Privacy Policy

Skilled.co takes the privacy of its users very seriously and want you to be as informed as possible about your privacy rights when visiting out website. The following policy outlines the information we and others may collect from you during your visit to the website and use of our services. By visiting this website you are agreeing to the collection and use of said information as outlined below.

 

If you do not wish to provide us or our partners with any information or do not consent to the manner in which we use it as outlined in this Privacy Policy, you should cease visiting Skilled.co immediately.

 

Information We May Collect From You

 

User Submitted Information: At various points during your time at Skilled.co you may be prompted to provide information about yourself, but you are under no obligation to do so. This may include but is not limited to:

 

Account Creation: When registering a user account you may be required or encouraged to share details such as your name, email address, geographic location, picture, and bio.

 

Sponsorship: We reserve the right to offer paid sponsorship space to web development companies. In this scenario you will be asked to provide your payment details, contact info, billing info, and business information. This will not be available publicly.

 

Guest Reviews: If at such a time we accept reviews from users you will at the least be required to provide a pen name or pseudonym to accompany your review, although you may also wish to provide your real name, bio, business info and anything else relevant to the review.

 

Surveys: From time to time we may ask users to complete a survey related to web development or your use of the website. Individual responses will remain anonymous but may be displayed publicly as part of a broader range of statistics.  

 

Information About Others: As part of our reference check process for user submitted reviews, paid sponsorships and other services you may wish to provide information about others (clients, companies etc). Where this information isn’t already publicly available you should seek permission before sharing this information with us. Private information will only every be used as part of the reference check process.

 

Information About You From Third Parties

 

As part of the account registration process and other services provided by Skilled.co we may use information from your social media accounts (such as your LinkedIn account ID as part of the sign in process). If you use this process to sign in to your Skilled.co account or otherwise share your social media accounts with us, we may and you consent to the collecting, storing and use of such data, as per this Privacy Policy. This may include but is not limited to your social media name/username and any other information the social network shares once you go through the account connection process. You should read the privacy policy of the social network in question to learn exactly what data they share to third parties when you go through the account connection process.

 

If you are a web developer or represent a web development company, information about you may be published on this site as part of our own or a user submitted review. This will be publicly available information and nothing personal.

 

Non Personally Identifiable Information

 

During a visit to Skilled.co we and third parties may collect certain non personally identifiable information from your web browser, via industry standard automated processes. This may done through the planting of a cookie, or the use of JavaScript, web beacons and web server logs. Information collected may include but is not limited to your internet protocol ( IP ) address, browser software (such as Firefox or Google Chrome), Internet Service Provider (ISP), type of device used (Windows PC, iOS iPhone), screen resolution, date and time of the visit, pages accessed, and referring website.

If you  visit the website via a mobile device, we may also make use of GPS location data that is not linked to any personal information. If you do not want your device to provide us with GPS location-tracking information, you can disable the GPS or other location-tracking functions on your device, provided your device allows you to do this. See your device manufacturer’s instructions for further details.

 

Cookies: Cookies are files containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that are sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the user’s browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

 

Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

 

Cookies can be used by web servers to identity and track users as they navigate different pages on a website and identify users returning to a website. We may use cookies to serve custom Web page content based on the user’s browsing preferences. For example if the user always uses a mobile device, they may be served a page optimized for mobile devices.

Skilled.co reserves the right to serve text and banner advertisements from reputable platforms such as Google. In the process of serving ads these third parties might use cookies. Google for example use the DART cookie in order to serve ads most relevant to the user. Beyond the ads served, this has no impact on the user’s browsing experience.

 

Web Logs: Web servers may also log information such as the device you used to access the site, ISP, geographic location, time zone, operating system, browser, the site that referred you, system language, and other system settings. They also may log information about your interaction with the website, such as which pages you visit.

 

Web Beacons: As part of the web logging process we may use web beacons, which is a tagging method similar to cookies, that links certain page of the site to certain web servers and their cookies. As well as the website these may also be included in promotional emails.

 

JavaScript: Skilled.co and third parties may use the JavaScript language to communicate, collect and store non personally identifiable information.

 

How This Information Is Used

 

Skilled.co will never pass on or sell your personally identifiable information to third parties without your permission. All information we collect directly is mostly used in the process of providing the website and services to you. This may include but is not limited to:

 

  • Providing you with an account which you have requested through registration.
  • Tailoring the content, look and feel of the website to you and your preferred device and browser.
  • Corresponding with you via email or sending you system and promotional emails, such as welcome messages, informing you of site changes and updates, promoting our services and that of our sponsors, responding to your feedback and queries, and other similar reasons.
  • Track which pages are loaded, for how long, and who referred you, for internal statistics.
  • Serve, monitor and refine advertising campaigns (i.e. the banners and other ads that appear beside site content).
  • Improve content and services, and research and create new content and services that suit our users based on their browsing habits on the website.

 

In the instance that we believe that an unlawful or harmful act has been carried out, including fraud, threats and harassment, we reserve the right to use the information we have to investigate, prevent further acts, and take legal action, as per our Terms of Service.

 

Note that unless a member of our staff is corresponding directly with you or you have shared personal information publicly (such as in a comment or user submitted review), the information we have collected cannot identity you personally (non personally identifiable information). We reserve the right to use and disclose such information, as it is not subject to our privacy policy. An example of this disclosure are survey results.  

 

How This Information Is Shared

 

Skilled.co will never pass on or sell your personally identifiable information to third parties without your permission. It may however still be shared in the following contexts:

 

  • If you have created a public profile and/or posted comments or user submitted reviews, this publicly available to anyone that visits Skilled.co and may also appear in search engine results, such as those of Google.
  • If you have offered a testimonial about Skilled.co and our services, or the web development companies that we review and profile, it will be viewable by others. We will also request to use your name, title, company and other relevant information, but you are under no obligation to provide this to us.
  • If we are in correspondence and you have requested and given us permission to share your information for whatever reason.
  • For any Skilled.co services you have requested that may require the sharing of information.
  • We reserve the right to share your non personally identifiable and anonymized/encrypted information with third party business partners that we use to help provide our services. This may include but is not limited to statistics gathering and analytic services (such as Google Analytics), payment processors (such as Paypal), advertising and marketing, and customer support. These partners are only permitted to use information in the manner outlined in their own terms and as part of their service to us.
  • If any major business changes occur, such as a merger, acquisition, reorganization, bankruptcy, dissolution or liquidation, or we sell or transfer a portion of the business assets that include user information.
  • If we have strong reason to believe that disclosing information is necessary to prevent illegal actions or investigate illegal actions, in compliance with local and international law and our terms of use. This may include but is not limited to violation of our terms, hate speech, threats, harassment, copyright infringement of us or third parties, security breaches, data theft, or to protect the rights, property and safety of us, our employees, users, or another person or entity connected to Skilled.co. Such information may be shared with law enforcement, government agencies, courts, legal experts or other parties deemed necessary to prevent illegal actions or investigate illegal actions.    

 

Advertising and Analytics Tracking

 

Analytics: This is the term to describe how websites use scripts and third parties to gather non personally identifiable information about visitors and their browsing habits, such as how many hits a page receives, the browsers and devices used to access pages, the general geographic location of users and other information that is useful in the management of a website. This data is collected in bulk and cannot and will not be used to identify any user personally. We reserve the right to use reputable third parties in the analytics process, such as Google Analytics.  

 

Advertisers and Other Partners: Non personally identifiable information may also be gathered by our advertising and other partners for serving tailored ads based on your browsing habits, device and browsing preferences, interests and other factors. Through the use of cookies, JavaScript and other technology outlined above, advertising networks may monitor your online activities when viewing Skilled.co and other websites that use the same networks, over an extended period of time. This data may then in turn be used to serve tailored ads when you visit Skilled.co and other websites that use the same networks. You are free at any time to delete these cookies through your browser settings and can also use ad blocking technology to remove any ads that may be displayed by these networks.

 

You may also wish to partake in schemes such as the Network Advertising Consumer Opt-Out and the Digital Advertising Alliance Opt-Out programs. Once you sign up you can choose to opt-out being tracked and served tailored ads by the advertising networks that are also part of the programs. This will not eliminate all ads, as the schemes are voluntary, but several major networks are members. At any given time not all of out advertising partners will be part of these schemes, including the likes of Google Ads. However they have their own opt-out policies which you can explore by clicking the link beside these ads or going to the Google Ad Preferences page. Note that these preferences are browser specific, so if you opted out once while using Internet Explorer, you will also have to opt out if you switch your browser to Chrome or use another device.

 

Opting out using the methods above do not physically remove cookies from your browser, so you may still wish to manually remove these by going to your browser settings or by using a browser add-on or software to manage them more effectively. Furthermore if you opt out, some information may still be gathered about your browsing habits for non-advertising means. You may also still be served ads, they just wont be tailored based on any collected data.

 

Note that Skilled.co does not recognize the Do Not Track protocol, which is a relatively new feature within certain web browsers that attempts to communicate to websites that the user does not want to be tracked or have their information collected. So called DNT is not yet a standardized feature across the web and the web industry is still developing the concept and how to respond to it. We reserve the right to comply with DNT in the future.

 

Accessing and Modifying Your Information

 

You have the right to access, modify and remove any publicly available information that you have shared about yourself via Skilled.co and its services. This includes but is not limited to your user account and profile. For example you may wish to change the text in your bio or update a picture. You may also close your account, which will remove it from our servers and may un-publish any comments you have made.

 

If you have submitted user content (such as a review) and this has been accepted and published, our policy is to keep it online even if you close your account or cease visiting Skilled.co. In some cases you may be permitted to revise or comment on the review at a later date.

 

We are not responsible for the illegal copying and re-publishing of your publicly available information on other third party websites and do not have the authority or means to have this removed per your request. If you close your account this information may also still be available. It may also show up in search engine results until they are updated, which is beyond our control.

 

Skilled.co reserves the right to hold on to certain information even after you close your account, if it is necessary to comply with legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse, enforce our agreements or as part of our Website data backup process. If you have purchased any services from us (such as sponsorship) information may need to be retained for tax purposes.

 

Data Protection and Security

 

Skilled.co adhere to all applicable data protection laws. Your personal and private information is also secured behind the latest encryption technology, to prevent hackings and data breaches. Any financial transactions are secured by recognized payment gateways and third part processors such as Paypal.

 

Outbound Links and Third Party Content

 

The Skilled.co website features outbound links to third party websites, and embedded website features, social media services, and web apps. By engaging with these features or following an outbound link to another website your non personally identifiable information may be collected and processed. We are not responsible for the content, terms or privacy policy of any third party website. Any information you choose to provide to or that is collected by these third parties is not covered by our Privacy Policy.

 

Policy Updates

 

Skilled.co reserves the right to update and change this Privacy Policy from time to time without notice or explicit acceptance by you, so please check this page frequently for updates and changes. Your continued use of the website constitutes agreement. However, changes made to this Privacy Policy will not apply to you to the extent that the changes concern matters which are the subject of an actual dispute between you and Skilled.co as of the date the changes take effect and we have actual notice of the dispute as of the date the changes take effect.

 

Children’s Privacy

 

We do not knowingly permit children under age 13 to register for any content, product or Service offered by Skilled.co. We do not knowingly collect, use or disclose personal information about users under age 13, except as permitted by law. If we become aware that personal information has been collected from a person under the age of 13, we will delete this information and terminate the person’s account as quickly as possible.

 

International Users

 

Skilled.co is hosted and operated from the United States. If You are accessing the Services from outside the United States, the laws or regulations governing personal data collection, use, and disclosure may differ from United States laws. Be advised that through your continued use of the Services, which is governed by U.S. law, this Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Use, You are transferring your personal information to the United States and You consent to that transfer.

 

Your California Privacy Rights

 

We do not disclose your personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes without your consent. If you have any questions regarding this policy, or would like to change your preferences, you may contact us.

 

No Rights of Third Parties

 

Skilled.co does not create rights enforceable by third parties and is not responsible for the privacy policies or terms of any third parties. This privacy policy applies only to the content, features and services owned by Skilled.co and the user of that content, features and services.