Our Privacy Policy is designed to assist you in understanding how we collect and use the personal information you provide to us and to assist you in making informed decisions when using our site and our services.

1. APPLICATION FOR MEMBERSHIP.

To become a member of DesignersCouch, you must first apply for membership. This application requests personal information such as your name and location. You will also be required to submit five (5) design pieces. This information is collected so that the DesignersCouch moderators can review your work so as to make an informed decision of the level of your skills, and is kept strictly confidential. During this process, DesignersCouch will not, under any circumstances, disclose your information or design work to any third parties.

If you are granted approval to become a member of DesignersCouch, you will receive an e-mail notifying you of such. You will then be given full access to the site’s services. You have the option of updating your profile page on DesignersCouch, which contains your demographics and your creative interests. You can also control what type of information is shown to the public (or non-members) through your Account Settings. DesignersCouch may use links to your profile on other pages of the Web site. If you send an email to another DesignersCouch member, that person will not see your email address; you would have to give it to him or her directly.

If your membership has not been approved, you will receive a notification e-mail of non-admittance. At this point, DesignersCouch will completely and immediately discard all information you submitted to us in your application. We will never use or hold any information you provided to us, including the design work you submitted.

2. USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION.

As a member of DesignersCouch, we may use your personal information for purposes of administering and expanding our business activities, providing customer service and making available other services to our customers and prospective customers. Occasionally, we may also use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our Web site, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable.

DesignersCouch makes every effort to keep user information personal. We will not sell, rent or share your personal information, including your location and e-mail address, with any third parties for marketing purposes without your express permission. We may share your personal information for the purpose of delivering our e-mail to you or as required by law. If necessary, DesignersCouch may need to disclose personal information when required by law and when such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process that DesignersCouch receives.

3. PUBLIC FORUMS REMINDER

Please remember that any information that you disclose in the DesignersCouch forums becomes public information to your fellow members. You are strongly advised to exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information.

We will not tolerate maltreatment of our members on the forum. While we value and encourage free expression, DesignersCouch reserves the right to take necessary action to preserve the forum's integrity, such as removing any posting that is inappropriate, offensive, or off-topic. We also reserve the right to suspend the membership of members who make offensive and inappropriate postings to the forum. Any member who is found to behave inappropriately on the forums will be reviewed and their membership may be suspended.

4. USAGE INFORMATION.

We may also collect non-personal, cumulative information about members' use of our site. This information will tell us how much time members spend on our site, from which other sites they came, and to what other sites they go. The collection of this information mainly allows us to prepare for traffic load demands and to efficiently deliver relevant information. This information is not personally identifiable.

5. REVIEW AND ACCESS.

Upon your request, you can access a summary of the information we collect about you. You will have an opportunity to correct, update or modify this information.

6. CHOICE/OPT-OUT.

If we ever send you information by e-mail concerning new services that you did not request, we will provide you with an e-mail address by which you may request no future notices.

7. TRACKING.

Like most sites, DesignersCouch may make use of browser "cookies." Cookies are strings of text and numbers that can identify your computer to us when you visit our site. They allow us to see if you have logged in, check your status as a member, and facilitate access to your preferences. DesignersCouch will not use cookies to retrieve information from a computer that is unrelated to our site or services.

8. IP ADDRESS.

When you visit our site, we log standard information such as your IP address, which is a number that can be used to identify your location and Internet Service Provider, along with the URL from which you came to our site and the URLs visited on our site. A URL is the full address of a Web site page, which may or may not contain some Personally Identifiable Information about the person who is viewing it.

When we send messages to you or others, we may provide a URL link to the DesignersCouch site that contains an alphanumeric identifier, which allows us to identify the person to whom we sent the message so that we can personalize our content for that individual.

9. THIRD PARTY COOKIES.

In the course of serving advertisements to this site, our third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser.

10. THIRD PARTY ADVERTISING.

Some of the ads appearing on our website may be delivered by one of our advertising partners. Information about your visit to their sites, such as number of times you have viewed an ad (but not your name, address, or other personal information), may be used to serve ads to you.

11. BUSINESS TRANSITIONS.

In the event DesignersCouch goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of a portion of its assets, users' personal information will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred.

12. LINKS TO OTHER SITES.

As part of the services we provide, DesignersCouch may create links allowing you to access third party sites. DesignersCouch LLC is not responsible for the content that appears on those sites and does not endorse these sites. Please consult those sites' individual privacy policies in order to determine how they treat user information.

13. SECURITY.

All information described above is stored on restricted secure database servers.

14. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY.

DesignersCouch reserves the right to change this policy from time to time. If we do make changes, the revised Privacy Statement will be posted on this site.

15. CONTACT US.

If you have any questions about this policy or our site in general, please contact us at info [at] DesignersCouch [dot] com or at 936-755-4890.