Privacy Statement and Disclosure

WebGroup Media LLC ("WGM") is a commercial open source company that has been leading and supporting the community development of Cerberus Helpdesk (Cerb5) since January 2002. In connection with this business, we operate the cerberusweb.com project website, as well as an On-Demand ("software as a service") network of applications hosted by subscription as subdomains of cerb5.com.

It is WGM's policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites and services. We do not sell any personally-identifiable information or data stored by On-Demand services to third-parties. We do not directly share your information with third-parties without explicit permission except to comply with the law or to provide necessary infrastructure in connection with the services you request; however, there is some passive risk of exposure to third-party access inherent in web-based services that is outlined in detail below. We do our best to mitigate and minimize these risks on your behalf.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, WGM collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. WGM's purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how WGM's visitors use its website. From time to time, WGM may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate; e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

WGM also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for visitors and logged in workers. WGM only discloses IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to WGM's websites choose to interact with WGM in ways that require us to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that WGM gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask workers who sign up for On-Demand services to provide an email address. Those who engage in transactions with WGM -- by purchasing products and services for Cerb5, for example -- are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, WGM collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor's interaction with WGM. WGM does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from purchasing or engaging in certain services.

Aggregated Statistics

WGM may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites or workers of its On-Demand software. For instance, WGM may gather metrics about individual Cerb5 instances like the number of workers, addresses, conversations, messages, and attachments; the composition of file attachments such as distributions of sizes or file types; or the amount of activity over a given time period. This information is used to improve the usability and performance of products and services provided by WGM.

WGM may display this aggregate, anonymous information publicly or provide it to others. However, WGM does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

WGM discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on WGM's behalf or to provide products and services available at WGM's websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using WGM's websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. WGM will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, WGM discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when WGM believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of WGM, third parties or the public at large.

If you are a registered user of a WGM product or service like Cerb5 and have supplied your email address, WGM may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what's going on with WGM and our products. We primarily use our social network profiles to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. WGM takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Third-Party Data Centers, Cloud Computing, and Virtualization

WGM provisions, administers, and maintains servers remotely in various data centers throughout the world and WGM does not maintain a physical presence in any of them. Most On-Demand services are currently provided from machines exclusively leased and operated by WGM from SoftLayer in their Seattle and Dallas facilities. However, other services, like our project portal, are provided from virtual servers in cloud computing and storage environments at Amazon Web Services, Linode, and Slicehost (Rackspace Cloud). In virtual environments, many users from various organizations share a pool of resources like computational power and storage capacity, although provisioned resources are isolated from one another to a similar degree as leased machines in a datacenter.

Due to the remote nature of leased servers, colocation, cloud computing, and virtualization, authorized technicians from our vendors and service providers may have temporary access to our servers in order to perform physical maintenance and upgrades, or to provide hands-on assistance with troubleshooting issues like RAID degradation and hardware failures.

In such events we defer to upstream privacy policies:

• http://www.softlayer.com/legal/privacy
• http://aws.amazon.com/privacy/
• http://www.slicehost.com/privacy
• http://www.linode.com/privacy.cfm
• http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/privacystatement.php

Backups

If you communicate with WGM, or use On-Demand services provided by WGM, your information will be copied regularly for the express purpose of maintaining backups for continuity and disaster recovery. Nightly backups and redundant storage are kept on machines controlled remotely by WGM. Backups may be transferred to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) for long-term, off-site archival. Upon cancellation, we will comply with authorized client requests for all backups to be immediately destroyed. Otherwise, these backups may be retained for a period of months or years to provide the capability for a customer to resume service at a future date.

Testimonials

WGM displays a list of clients and testimonials on our websites. We do not disclose the names of licensed organizations, or their representatives, without explicit permission, except in the event that a client freely discloses their identity through postings on public forums or social networks.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor's computer, and that the visitor's browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. WGM uses cookies to help WGM identify and track visitors, their usage of WGM website, and their website access preferences. Visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using WGM's websites, with the drawback that certain features of WGM's websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies. Web-based products like Cerb5 require cookies to be enabled, although their use is limited to maintaining a logged-in session within the software.

Business Transfers

If WGM, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that WGM goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of WGM may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

In the rare event that ads appear in any of our applications or on any of our websites, they may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by WGM and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, WGM may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in WGM's sole discretion. WGM encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

License

This privacy policy is available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license derived from original groundwork by Automattic. WGM has no professional affiliation with Automattic.