers. Your IP address and information about the visit may be transmitted to Vimeo and stored. When you interact with the Vimeo plug-ins (i.e., by pressing ‘play’ on the video), the fact that you have done so may also be stored.

If you have a Vimeo user account and do not wish Vimeo to use the Website as a way of collecting information and linking this information with the membership data held by Vimeo, you should log out of Vimeo before visiting the Website. To find out more about Vimeo's data protection policy and how Vimeo gathers and uses your data, please visit https://vimeo.com/privacy/.

Vimeo also activates Google Analytics tracking, whether or not you have logged into your Vimeo account. This is Vimeo's own tracking application, to which Kodeco does not have access, and is separate from Kodeco’s Google Analytics tracking described above. Users can prevent the recording of data by Google Analytics and usage and processing of this data by Google by downloading and installing the browser plugin available at the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/.

Kodeco believes that it has a legitimate interest in embedding Vimeo videos on its Website without your explicit consent. Because educational videos hosted by Vimeo are one of Kodeco’s primary products, and are prolific on the Website, it is not practical to require express consent from every user. Because large sections of the Website would be practically inaccessible if all Vimeo content was disabled, that consent might not be meaningful in any event. We believe that our users’ reasonable expectation upon clicking a Vimeo video is that Vimeo would collect their personal information. Finally, the personal information disclosed to Vimeo does not include the most sensitive information (such as payment information), which a user might reasonably expect to keep private. For these reasons, we are using Vimeo without requesting your explicit permission to do so.

In addition, in the event that you purchase access to Kodeco videos, Kodeco has no video content delivery system other than the embedded Vimeo videos and their associated cookies, together with the information Vimeo collects through that process. Thus, when you purchase videos, we must disclose to Vimeo the personal information Vimeo collects in order to enable us to fulfill our contract with you.

Where is my personal data stored?

Your personal data that Kodeco stores is located on the Amazon Web Services servers in Virginia, USA. AWS complies with the EU “Privacy Shield” protocols. To the extent that we share your data with third parties, their own privacy policies should provide information about data storage.

How long will you keep my data?

For data associated with an account, we will keep your data for as long as you have an account. For tracking and other data not associated with an account, we have set Google Analytics to retain the data for 26 months. We also cleanse superfluous personal data from our order transaction records after 30 days. We will not keep your data longer than is necessary. Third parties with whom we share your data will keep data in accordance with their own data retention policies.

What other rights do I have in connection with my data?

You have the right to access and download your personal information. If you wish to do so, click here. You may also rectify (that is, correct) your personal information; to do so, click here.

You have the right to request the erasure of your personal data (i.e., the right to be “forgotten”). To make such a request, click here. When you request to erase your personal data and you have posted on the forums, we may anonymize the posts without removing them.

Finally, you have the right to withdraw consent to the sharing of your personal information with third parties, to the extent that Kodeco relied on your consent to share it in the first place. To withdraw consent, you should follow the steps necessary to clear cookies from your browser; for a link to a list of those steps for various browsers, visit https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/cookies/. This will have the following effects: We will not be able to load the tracking libraries next time you visit the Website; you will be logged out of the Website if you have a user account; you will once again see the box on the Website allowing you to give consent to tracking cookies; and your browser will delete the unique tracking IDs that Google, Drip, Facebook have put in your browser, which removes the ability to track your use of the Website and prevents the display of Kodeco-oriented ads on other sites. You may also withdraw your consent to the sending of direct marketing e-mails by clicking here.

How do we protect the information we collect?

We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the Website, your information is protected both online and offline.

Wherever we collect sensitive information (such as credit card data), that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for "https" at the beginning of the address of the web page.

Although we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, billing or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.

Third parties with whom we share your information protect it in accordance with their own data protection policies.

How will you notify me of changes in the privacy policy?

We may update the Privacy and Cookie Policy from time to time, and we will always post the most up to date version on the Website. If we make material changes to the privacy policy, we will notify you by sending an e-mail or by causing an additional box to appear on your screen when you access the Website.

Although this Privacy Policy is generally applicable, we never want to lose business because you feel uncomfortable with some aspect of it. We want to work with you. If you have questions, or if you are concerned about what you perceive as a violation of this Privacy Policy or applicable law, please reach out to us at support@kodeco.com.