At beingmeta, your privacy is important to us and this document describes our intentions, responsibilities, and the limits to our responsibilities 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.
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 "echoes" created as registered users of our services add comments, tags, or links (collectively, "pings") regarding web locations identified by URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). These echoes 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 so you are advised to treat your echoes as public information.
Registered users of sBooks usually associate their sBooks account with one or more external accounts on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. We honor the privacy policies and terms of service of those sites and will only use the information from those sites in conjunction with sBooks or user-approved applications that use the sBooks platform. Your sBooks settings page allows you to customize how this information is used and to control the visibility of your echoes to other users.
You may close your sBooks account at any time. When you do this, we will immediately make all of your echoes private and delete them from our active systems within five business days. You may also delete or edit any of your echoes at any time. If another user has referred to an echo that you have deleted, users will see a note that the referenced echo has been deleted by its author. However, we obviously cannot assure that other users have not saved or printed copies of an echo 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. Also, the visibility of your echoes 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, we may log information about user sessions, including machine information and IP addresses, in order to improve our service and identify abuses. 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 be shared with any third parties, except with your consent or in anonymized form.
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.