What information does Skimlinks collect about Users through its technology and how does it use this information?
We do not intentionally capture any personally identifiable data like a User’s name, email address, contact details, age, gender, or anything else about a User personally. However, if a User utilises a Publisher Toolbar, we may inadvertently capture the personally identifiable information described above if it is displayed on a website a User is visiting with insufficient security safeguards. However, although this information is processed, we do not use it for any purpose, nor do we pass it on to third parties, and it is automatically discarded immediately after page load.
We do store Users’ IP addresses, from which we can determine a User’s vicinity. We need this information to ensure the links we create are to Merchants in a User’s country. We do not use this information to identify any individuals.
We also store information about the device Users use to access the internet, such as the browser type, browser version, and device used to access sites within our Publisher network. This helps us ensure we can diagnose and fix browser compatibility issues more swiftly, and optimise our service to suit the preferred browsing environments.
We aim to provide Users with relevant and useful links to products in which they are likely to be interested, and to Merchants from whom they are likely to want to buy. To achieve this, we collect anonymous information, using cookies, about the websites within our Publisher network that Users visit, which of our links Users click on, and whether Users make a purchase (although we do not always know this). Further information regarding the cookies we utilise to collect this information is contained here.
As part of the information available in standard web serving logs, we also store information about the referrer, i.e. the website page from which the User linked to the Publisher Site. However, at no time do we know who a User is, nor do we make any attempt to try and identify a User. We don’t combine any information we store with outside sources to find out anything personal or identifiable about a User. All we know is that these actions were done by an anonymous individual, and we use this to try and serve this anonymous individual relevant useful product links as he or she browses that site and other sites within our Publisher network.
If Users browse on any secure, private or password-protected sites, we do not know about, collect or store content from them. We only know about the content (i.e. words and links) on websites that Users visit that are publicly accessible. We determine whether any product or Merchant references are made in this content, so we can serve an appropriate shopping link for that product within or alongside the content.