Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At The Maple, we have a few fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
We use as few cookies as possible.
We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to add you as a free or paying member, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up a free your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a The Maple account to provide an email address — and that’s it.
Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile.
Payment and contact information: If you become a paid subscriber or buy something from us, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us, you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made.
Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, or post a comment.. When you communicate with us via form, email, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications.

Links to other websites and services
Our website may integrate with or contain links to other third party sites and services, such as an embedded Tweet or YouTube video. While we strive to keep cookies to a minimum, we are not responsible for the practices employed by third party websites or services embedded in, linked to, or linked from our website. Your interactions with any third-party website or service are subject to that third party’s own rules and policies.

Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically:

Usage information: We collect information about subscribers' usage of The Maple. For example, we collect information about when you visit. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
Location information: Our publishing system may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
Information from cookies & other technologies: We only use cookies to log-in users and do not cookie any reader who is not a free or paid subscriber. We also other technologies like pixel tags to understand email campaign effectiveness.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We and our partners use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, deliver newsletters, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy or make our Services easier to use.
To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of The Maple and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on The Maple.

How We Share Information
We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy.

Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe, which powers subscription payments, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, those that host our website, assist us with our marketing efforts; those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); and other third-party tools that help us manage operations. We only use vendors that agree to similar privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about how many subscribers we have, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request (without your name or identifying information attached) in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

We do not sell our users' data.

We aren't a data broker, we don't sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don't sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly. That means information like your comments are all available to others — and we hope they get a lot of views!

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we and our partners work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We and our partners monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you and communications:

Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, paid subscriber-only posts may not be accessible.
Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, The Maple does not respond to “do not track” signals, since we don't use tracking cookies.
Unsubscribe from our newsletters: Free and paid subscribers may unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time, either through the unsubscribe link at the end of every newsletter or on the website in your account settings. You may not opt out of Service-related communications (e.g., account verification, payment confirmation, changes/updates to our products or features, technical and security notices.)
Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services.

Creative Commons Sharealike License

We built this privacy policy using the template created by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, who made their Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can grab a copy of their Privacy Policy and other legal documents on GitHub. You’re more than welcome to copy ours or theirs, and adapt and repurpose them for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your policy reflects your actual practices. If you do use it, we’d appreciate a credit and link to our website and to Automattic/WordPress somewhere on your site.