Privacy Statement

This Privacy Statement outlines what personal information is collected and why as well as how we use your information to provide you with a personalized, relevant, user-friendly experience on the Website and other websites and mobile applications that we operate worldwide and which link directly to this Privacy Statement. This Privacy Statement applies to visitors and new users registering on the Website on or after April 15, 2015.

Our Privacy Commitment
BrightStat.com mission is to help everyone to analyze and visualize personal, professional and/or scientific data. We accomplish this by using the resources available on our website and also through collaborating with our extensive number of users around the world. This involves the collecting, processing, storing and sharing of personal and non-personal information. We are committed to ensuring that this is done in a responsible, transparent and secure environment that fosters your trust and confidence. As part of our commitment to you, we have developed this Privacy Statement to describe how we gather and use the information we receive from you on BrightStat.com.com (hereafter, the 'Website'). Please review the information below to familiarize yourself with our policies.

By using the Website you consent to the collection, processing, use, storage, transfer and disclosure of your personal information by BrightStat.com scians GmbH (the company that owns and operates the Website, either directly or through its affiliated companies), its group companies ('Group Companies"), contracted third parties and agents (collectively 'BrightStat.com,' 'we', 'us' or 'our') in accordance with this Privacy Statement. As a reminder, by registering with the Website you are becoming part of the 'BrightStat.com Community' a resource in which the users of the Website ('Users') may upload, change, analyze and visualize personal, professional and/or scientific data. Please be aware that some sites may have some additional specific policies or different functionality and you should read and / or understand these before using the relevant services.

This Privacy Statement should be read in conjunction with the BrightStat.com Terms and Conditions.

1.  What personal information does BrightStat.com collect from or about you?
We only collect information we believe is necessary for our legitimate business interests. Here is a list of the type of personal information we request, collect or you provide:

i) Name, contact information and payment details: Users may access some of the areas of the Website without providing any personal information to BrightStat.com. To gain access to certain parts of the Website, it will be necessary to create a registered user account by providing your name, email address, and a password. To gain full access to the paid members-only areas (including through a free trial), BrightStat.com also asks for your payment details (such as a credit or debit card number) to facilitate payment and fulfillment for any subscription or purchases you may choose to make through the Website. The amount of other personal information you decide to submit to BrightStat.com is up to you but understand that your experience of the Website may suffer if you choose to provide no additional information.

ii) Your opinions and comments: If you participate in community discussions, chats, communications with us or between you and other users, in disputes and while communicating with member services, BrightStat.com will capture that information. You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them. To request removal of your personal information from our blog or community forum, contact us by the contact information below and we will consider it for removal.

iii) Minors: Our Website and Services are intended for adults. BrightStat.com relies upon parents or guardians 18 years of age or older to determine if the Website and Services are appropriate for use by individuals under the age of 18. When a minor uses the Website, the parent or guardian of that minor will be held responsible for the minor's actions and are deemed to have consented to the use of the minor's information by BrightStat.com. We do not knowingly seek or collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If BrightStat.com becomes aware that we have unknowingly collected personal information from a child under the age of 13, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to delete such information from our databases.

2.  How does BrightStat.com use personal information?
Any personal information you provide us or that we otherwise collect may be transferred to and stored and processed in other countries which may provide a different level of protection for personal data than in your country of residence. By allowing us to collect personal information, you specifically consent to the transfer, storage, and processing of that personal information. Please be aware that any personal information you elect to post on our Website may be made available elsewhere within the BrightStat.com Community and may be visible to both registered and non-registered users of the Website.

Subject to the restrictions described in this Privacy Statement and applicable law, we may use personal information for any reasonable purpose related to the business, including to communicate with you, to provide you information about BrightStat.com products and services, to respond to your requests, to update our product offerings, to improve the content and User experience on the Website, to let you know about offers of interest from BrightStat.com, and to prepare and perform demographic, benchmarking, advertising, marketing, and promotional studies. In particular we may use your personal information as follows:

i) To provide the Service: We primarily use your personal information to provide you with relevant information such as appropriate search results, information about content releases and product updates, or informational updates that you have requested through the Website, or to address customer service needs and requests. BrightStat.com may also use personal information to let you know about new features, other users' activity on the Website, or other offers of interest from BrightStat.com. We also use your data to fulfill the purposes for which you have provided the personal information, such as processing your subscription.

ii) Verification: We will use your personal information to verify your identity so that you can carry out transactions through the Website, such as changing your account information, retrieving a forgotten username or password, or completing financial transactions relating to payments you make online.

iii) For internal business purposes: In order to improve the Website and the Services (or to develop new products and services), we may use personal information for internal data analysis, studying how our Website are used, identifying usage trends and determining the effectiveness of promotional campaigns.

iv) To communicate with you: BrightStat.com may communicate with you for the purpose of informing you of issues with your membership or changes to BrightStat.com or of any BrightStat.com-related products and services. Our communications with you will generally be via email, but may be made via telephone, direct mail or another method of communication in select circumstances. You may also receive promotional offers from BrightStat.com or other third parties trusted by BrightStat.com.

v) To distribute advertisements: BrightStat.com strives to show you relevant advertisements. To that end, we use the information you provide to us, aggregated demographic information (such as women between the ages of 45-60), anonymized data compared to data from third parties, or the placement of cookies and other tracking technologies (as discussed in more detail below). In these ways, BrightStat.com can display relevant ads to appropriate users either on our Website or on third party Website. We do not provide advertisers with access to your individual account information. BrightStat.com does not sell, rent or otherwise distribute the personal information you provide us to these advertisers unless you have given us your consent to do so.

vi) To showcase your contributions: We may sometimes wish to highlight our Users' contributions to the Website and may include your contribution in a highlighted section of one of the Website. When we do so, we will attribute your contribution and provide a link to your profile on the appropriate Website.

3.  Will BrightStat.com disclose any of your personal information to third parties?

BrightStat.com will not disclose any personal information to third parties except in very limited circumstances which are set out below. Before BrightStat.com begins to transfer personal information to any third party acting as our agent, we will confirm that they have adopted, are subject to, or are contractually obligated to comply with the principles and objectives of this Privacy Statement.

i) In these scenarios: Examples of the limited scenarios where BrightStat.com may disclose personal information to third parties are: (a) with your knowledge and consent; (b) as described in this Privacy Statement; (c) as may be required or permitted by law, regulatory authorities, legal process or to protect the rights, property, safety, confidentiality, or reputation of BrightStat.com, its Group Companies, or other Users (including outside your country of residence); (d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to prevent fraud or cybercrime; or (f) to permit us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

ii) To Group Companies: We may share personal information with our Group Companies so that they may use personal information for the purposes described in this Privacy Statement, to provide the additional services of those Group Companies, and for the purposes of connecting you to Users of the other Website operated by the Group Companies. BrightStat.com is responsible for the management of the jointly-used personal information. The Group Companies are subject to similar privacy statements. Additionally, as our business continues to grow and change, we might restructure, buy, or sell subsidiaries or business units. In these transactions, customer information is often one of the transferred assets, remaining subject to promises made in then prevailing privacy statements. Also, in the event that BrightStat.com, or substantially all of its assets or stock are acquired, transferred, disposed of (in whole or part and including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings), personal information will as a matter of course be one of the transferred assets.

iii) Third-party service providers: Under the protection of appropriate agreements, we may disclose personal information to third party service providers we use to perform various tasks for us including for the purposes of data storage, consolidation, retrieval, analysis, or other processing, as well as effective management of customer information and to help us communicate with you. For example, we use third parties to process payments from you and to help manage our Website and relationships with you. These third-parties are only given access to that information needed to perform their support functions, and are prohibited from using it for other purposes. These third parties include affiliated and unaffiliated service providers in in the United States, Europe, Switzerland and in other jurisdictions.

Please note: If you click away from our Website to visit the site of any third party advertiser or sponsor, you may be asked for your payment card or other personal information in order to purchase or use the products and services that those third parties offer. These companies have their own privacy and data collection practices. We have no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. You should therefore review their privacy notices carefully if you have concerns about how your information may be used. 

4.  Security

BrightStat.com places great importance on the security of all personally identifiable information associated with our Users. We have security measures in place to attempt to protect against the loss, misuse, unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure of User data under our control. For example our security and privacy practices are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized personnel have access to personal information. We use secure server software to encrypt financial information you input before it is sent to us. In addition, we use encryption when transmitting geo-location data on your mobile device. While we cannot guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur we use commercially reasonable efforts to prevent this. It is also important for you to guard against unauthorized access to your passwords and the unauthorized use of your computer.

 5.  What about non-personal information, mobile data,"cookies" and social media features?

i) Non-Personal Information. When you visit our Website, we may collect information or computer-generated data that does not personally identify you ('Non-Personal Information'), such as the website from which you have come to our Website, your Media Access Control address, your computer type, screen resolution, operating system version and Internet browser, as well as information based on your interaction with the Website, such as web log information, page views, and IP addresses on an anonymized basis. We have to use your IP address and other Non-Personal Information to deliver the Website and our Services to you and to help diagnose problems with our server. We may also collect Non-Personal Information such as demographic data, age groups, and your geographic areas, etc. Non-Personal Information also includes personal information that has been aggregated in a manner such that the end-product does not personally identify you or any other user of the Website, for example, by using personal information to calculate the percentage of our users who have a particular telephone area code or who are female. This technology helps us compile aggregated statistics about our Users and their use of the Website. We use these statistics to improve the design and content of the Website and to prepare and deliver our marketing programs. Because Non-Personal Information does not personally identify you, we may use Non-Personal Information for any purpose, including sharing that information with our Group Companies and with other third parties. In some instances, we may combine Non-Personal Information with personal information (such as combining your name with your geographical location). If we do combine any Non-Personal Information with personal information, the combined information will be treated by us as personal information, as long as it is combined, and its use by us will be subject to this Privacy Statement.

ii) Mobile data. If you access the Website using a mobile device (e.g. your phone or tablet), we may collect mobile device identifiers such as the device type, IP address and the operating system. We use mobile analytics software to allow us to deliver you the Website and the Services and better understand the functionality of our Website and Services. For example, if you are accessing the BrightStat.com mobile application, this software may record information such as how often you use the application, the events that occur within the application, aggregated usage, performance data, and where the application was downloaded from. We do not link the information we store within the analytics software to any personally identifiable information you submit within the mobile app. Our Website may also collect other non-personal information from your mobile device, such as your geographic location, with your permission. For example, if you use your mobile device to take a photo through the BrightStat.com mobile application, we will ask if you wish to include your location. If you agree to this request, we will add your location to the photo. We will also occasionally send you push notifications to provide you information about our services. You may opt-out of these notifications at the device level.

iii) Cookies and other tracking technologies. We (either ourselves or our appointed third parties) may sometimes place cookies on your web browser or utilize pixel tags (small tracking files) to analyze the use of our Website and optimize and customize the Website and your experience. Our cookies and tags do not extract any private contact information or other personal information from your computer's memory, but rather record only limited information your computer sends us when you visit our Website, such as IP addresses. In addition, the cookies and tags may include de-identified demographic or other data linked to information you voluntarily submit to us (e.g., your email address), that are shared solely in hashed, non-human readable form. Cookies enable our server to recognize or "remember" who you are each time you return. BrightStat.com may make limited use of cookies to deliver content and advertisements specific to your interests and to measure advertising effectiveness for BrightStat.com and other organizations. For instance, they may be used to retain your personal preferences, hold session information for a "shopping basket," or save your password so it doesn't have to be re-entered each time you login. These technologies may also be used to see how you move around and interact with the Website or to show you relevant ads either on or off the Website.

You can erase or block cookies from your computer if you want to (your help screen or manual should tell you how to do this), but certain Services or portions of the Website may not work correctly or at all if you set your browser not to accept cookies. To learn more about cookies in general, please visit https://www.allaboutcookies.org/.

Please note that BrightStat.com allows third-party advertisers that are presenting advertisements for us to set and access their cookies or pixel tags on your computer or otherwise use your Non-Personal Information. The advertisers' use of cookies and pixel tags is subject to their own privacy policies, not this Privacy Statement.

iv) Social media features. Our Website may include social media features, such as the Facebook 'Like' button and widgets, such as the "Share this' button or interactive mini-programs that run on our site. These features may collect your IP address, record which page you are visiting on our site, or set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Website. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy statement of the company providing it.

 6.  About our advertisements

BrightStat.com strives to show you relevant advertisements both on our Website and elsewhere on the Internet. BrightStat.com uses some third parties to show you BrightStat.com-related advertisements that are tailored to you based upon your interests or online behaviors. Any such targeted ads placed on our behalf will contain information on or near them that informs you about the third party delivering you the ads and how to opt-out of receiving such ads in the future.

Please note that the above links do not opt you out of being served advertising. Because occasionally the Website may be partially advertiser supported, you may not "turn off" the advertising that appears on the Website pages. You will continue to receive generic ads that may not be as relevant to you. If you are concerned about other interest-based ads you are receiving on other Website, you may want to visit https://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ or https://www.aboutads.info/choices/ for additional opt-out information. Also, please note that if you delete, block or otherwise restrict cookies, or if you use a different computer or Internet browser, you may need to renew your opt-out choice.

7.  Contests, surveys, and promotions

We may occasionally run contests, surveys, or other special promotions on our Website in which we ask Users for personal information (like an email address or name) or demographic information (like a zip code, age, or income level). We use this data to run the contests or promotions and send users promotional material about our company or third parties we deal with. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The participant's contact information is also used to contact him or her when necessary and may be shared with other companies for promotional purposes, but only with your prior permission and under the terms and conditions specified when you take part in the promotion. At any time, you may opt-out of receiving future mailings of this kind by following the unsubscribe instructions in each promotional communication, or simply decline to take part in the promotions.

8.  Changes, updates, and consent

We are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations governing the collection and use of personal information. From time to time, BrightStat.com will review its personal information collection, use, and disclosure practices in order to assure that we are complying with our Privacy Statement and all applicable laws and regulations. If we decide to change our Privacy Statement, we will issue an updated version of this Statement with an updated date legend and/or notify you via email, via the Website or mobile applications or by other appropriate means prior to the change becoming effective if it is a significant change. You should review this Privacy Statement regularly to ensure you are familiar with any changes to it. If you do not consent to any changes to our Privacy Statement and as a result you would like us not to use or hold your information in accordance with the revised terms, you may notify us here so we can discontinue your account.

9.  Contacting us about privacy

If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement, BrightStat.com privacy practices, or your dealings with the Website or mobile applications or mobile Website, or wish to request access to and receive information about the personal information we maintain about you (note please that the right to access personal information may be limited in some circumstances), update and correct inaccuracies in your personal information, have the information blocked or deleted, as appropriate, or oppose (in case of legitimate reasons) the processing carried out with respect to your personal information, you can contact us via the information below. We will respond to all access requests within 30 days.

For BrightStat.com.com, please send an email to support@BrightStat.com. If you would like to access your BrightStat.com.com account details, please click here.