Privacy Policy
Last updated 28th May 2024
Mineralexpert.org is an educational and scientific website, combining database of mineral photos, mineral locality photos, and educational texts (articles, e-books). Large portion of the content is provided by registered users.
It is very important that you understand what information Mineralexpert.org does capture and store, what information you voluntarily provide, what information is collected automatically, and how that information is used and your rights in changing/removing such information in the future.
Use of Cookies
Mineralexpert.org uses cookies only to secure authorization process, no cookies are used in any way to track your activities. These are so called technical cookies and no user consent is required. You can turn off cookies in your browser settings, this can result in random logout. If you are a guest user, no cookies are used.
Mineralexpert.org uses Google Analytics to monitor its visitors to better understand how they use it. This tracking software uses cookies to track visitor usage. The software will save a cookie to your computers hard drive in order to track and monitor your usage of the website, but will not store, save or collect any personal information. You can check Google's privacy policy for further information. Only basic Google Analytics is used, which use only aggregated and anonymized data. It can not be used to track or identify certain persons. No retargeting, tag management and user tracking methods are used - again, this is a technical type cookie.
Affiliate links
Mineralexpert.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. All articles containing affiliate links are clearly labeled with FTC and Amazon disclosure.
If you click on the Amazon affiliate link, you are redirected to the Amazon store. Amazon primarily uses the clicked link URL to identify that you came from Mineralexpert.org. Amazon then uses its own cookies, registered user profiles and other technical solutions to identify if you made a purchase based on our link or not. Check Amazon privacy policy for the technical details.
Important note: Amazon does not provide Mineralexpert.org any user details, personal details, financial or private data. Mineralexpert.org only receives aggregated summary of the clicks on the links and sold items. We have absolutely no way to identify the persons and users or to influence Amazon tracking cookies. Mineralexpert.org does not use any way to collect information about users clicking on the affiliate links.
Information that we collect
Mineralexpert.org collects information in two ways, information that you provide yourself when registering or entering data into the site, and information that is collected automatically.
Third parties may also provide information about you, specifically your name, if you are the author of a (scientific) paper or any other public document. This is required by the authorship laws and GDPR/ePrivacy restrictions do not apply in such case.
Information you give us
When you register, you provide Mineralexpert.org with your name (or pseudonym) and e-mail address. All your uploaded photos, texts and other contributions are associated with your profile and name.
Your data is stored in encrypted form in our database and backups. Mineralexpert.org does not provide or sell your personal information to anyone.
Only your name is visible to the other users. This is because of the legal reasons – Mineralexpert.org does publish copyrighted content (photos, texts) and these must be attributed by the law (this is also GDPR exception). If you do not want to expose your real name, you can use pseudonym. We do not enforce exposing real names in any way. However, misleading, inappropriate or offensive pseudonyms might not be approved.
Only Mineralexpert.org administrators can see your e-mail address. This is because of the technical and legal limits – e.g. password recoveries, user verification, communication of questions and issues.
If you provide any other personal information, be it in your profile, texts, articles, various descriptions, forum posts etc., you do it at your own will and at your own risk. Mineralexpert.org does not require such information and can not be held responsible for publishing and/or misuse of such information.
Information recorded automatically
Some traffic data, including your IP addresses, are temporarily logged by the server because of technical and security reasons. These data are not provided to anyone and are removed periodically.
Mineralexpert.org does not use Facebook tracking pixel, Facebook like buttons, Twitter buttons, Pinterest buttons or any other form of third party social tracking. The social buttons in the header are just plain links to Mineralexpert.org social profiles.
Deleting your account and data
You can request complete removal of your account. However, this requires complete removal of all your contributions – photos, texts, articles etc. We do not force you to provide irrevocable license to contributed content, it is solely your right to do whatever you want with it. But keep in mind that your content will be completely removed forever after we delete your account.
Complete removal of some of the contributions – like articles, data in backups etc. – can not be done automatically. It will be done as fast as possible but it can take up to several days to completely finish.
If you just want to disable your account or remove only part of the contributions, do not hesitate to contact us.
Content removal can not be requested for content Mineralexpert.org purchased from you.
General
Users contacting the website and/or its owners do so at their own will and provide any such personal details requested at their own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely, no private communication is published or exposed in any form. We use end-to-end encrypted email service, our email service provider is located in Switzerland. If you write us from your own email address with lower security standards, it is your own responsibility.
Personal information is stored on servers outside the European Union but may be transferred at any time and without warning in or out of the European Union.
No personal information was/is/will be sold or provided to any third party organization.
Mineralexpert.org reserves the right to update and/or replace this privacy policy at any time without warning. Regular check of this page is highly recommended. Please, stop using the website should you feel unhappy with any of the terms above.
Contact
If you have any concerns please feel free to contact us at: info@mineralexpert.org.