Privacy Statement

Last Updated 4/08/2009

Coastal Research Group is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build user’s trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This privacy statement covers the Web site www.studentdoctor.net. Because this Web site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact the SDN Executive Director, Lee Burnett at http://studentdoctor.net/contact-us/

If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily address, you should contact TRUSTe at http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with us to resolve your concerns.

The Coastal Research Group is the sole owner of the information collected on The Student Doctor Network. The Student Doctor Network collects personally identifiable information from our users at several different points on our Web site.

Registration

In order to use some sections of this Web site, you must first complete the registration form and create a user name and password. During registration you are required to give contact information (such as email address and age). We use this information at the time of registration to ensure validity of member registrations.

Protecting the privacy of young children is important to us. We do not knowingly collect or maintain personally identifiable information on our site from persons under 13 years of age. If we learn that a person less than 13 years of age has been collected on our site, then we will take the appropriate steps to delete this account.

Orders

SDN Bookstore

When you choose to purchase products or view our SDN Bookstore, you will be taken to www.amazon.com. We are a member of their affiliate program. All information colleted on this site is governed by Amazon.com’s privacy statement:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468496

Tell-A-Friend

If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. The Student Doctor Network does not store this information.

Uses of Information

We use the personal information you supply us, including your registration data, to enhance our services; fulfill your requests for products, programs, or services; and personalize your experience. We also use other information obtained from user site traffic patterns to better provide you with a personalized experience.

The Student Doctor Network uses the information described above to do, among other things, the following:

• Personalize and enhance the site and service such as providing you with information we believe will be of interest to you.
• We may also use the information we collect to develop summary reports for our advertisers. An example of a summary report might be “100,000 people clicked on this advertisement.” We provide this information to assist our advertisers in determining how to promote their products. We do not tell our advertisers who it was that saw or clicked on their advertisements.

Information that you provide while using products such as SDN Forums and SDN Chat is available for all to see. Discretion should be used in entering Personally Identifiable Information within such forums, as it may be collected by third parties. The Coastal Research Group does not actively associate the message content entered by our users in SDN Forums, or SDN Chat with those users’ registration information. Our server computers will retain this information. It is available for distribution to law-enforcement agencies acting under subpoena power. See “Legal Disclaimer” below.

Communications from the Site

SDN Forum Notices

We will occasionally send you email messages from the SDN Forums. We only send information that you specifically request during registration at the SDN Forums. This includes, but is not limited to, Private Message notifications, subscribed thread notifications, system updates and birthday greetings.

Choice/Opt-Out

You may indicate when you register whether or not you would like to receive messages from our Web Administrator as described above.
To opt-out of SDN Forum messages, please edit your messaging and notification options at: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/profile.php?do=editoptions
Contact us at http://studentdoctor.net/contact-us/ should you have any trouble administering your account.

Service-related Announcements

We will send you strictly service-related announcements on rare occasions when it is necessary to do so. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email. You may not opt-out of receiving these communications.

Customer Service

Based upon the personally identifiable information you provide us, we will send you a welcoming email to verify your username and password. We will also communicate with you in response to your inquiries, to provide the services you request, and to manage your account. We will communicate with you by email only.

Profile

We store information that we collect through cookies, log files, and clear gifs to create a “profile” of your preferences. We do not tie your personally identifiable information, or your purchasing history, to information in the profile.

We do not share your individual profile with other third parties. However, we may share information from your profile in aggregate form only with potential or existing advertisers or potential or current partner organizations.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)

We share aggregated demographic information about our user base with our advertisers. This information does not identify individual users. This includes, but is not limited to, age, gender, education status. We do not link aggregate user data with personally identifiable information.

Sharing of Information with SDN Partners or Affiliates

You have the option to opt-in to receive email from SDN partners or affiliates.  If you choose this option, we may share your email address with those organizations.  We will put in place reasonable restrictions to maintain proper use of your personal information by such providers.

Personally identifiable information

We DO NOT Share Personally Identifiable Information with Third Parties who are not agents or service providers.

Service Providers

We use an outside shipping company to fulfill orders (for example SDN T-Shirts). We use PayPal who will bill you for goods purchased on their site and when donating to SDN. You will be directed to the PayPal.com Web site in these cases, and PayPal’s privacy statement will govern the collection and use of personally identifiable information during this process. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any other purposes except order fulfillment. They may not use it for their own marketing purposes.

Legal Disclaimer

We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.

Log Files

As is true of most Web sites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.

We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users’ movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

We do link this automatically-collected data to personally identifiable information. IP addresses are tied to personally identifiable information to allow us to ban guests that repeatedly violate our terms of service and/or usage policies.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on this site. We do link the information we store in cookies to personally identifiable information you submit while on our site. We do this to allow you to remain logged-in while using the SDN Forums, Wiki, Classifieds and My SDN Space.

We use both session ID cookies and persistent cookies. We use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser’s “help” file.

Cookies are used to enhance your experience at the SDN Forums. We set a persistent cookie to store your passwords, so you don’t have to enter it more than once. Persistent cookies also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site.

If you reject cookies, you may still use our site, but your ability to use some areas of our site, such as the SDN Forums, will be limited.

Some advertisers use cookies on our site. We have no access to or control over these cookies. This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by this site only and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers. See the “Third Party Advertisers” section.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)

We employ, and/or our third party advertising partner, Google, may employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better manage content on our site by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information.

To learn more about Google’s use of clear gifs, please go to www.google.com.

Third Party Advertisers

Some of the ads appearing on this Web site are delivered to users by Google, our advertising partner.  Google may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.

Links to Other Sites

This Web site contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by The Coastal Research Group such as Amazon.com and PayPal.com. Please be aware that we, The Coastal Research Group, are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.
We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Web site that collects personally identifiable information.

This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this Web site.

Forums and Chat Rooms

If you use the SDN Forums or SDN chat room on this site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. However, use of information for these purposes is a violation of our SDN Forums Usage Policies.

Access to Personally Identifiable Information

If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, delete or deactivate it by making the change on our member information page or by contacting us through our contact form.

Security

The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can contact us through our contact form.

Business Transitions

In the event The Coastal Research Group goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another organization, or distribution of all or a portion of its assets, your personally identifiable information will likely be among the assets transferred. You will be notified via prominent notice on our Web site for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your personal information.

Changes in this Privacy Statement

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact us at:

Student Doctor Network
PO Box 1160
Sunset Beach, CA 90742

Physical Address

Student Doctor Network
26922 Oso Parkway #380
Mission Viejo, CA 92691

Or use our contact form at:
http://studentdoctor.net/contact-us/