Your privacy is important to us. We do not sell your private personal information to advertisers. We use session cookies and javascript to make the website work properly and to provide our services, but not to track you on the web outside of our own websites (opengendata.org and hjournals.com). We may use analytics and log all access to our server, all search criteria, all transcriptions submitted, and all communication with us to track how the site is used, troubleshoot problems, deter abuse of our systems, conduct business, and improve our services. We currently use Google Analytics, so Google will set and track some cookies of its own (see policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites to learn what Google Analytics collects and how Google uses the data). We also serve ads on some pages to help reduce our hosting costs. We use Google AdSense to do so. (Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet. You can opt out of personalized Google ads at https://www.google.com/settings/ads and some third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info).
We may share private personal information with third parties when necessary to conduct business or complete a transaction, and we keep information we need for record-keeping, accounting, taxes, and other business purposes. (For example, if you contribute funds to help offset the costs of the Open Genealogy Data project, a third party such as PayPal or a credit card gateway or a bank would handle the transaction, and we would also have to keep records of the transaction for accounting and tax purposes).
The search page and the web-based transcription system is hosted on the Historic Journals website (hjournals.com). If you transcribe, you may transcribe as a guest, or you may transcribe as a logged-in user via your Historic Journals account. In either case, the terms of use and privacy policy of the Historic Journals website apply. Both hjournals.com and OpenGenData.org are sponsored and operated by Historic Journals LLC, and personal information may be shared between the two websites.
Some of our services use location data from your browser or device (if you permit) and/or IP address geolocation databases. For example, we may attempt to allocate records for you to transcribe that are nearer to your location instead of from some random distant location. If you permit your location to be sent to us, we may use that to improve the IP address geolocation database / service. IP address alone does not personally identify you and we do not consider it to be private personal information that must be safe-guarded, as IP address geolocation databases are widely available.
Your transcription contributions to the Open Genealogy Data projects are not private personal data. You dedicate your transcriptions to the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.