Privacy Policy


Your privacy is critically important to us. At Hill Genealogy we have a few fundamental principles:

•We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your income level or education level for no apparent reason.)

•We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.

•We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals:

HillGenealogy.com (“Hill Genealogy”) operates several sub-sections of the HillGenealogy.com domain, including HillGenealogy.com (the original version of our website), and HillGenealogy.com/wp/ (additional articles). It is Hill Genealogy’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Hill Genealogy 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. Hill Genealogy’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Hill Genealogy’s visitors use its website.

From time to time, Hill Genealogy may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Hill Genealogy also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Hill Genealogy does not use such information to identify its visitors, however, and does not disclose such information, other than under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information, as described below.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Hill Genealogy’s websites choose to interact with Hill Genealogy in ways that require Hill Genealogy to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Hill Genealogy gathers depends on the nature of the interaction.

For example, we ask visitors who sign up for a free member account to provide a username and email address. Those who engage in transactions with Hill Genealogy – by purchasing items from our online catalog, for example – are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions.

In each case, Hill Genealogy collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Hill Genealogy. Hill Genealogy 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 engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

Hill Genealogy may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Hill Genealogy may monitor the most popular article authors on the site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. Hill Genealogy may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Hill Genealogy does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Hill Genealogy 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 Hill Genealogy’s behalf or to provide services available at Hill Genealogy’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 Hill Genealogy’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Hill Genealogy 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, Hill Genealogy discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Hill Genealogy believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Hill Genealogy, third parties or the public at large.

If you are a registered user of an Hill Genealogy website and have supplied your email address, Hill Genealogy 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 Hill Genealogy and our products. We primarily use announcements on our website to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum.

If you have subscribed to receive our weekly newsletter or product notifications, we will use your email address to deliver those subscriptions.

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. We may also use your question as the basis of our weekly Mailbag Question, so others may benefit from our detailed answer to your inquiry about a specific subject.

If you send us comments related to your satisfaction with an item you purchased from our website, we may publish your comments as a review of that product.

Hill Genealogy takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

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. Hill Genealogy uses cookies to help Hill Genealogy identify and track visitors, their usage of Hill Genealogy website, and their website access preferences.

We use a cookie, for example, to tell you are logged in as a registered member, so that you can access portions of our website that are reserved for registered members, such as article submission forms or access to particular family branch that is hidden to general users.

Hill Genealogy visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Hill Genealogy’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Hill Genealogy’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Ads

We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information.

To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit https://www.networkadvertising.org.

We also utilize affiliate links to recommend products we think would be of value to you. If you click one of these links and subsequently buy something on the affiliated site, we receive a small commission which we use for the upkeep of our HillGenealogy.com website. However, you will pay the same price for the product whether you reach it from one of our affiliate links or go to the advertiser’s site via a direct URL link typed into your browser.

This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Hill Genealogy and does not cover the use of cookies by any linked website once you leave our site. You should check the Privacy Policy of each website you visit.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Hill Genealogy may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Hill Genealogy’s sole discretion. Hill Genealogy 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 changes.