Privacy Policy

Last Revised December 28, 2019



COOKIE USAGE SUMMARY (provided for your convenience, please review the full details of our Privacy Policy below) The Flag Counter image itself does not use cookies. This section provides a summary of the cookies in use on our own website, which includes the pages on our site containing a Flag Counter's statistical information.
	Opt out available	Information
Logging into your account	No	If you have a Flag Counter account, we need to set a cookie to securely log you in. This is necessary for the functionality of our site, and not used for any other purpose.
Session and page preservation cookies	No	We may set session cookies that preserve your session state as you navigate pages of our site (such as a "collapsed" or "expanded" view of your statistical information). These cookies are necessary for the functionality of our site, expire when you close your browser, and not used for any other purpose.
Consent cookies	No	We may ask you to consent to the usage of cookies and then set a cookie to remember your selection. These cookies are necessary for the functionality of our site, and not used for any other purpose.
Third-party advertising if you are not in California or the European Economic Area	Yes	When you view a counter's statistical information, we display third-party advertising that keeps our service free. This advertising uses cookies to serve ads which may be based on your prior visits to this or other websites. To opt-out of personalized ads, visit here.
Third-party advertising if you are in California or the European Economic Area	n/a	When you view a counter's statistical information, we display third-party advertising that keeps our service free. We have elected to show users in California or the EEA non-personalized ads only, by default. These ads do not take into account past behavior or website visits. Although these ads don't use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.


FLAG COUNTER PRIVACY POLICY

This document describes Boardhost.com, Inc.'s Flag Counter service's policies regarding privacy, and the privacy expectations that you may have when using this service, or when corresponding with us.

Usage of our services is subject to our Terms of Service.

Your privacy is valuable to us. It is our intention to not collect any more information than what we believe is necessary to provide our service. Our website features third-party advertising so that we can offer our services free of charge. We do not otherwise sell, trade or barter information, nor will we.

INFORMATION ABOUT OUR CUSTOMERS (I.E. THOSE WHO CREATE THEIR OWN FLAG COUNTER)

Information necessary to provide you with services may be shared, such as:


• If you make a payment, we need to share your information with our billing provider to process the payment, prevent fraud, or resolve disputes regarding your payment.
• We may disclose information in certain circumstances in response to a court order or in response to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative process, or may do so if we believe there has been a violation of law or an emergency necessitating such disclosure.

We do not utilize a promotional mailing list of any kind. We will use your email address only to provide requested assistance or information, to remind you of an upcoming billing renewal, or to provide information that may be required by law or that may materially affect your usage of our services.

INFORMATION COLLECTED BY A FLAG COUNTER

A Flag Counter image itself placed on a website does not collect personally identifiable information. We are not able to determine whether a particular person has viewed a particular counter. The counter collects the minimum information that we believe is necessary to provide our service.

A Flag Counter displays information about the countries and/or regions that have viewed a particular counter publicly, as is its purpose.

Our counter service is a simple image. When an image loads from our server, the visitor's web browser automatically provides us with certain information including the visitor's IP address, the URL of the referring page (where the image was placed), and the user-agent string of the visitor (which ordinarily contains the type and version of a visitor's web browser and operating system). However, the information we log is limited.

When the image is requested, our service queries a third-party company's database which is locally hosted on our servers (no information is transmitted to the third-party company. Our service does not use GPS nor do we request or have access to a visitor's precise location). This allows us to determine the country and/or region most likely associated with a particular visitor's IP address, at which time that country and/or region is added as a visit to the counter.

To prevent a returning visitor from repeatedly adding to a counter's statistics, a combination of the visitor's IP address and the particular counter's username are converted to an encrypted hash (which we cannot reverse), and then the hash itself is placed into a filter (for up to seven days after which it is erased). This method allows our counters to operate without the use of cookies.

We do not log IP addresses of a counter's visitors or otherwise associate them with a particular visit.

Counters provided as part of our free service:
Most of our customer use free counters. Free counters do not log any information. These counters only add information to a tally of the visitor counts we have associated with a particular country/region and/or date.

Counters provided as part of our paid Flag Counter Pro service:
Some of our customers have upgraded to our paid Flag Counter Pro service. When an upgraded counter loads, it will log the visit's referring page URL (as provided by their browser¹), the detected country and/or region of the visitor, and the visitor's web browser (such as Firefox) and operating system (such as Windows 10) as indicated in the visitor's user-agent string; this limited logged information is made available for a period of up to 90 days.

We do not build profiles on a counter's visitors nor do we attempt to track or associate visitors from one counter to another. The Flag Counter image does not use cookies. Adding the counter to your website will not cause any cookies or advertising on your website itself.

¹To prevent recording a potential leakage of personal information from third-party sites, query strings are automatically stripped from a referring page URL.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH US

Correspondence received from customers of our service (who identify themselves as such) regarding their account will ordinarily not be revealed to third parties, except as we deem in our sole discretion, necessary for us to address any issues raised in or by such correspondence, or as required by law.

If you're contacting us about someone else's account, your correspondence may be revealed to that customer, or to other third-parties at our sole discretion (even if the third-party contacting us is also our customer). For instance, if we receive a complaint regarding a customer's account, we may reveal that complaint to the account holder, so that they may address the situation.

UPDATING OR REMOVING YOUR INFORMATION

If you have created a counter and you do not use your counter, after 30 days of it not recording a new visitor, it will automatically be removed from our service to make room for our active customers. Any information associated with the counter will be erased.

If you registered your counter, you have access to the Flag Counter Management section, where your information can be updated, or your counter and all of its information erased. Other updates and/or removals can be requested by contacting us. We will respond within 30 days, and may request information sufficient for us to verify that you are inquiring about your own information.

Please note that most information requested and stored by us is the minimum necessary for us to provide services to you, therefore if you request that your information be removed, you may not be able to use our services.

REVIEWING YOUR INFORMATION

If you created and maintain an active free counter, it is likely that the only information we have about you in our records is your email address.

If you have upgraded to our Flag Counter Pro service, we may also have credit card or billing information.

If you are interested in reviewing your information, please contact us. We will respond within 30 days, and may request information sufficient for us to verify that you are inquiring about your own information.

OUR WEBSITE USES THIRD-PARTY ADVERTISING AND COOKIES

Pages on our website, including your counter's statistical information may include advertising. This allows us to offer our service for free. When you view pages on our website, third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites (except as indicated below). You may review how Google uses information by visiting here.

If you are not in California or the European Economic Area: You may opt out of the use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings.

If you are detected as being located in California or the European Economic Area (based on your IP address): We have opted to show you only non-personalized ads on our site by default. These ads do not take into account past behavior or website visits. Although these ads don't use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.

We use other cookies that are necessary for the functionality of our site, such as when you log in, to preserve your browsing session, or when you are asked to consent to the usage of cookies. These cookies do not track you, but instead provide this basic functionality. You may configure your browser to reject such cookies, but our services may not work correctly and/or your functionality may be reduced.

DO NOT TRACK (DNT)

Our website does not currently respond to "do not track" or "DNT" signals that may be sent as a result of a web browser's settings.

INTERNATIONAL USERS

We are based in the United States and our servers are hosted in the United States. You authorize us to store in the United States any information or content you may provide, post, create, or otherwise make available to our service in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

OUR WEBSITE USES GOOGLE'S RECAPTCHA SERVICE TO HELP ELIMINATE SPAM

We use Google's reCAPTCHA service on certain forms on our site. This helps prevent spam robots from consuming our resources by requiring the submitter to prove they are not a robot. Use of reCAPTCHA is subject to Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. You consent to these policies and and such usage of information by using or interacting with such forms.

CHILDREN'S PRIVACY

We do not knowingly collect or maintain information from persons under 13 years of age.

MODIFICATIONS

This document and our policies may change from time to time. Any such modifications will be posted at this address. Please check here regularly for any such changes to our policies. If you are our customer (i.e. you have created your own Flag Counter) and have provided your email address and we change this policy in what we believe is a material way, we will attempt to notify you via email.

CONTACTING US ABOUT THIS PRIVACY POLICY

You may contact us via our contact form or by mail, at Boardhost.com, Inc., PO Box 3286, Dubuque, IA 52004