Privacy Policy

(Last updated: November 10, 2022)
CCPA privacy statement

Your privacy matters to us

Welcome to Bigwords (Bigwords). Because we are committed to protecting your privacy in all aspects of our business, we hope you will take the time to read this policy, which explains what information we collect from you and how we use and disclose that information. This Privacy Policy ("Policy") is incorporated into and is subject to the Bigwords Terms of Use ("Terms"), and capitalized terms used but not defined in this Privacy Policy are defined in the Terms. Bigwords operates the web site located at www.bigwords.com, as well as other services including the online store, marketplace, community and any other features, content, or services we may offer from time to time (collectively, the "Service"). This Policy does not apply to the practices of companies that Bigwords does not own or control, or to people that Bigwords does not employ or manage. The collection and use of your information by third parties (such as on third party web sites and services that are linked to, reference, advertised, or otherwise made available to you through the Service, or other users of the Service, such as users who you transact with to buy and sell items) are governed by those parties' own policies. Before using such third party services or transacting with other users, you should familiarize yourself with their policies and practices with respect to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information.

What information we collect from you

Bigwords collects a variety of personal information from you when you register with Bigwords and when you use the Service, including information that may be used to identify you, commonly referred to as "personally identifiable information."

• Account and Order Information:When you register for an account, you must provide certain information, such as your first name and email address, and to choose a password (your "Account Information"). We also receive personally identifiable information from you when you update any of your information on the Service.
• Other Information:The Service includes a variety of other features that allow you to voluntarily provide personally identifiable information to Bigwords, such as by our community features, "chat with an agent" feature or other customer service systems, email submission forms, contests, drawings, surveys, and others. Bigwords may use all of this information throughout the Service to provide the Service to you and other users.
• Information from Third Parties:We may also receive information about you if you order books on another web site through a third party partner of Bigwords.
• "Automatically Collected" Information:Like most web sites, when you visit the Service, Bigwords automatically collects a variety of information about your computer and your use of the Service in log files, such as your IP address, address or device id, operating system, and browser type, as well as information regarding pages you visit, web sites you visit before or after using the Service, search queries you may have used to find the Service, items on the Service you view, and transactions you engage in through the Service. If automatically collected information is used or intended to be used to identify you, or if we associate or combine this information with your other personally identifiable information, we will treat the associated or combined information as personally identifiable information under this Policy.
• "Cookies" Information:The Service also uses "cookies," which are small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer's hard drive so that the Service may access that information on your return visits. We generally do not store or retrieve any personally identifiable information in cookies. If you've set your browser to reject cookies, you can still use our site, but will not be able to take full advantage of all the features of the Service.

How Bigwords uses your information

Bigwords uses information you provide or that we collect for a variety of purposes.

• Communication:We use your information to communicate with you regarding the Service, such as for administrative purposes, customer service purposes, to address intellectual property infringement, or rights of privacy, and as otherwise may be necessary to provide, operate, maintain, and enhance, the Service. For certain types of communications relating to the Service and your account with Bigwords (such as notifications, service announcements, and administrative messages, and the like) you will not have the opportunity to opt-out. If you subscribe to the Bigwords newsletter, we may use your Account Information to occasionally notify you about important changes to the Service, new Bigwords features, or special Bigwords offers you may find useful. If you would prefer to opt out of receiving this information, visit your account page to change your preferences.
• Providing and Improving the Service; Personalization:We may also use information we collect from you (including automatically collected information and cookies information) (i) to provide, customize, and personalize features of the Service (such as remembering your information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you use the Service), (ii) to analyze and understand the usage trends and preferences of users of the Service, and the effectiveness of our marketing and communication efforts, so that we can continually improve our offerings, (iii) to perform internal reporting, analysis, maintenance, enhancements, troubleshooting, and other related development work, and (iv) to provide customized third party advertisements, content, and information.

How Bigwords shares and discloses your information

Bigwords is not in the business of selling your information, and we take your privacy very seriously. In the course of providing the Service to you and other users, we do make limited disclosures of your information to others for a variety of purposes.

• Technical Service Providers: We offer certain of our services on or through resellers and third party service providers. Personal information that you provided to us may be sent to those resellers and third party service providers in order to deliver the product or service. We will only pass information to those resellers and third party service providers that is needed to provide the product or service that you have requested. We process all personal information under the terms of this privacy policy. The resellers and third party service providers may have different privacy policies and we encourage you to read their privacy policies. Bigwords works with third party service providers to provide website development, maintenance, and hosting, promotional email distribution, backup storage, as well as other services for us. In the course of performing services for Bigwords, these providers may have access to or process your personally identifiable information. Generally, these disclosures are made under terms comparable to this Policy, and the recipients are limited to using the information the purpose for which it was provided.
• Your Communications: The Service enables users to publish information and communicate in a variety of ways. Any personal information that you voluntarily choose to include in a message to another user, or in a publicly accessible area on the Service (such as a public profile page, comment submission or other community posting, or a wishlist), may be made available through the Service in a variety of publicly accessible areas and identify you as the source of the information. As a result, any personal information you submit in this manner will be available to other users who access that content. Once you make your personal information available to others, Bigwords cannot control how it is collected, used, and disclosed by the recipients.
• Payment Processing: In the course of providing the Service, we may disclose your personally identifiable information to third party providers in connection with the processing of credit card payments or other payment method transactions.
• Aggregate Information: Bigwords may also provide aggregate, non-personally identifiable information and statistics about our users, customers, demographics, sales, traffic patterns, and other information related to the Service to third parties.

Except as specified above, Bigwords does not share your personal information with third parties unless you have consented to the disclosure or Bigwords believes the disclosure is necessary to (1) comply with the law or with legal process, or to cooperate with law enforcement activities, (2) protect and defend our rights and property, (3) protect our customers or users from misuse or unauthorized use of the Bigwords Site, or (4) protect the personal safety or property of our customers or the public.

Your choices

You may, of course, decline to share certain personally identifiable information with Bigwords. You may also update, correct, or delete your profile information and preferences at any time by logging in to Your Account. Please note that while your changes may be reflected promptly in active user databases, we may retain all information you submit for a variety of purposes, including backups and archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, and analytics, including copies stored in our network environment as well as archival backups copies stored offsite by third party providers. If you would rather not receive certain promotional information via email, such as through the Bigwords Newsletter, or you would like to change other privacy settings (such as whether your wishlist is public), visit Your Account to change your preferences.
(Whenever you decide to change your preferences, please make sure to change your preferences for each account or email address you have with us.) To delete your account from our system, contact customer service.
To protect your privacy and security, we take steps to verify your identity before granting you account access or making changes to your information and preferences. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of any applicable password and account access credentials at all times.

How we protect your information

This Site has security measures in place to help reduce the risk of loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. When you place orders or access your account information, we use a secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol, which encrypts all information during transmission. All of the customer data we collect is similarly protected against unauthorized access. We also employ other physical, managerial, and technical safeguards to preserve the integrity and security of personally identifiable information in our control. Nevertheless, in spite of our efforts to prevent third parties from intercepting or accessing your information (whether stored on our servers or during transmission), we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or communications will always remain private.

Our commitment to children's privacy online

At Bigwords, we understand that children's privacy is particularly important. Use of the Service by children under 13 is prohibited by the Terms, and if you are under age 13, you should not use the Service or submit personal identifying information to Bigwords. If Bigwords learns that personally-identifiable information of children under than 13 has been collected on the Service without verifiable parental consent, then we will take the appropriate steps to delete this information. If you are a parent or guardian and discover that your child under the age of 13 has posted or submitted personal information to the Service, please alert us and request that Bigwords delete that child's personal information from our systems. Parents wishing to limit their children's access to material they believe may be harmful, should look into commercially available hardware, software, and filtering devices.

Modifications to this Policy

As specified in the Terms, Bigwords may from time to time revise this Policy. If we do, we will post those changes on this page and indicate the new Policy's effective date so that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it. For changes to this Policy that may be materially less restrictive on our use or disclosure of personal information you have provided to us, we will notify you before implementing the change. Unless we receive your express consent, we will only use and disclose your information in a manner consistent with the version of the Policy that was in effect at the time we collected that information. We encourage you to periodically review this Policy to stay informed about how we are protecting the information we collect from you.

International customers

If you use the Service from countries outside the United States, please note that your personally identifiable information may be transferred to the United States as our Site is hosted on servers located in those countries. By using the Service, you consent to having your personally identifiable information transmitted to and processed in the United States.

In the event of merger or sale

In the event that all or a portion of Bigwords or its assets are acquired by or merged with a third party entity, Bigwords reserves the right, in any of these circumstances, to transfer or assign the information that we have collected from users in connection with such merger, acquisition, sale, or other change of control. In such a case, your information will still be subject to the terms of the Policy in place at the time of transfer.

How to contact us

Bigwords welcomes your questions and comments about privacy. Please send email to [email protected]. You can also contact us at the address below:

Bigwords
75 McCabe Dr.
P.O. Box 17518
Reno, NV 89511
US

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PRIVACY STATEMENT-CALIFORNIA

This PRIVACY STATEMENT - CALIFORNIA supplements the information contained in our Privacy Policy and applies solely to Bigwords website users who reside in the State of California ("consumers" or "you"). We adopt this notice to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 ("CCPA") and other California privacy laws. Any terms defined in the CCPA have the same meaning when used in this notice.

Information We Collect

We collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or device ("personal information"). In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from consumers within the last twelve (12) months:

Personal information does not include:

• Publicly available information from government records.
• De-identified or aggregated consumer information.
• Information excluded from the CCPA's scope, like:

1. Health or medical information covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) or clinical trial data;
2. personal information covered by certain sector-specific privacy laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) or California Financial Information Privacy Act (FIPA), and the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994.

We obtain the categories of personal information listed above from the following categories of sources:

• Directly and indirectly from activity on our website (www.bigwords.com). For example, searching and browsing.

Use of Personal Information

We may use or disclose the personal information we collect for one or more of the following business purposes:

• To fulfill or meet the reason for which the information is provided.
• To provide you with information, products or services that you request from us.
• To carry out our obligations and enforce our rights arising from any contracts entered into between you and us, including for billing and collections.
• To improve our website and present its contents to you.
• For testing, research, analysis and product development.
• As necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property or safety of us, our clients or others.
• To respond to law enforcement requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.
• As described to you when collecting your personal information or as otherwise set forth in the CCPA.

We will not collect additional categories of personal information or use the personal information we collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes without providing you notice.

Sharing Personal Information

We do not share or sell your personal information.

We may disclose your personal information to a third party for a business purpose. When we disclose personal information for a business purpose, we enter a contract that describes the purpose and requires the recipient to both keep that personal information confidential and not use it for any purpose except performing the contract.
In the preceding twelve (12) months, we have disclosed the following categories of personal information for a business purpose:

Category A: Identifiers.
Category B: California Customer Records personal information categories.
Category D: Commercial Information
Category F: Internet Activity

We disclose your personal information for a business purpose to the following categories of third parties:

• Our affiliates.
• Service providers.
• Third parties to whom you or your agents authorize us to disclose your personal information in connection with products or services we provide to you.

In the preceding twelve (12) months, we have not sold any personal information.

Your Rights and Choices

The CCPA provides consumers (California residents) with specific rights regarding their personal information. This section describes your CCPA rights and explains how to exercise those rights.

Access to Specific Information and Data Portability Rights

You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past 12 months. Nearly all of the personal information we collect about you is viewable in the Account section of our website. If you do make a disclosure request, once we receive, confirm, and verify it, we will disclose to you:

• The categories of personal information we collected about you.
• The categories of sources for the personal information we collected about you.
• Our business or commercial purpose for collecting that personal information.
• The categories of third parties with whom we share that personal information.
The specific pieces of personal information we collected about you (also called a data portability request).
• If we disclosed your personal information for a business purpose, identifying the personal information categories that each category of recipient obtained.

Deletion Request Rights

You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions. Once we receive and confirm your verifiable consumer request, we will delete (and direct our service providers to delete) your personal information from our records, unless an exception applies.

We may deny your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for us or our service providers to:

1. Complete the transaction for which we collected the personal information, provide a good or service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our contract with you.
2. Detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities.
3. Debug products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality.
4. Exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law.
5. Comply with the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code ร‚ยง 1546 seq.).
6. Engage in public or peer-reviewed scientific, historical, or statistical research in the public interest that adheres to all other applicable ethics and privacy laws, when the information's deletion may likely render impossible or seriously impair the research's achievement, if you previously provided informed consent.
7. Enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us.
8. Comply with a legal obligation.
9. Make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.

Exercising Access, Data Portability, and Deletion Rights

To exercise the access, data portability, and deletion rights described above, please submit a verifiable consumer request to us by either:

Emailing us at [email protected]

Only you or a person registered with the California Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your personal information. You may also make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child.
You may only make a verifiable consumer request for access or data portability twice within a 12-month period. The verifiable consumer request must:

• Provide sufficient information, including the email address associated with your Bigwords account, that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information or an authorized representative.
• Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.

We cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the personal information relates to you. Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us. We will only use personal information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor's identity or authority to make the request.

Response Timing and Format

We endeavor to respond to a verifiable consumer request within 45 days of its receipt. If we require more time (up to 90 days), we will inform you of the reason and extension period in writing. Any disclosures we provide will only cover the 12-month period preceding the verifiable consumer request's receipt. The response we provide will also explain the reasons we cannot comply with a request, if applicable. For data portability requests, we will select a format to provide your personal information that is readily useable and should allow you to transmit the information from one entity to another entity without hindrance.

We do not charge a fee to process or respond to your verifiable consumer request unless it is excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded. If we determine that the request warrants a fee, we will tell you why we made that decision and provide you with a cost estimate before completing your request.

Non-Discrimination

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights. Unless permitted by the CCPA, we will not:

• Deny you goods or services.
• Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or other benefits, or imposing penalties.
• Provide you a different level or quality of goods or services.
• Suggest that you may receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services.

Changes to Our Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to amend this privacy notice at our discretion and at any time. When we make changes to this privacy notice, the changes will appear on this page along with the date of the most recent update.

Contact Information

If you have any questions or comments about this notice, our Privacy Statement, the ways in which we collect and use your personal information, your choices and rights regarding such use, or wish to exercise your rights under California law, please do not hesitate to contact us at:

Website: https://www.bigwords.com/contact/contact-home
Email: [email protected]
Postal Address: Bigwords, Inc.
75 McCabe Dr.
P.O. Box 17518
Reno, NV 89511
US