sBooks Privacy Policy
This document describes our intentions, responsibilities, and how we operate with regard to your privacy. Note that we reserve the right to change this policy at any time and will attempt to inform users in the event of such changes. Your privacy is important to us!
sBooks is designed to help users share their online browsing and reading experiences among their friends and colleagues. sBooks makes use of beingmeta's online WebEchoes service for recording and sharing user's explicitly created notes and comments. The site maintains a database of "glosses" created as registered users of our services add comments, tags, or links (collectively, "pings") regarding web locations. These glosses can then be viewed by other registered users subject to various constraints, including their relationship to the author. We will make reasonable efforts to ensure that those constraints are satisfied but we cannot make any guarantees. You are advised to treat your glosses as public information.
You may close your sBooks account at any time. When you do this, we will immediately make all of your glosses private and delete them from our active systems within five business days. You may also delete or edit any of your glosses at any time. If another user has referred to an gloss that you have deleted, users will see a note that the referenced gloss has been deleted by its author. However, we obviously cannot assure that other users have not saved or printed copies of an gloss you have edited or deleted.
You may also disassociate your sBooks account from an external social network at any time. After doing so, we will remove all your personal information which we derived from the site. The visibility of your glosses will be limited by relationships established directly at sBooks or available from your remaining registered networks. sBooks will update its information from your registered networks on a regular basis and you can also force an update from the Settings page.
As part of operating this website, to improve our service and identify abuses, we may log information about user sessions, including machine information and IP addresses. In certain cases, we may use this information to deny service in accordance with our terms of service.
This site uses “cookies” to manage user sessions. A cookie is small amount of information that is sent from our servers to your browser and may be stored on your computer's hard disk. Normally, all of these cookies are cleared when you log out of sBooks, but you may opt-in to set a "sticky cookie" to use some advanced features of sBooks.
Unless required by law, information gained from logs or cookies will not attributed to you when shared with any third parties, except with your consent.
When you add a comment to an sBook, two options determine who will be able to see your comment. The designated tribe for the comment indicates a community which will be able to view your comment. This is combined with a specific exposure indicating the visibility of the comment to your social networks (for example, your Facebook friends).
A tribe can be an existing social network community (for example, a Facebook group or fan page), a published metadoc for which you are a contributor, or a reading circle organized around a particular text. An sBook may specify a default tribe for comments (for instance, publisher-supported reading groups), but you may always override that selection.
Currently, the exposure of a comment can be either friendly or private. Friendly comments (the default) are visible to all your friends in all of your registered social networks, as well as to everyone in the designated tribe. Private comments are visible only to yourself and the tribe that you designate.
