Southern Muse Privacy Policy

This Privacy Statement was last updated on April 10, 2009. If you have not reviewed it since that date, please do so. You will not receive any other notice of changes to this statement. This document may be updated at any time at the discretion of Southern Muse, editor.

The Southern Muse website and all related pages are not directed at children under the age of 18. If you are under 18, please do not provide any personal information to Southern Muse or its editor(s).

Southern Muse respects your privacy. We do not collect personally identifiable information without your express consent and approval. [IMPORTANT: GENEALOGY EXCLUSION/DISCLAIMER].

Generally, Southern Muse does not collect personal information at all, except as needed to complete a specific business transaction. Southern Muse is not a secure website and does not provide shopping carts. Instead, we use secure, reputable third-party vendors (such as PayPal or Google) to conduct such business. Read below for more information on privacy.

You do not have to provide personal information to use the Southern Muse website. You will not be asked to provide personal information unless that information is necessary for us to respond to your specific request. If you do provide such information, Southern Muse will not use it to SPAM you and Southern Muse will not share your personal information with any third party, except at your request and with your express permission. Exception: Genealogical queries are considered special requests and may fall under our policy regarding PERMANENT CONTACTS. If your correspondence is related to genealogy, please read our SPECIAL PRIVACY POLICY REGARDING GENEALOGY and PERMANENT CONTACTS

Southern Muse does not collect your credit-card information for any reason. Occasionally, Southern Muse does sell products or services such as artwork. In such cases, Southern Muse uses secure, reputable third-party websites, such as PayPal or Google, in order to complete the transaction. In such cases, Southern Muse will not have access to your credit-card information. However, Southern Muse may have access to other personally identifiable information, such as your name, address, email address, and/or phone number. We will use this information only as needed to complete the transaction, ship the product, and participate in any follow-up correspondence as appropriate. Southern Muse will not use your information to send unsolicited email correspondence. Southern Muse will not share your information with any third party; except with PayPal or Google, as appropriate, and then, only as needed to complete the business transaction. (See more, below, about third-party vendors.)

Email:

Southern Muse uses standard email accounts (hosted by Yahoo), not secure email. Standard email correspondence may be viewed by third parties. Users who wish to relay private information to Southern Muse or its editors are strongly encouraged to use the U.S. Postal Service to contact Southern Muse (More information about contacting Southern Muse.) If Southern Muse receives personally identifiable information through USPS, the information will only be used as needed to complete business transactions, such as shipping purchased products, as requested by the user. (EXCLUSION: SEE GENEALOGY SECTION.)

Occasionally, Southern Muse may provide a user or page administrator with an email account or similar service on our account. In that event, the user may be required to provide name, address, phone number or other personally identifiable information from the user in order to provide, service, and maintain said email account for the user. Southern Muse email is hosted by a third-party, Yahoo, and is subject to Yahoo's privacy policy.

Privacy Regarding User Correspondence and Queries

Southern Muse receives a number of queries and general questions regarding articles, topics and themes of our website. The following special privacy policy covers correspondence initiated by user(s) of the Southern Muse website and directed to the editor, artist, or other entity of Southern Muse. Your emails and letters to the editor or artist at Southern Muse are handled in different ways, with different levels of privacy, depending upon the nature and subject of the correspondence.

TOPICAL QUERIES
Southern Muse receives queries on certain subjects, such as chenille tufting, art, the South, and other themes and topics. Generally, Southern Muse retains a user's email queries for a short period of time, in order to answer questions and participate in any follow-up emails between the user and the editor, after which the user's email and personal information is deleted. If Southern Muse cannot immediately answer the user's question, but agrees to do further research, the user's email address may be retained for an undetermined length of time while Southern Muse attempts to research a topic in order to answer the user's question(s), and participate in any follow-up correspondence. When it appears that the correspondence is complete, the user's email address and personal information will be deleted. Southern Muse will not SPAM you and will not share your personal information with any third party without your express permission.

GENERAL SITE QUERIES
Southern Muse reads and responds to general site queries and other unsolicited email at our own discretion. Polite queries from webmasters and other users may, at our discretion, receive a polite, appropriate response ~ after which the user's email and all personal information will be deleted. If Southern Muse is interested in a webmaster's site submission (or other query), Southern Muse may retain your email for an undetermined period of time, for further review, while we decide whether to provide a link or participate in follow-up correspondence. Once a link is selected for publication, the link will be retained, but your email and other personal information will be deleted. Southern Muse will not SPAM you and will not share your personal information with any third party without your express permission. We do not respond to commercial SPAM. Unsolicited bulk or commercial email from any user may be reported as SPAM and will be deleted.

Third Party Vendors

Southern Muse uses PayPal, a secure site, to complete business transactions as requested by you, the user, in a secure manner. When PayPal is used to complete a transaction, Southern Muse will not have access to the user's credit-card information. Southern Muse will have access to such personally identifiable information as is needed to complete the transaction and ship the product to the user. This may include name, address, telephone number, and email address. Southern Muse does not share this information with any third party (other than PayPal, as needed to complete the transaction). Southern Muse does not use this information to send unsolicited email to the user.

Southern Muse may provide a secure link to PayPal as needed to complete a sales transaction. Users are encouraged to double-check the link provided and make sure that the provided URL is secure, and that it is housed on PayPal's secure servers. The secure URL should begin with: https://www.paypal.com/. Transactions completed using PayPal are subject to PayPal's privacy policy. (Read more about PayPal's privacy policy.)

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Southern Muse. Google's use of the Double-click DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Southern Muse is hosted by Yahoo Webhosting. Like most Web servers on the Internet, Southern Muse (through Yahoo Webhosting) collects and stores within Web-access logs all of the information that your Web browser sends when it requests a Web page, including:

- the name, domain, and numerical internet address of the host computer (typically a computer belonging to your Internet Service Provider and not your personal computer) from which you access the Internet;
- the date and time you accessed our sitee;
- the Internet address of the Web page thhat you came from;
- the page you requested from our site annd the number of characters sent to your computer; and
- the information your Web browser softwaare sends as its so-called “User Agent,” which typically identifies the browser software and may also indicate the operating system used in your personal computer and the type of computer.

It is impossible to determine the actual identity of an individual user from this information. The logs are periodically summarized and analyzed to study site usage over time and to perform other studies to help us improve the site's organization, performance, and usefulness. Monthly extracts of the log files are archived and stored offline at our discretion for an indefinite period of time. Some statistical summaries derived from these data may be retained online or offline at our discretion for an indefinite period of time. These analytical reports are performed for Southern Muse by Yahoo, and are subject to Yahoo's privacy policy.

Southern Muse Postcards are delivered using forms created by a third-party vendor, Free CGI. Postcards are provided for the entertainment of you, the user. Southern Muse does not collect email addresses using the postcard tool. However, you, the user, should be aware that Free CGI is not a secure server! Free CGI simply offers free CGI code and other tools that allow webmasters to create postcards, forms, and other interactive materials for their website. When sending postcards, users are required to enter their own email address and the email address of the recipient. In this case, the third-party vendor, Free-CGI, may have access to any and all email addresses entered. Southern Muse has informally tested postcards and has not found Free CGI itself to be a SPAMMER. However, users who send postcards typically send such cards to multiple recipients or forward similar content to multiple users. As a result, postcard users may be subject to SPAM as a matter of course. For this reason, users are greatly encouraged to use disposable email addresses when sending postcards, jokes, and other correspondence intended for entertainment only. Users are also advised that some email recipients might regard postcards and other such entertaining correspondence as SPAM. Southern Muse encourages users to respect the wishes of friends and business contacts regarding the use of postcards. In any case, Southern Muse expressly forbids the use of postcards for the sending of commercial or intentional SPAM! Please use postcards sparingly for the entertainment of your friends.

Cookies:

Southern Muse and Yahoo Webhosting use cookies in order to complete generic usage reports such as number of unique page visits by user. These reports are completed by Yahoo Webhosting for Southern Muse, and are subject to Yahoo's privacy policy. Cookies contain non-personally identifiable information.

Minors/Children Under the Age of Eighteen:

Southern Muse does not collect personally identifiable information from children under the age of eighteen (18). Minors are discouraged from sharing personally identifiable information of any kind with any website without consulting a parent or guardian. In regards to children under the age of thirteen (13), Southern Muse adheres to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement:

Southern Muse cooperates with law enforcement officials or private parties to make the Internet to enforce and comply with the law, in order to make the Internet a safe place for business and correspondence. We may disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate to respond to claims, legal process (including subpoenas), to protect the property and rights of Southern Muse or a third party, the safety of the public or any person, to prevent or stop any illegal, unethical, or legally actionable activity, or to comply with the law.