Privacy Policy
Skimlinks recognises that your privacy is very important to you and that it is your right to control your personal information, whether you are a publisher signing up to use our service, or an end-user experiencing Skimlinks technology on a publisher’s site. We know that providing personal information is an act of trust and we take that trust seriously.

What does this privacy policy cover?
Within this privacy policy, we will cover our practices around the data we collect from publishers who sign up to use Skimlinks on their website, as well as the data we collect when end-users interact with Skimlinks on publisher websites.

 

End-user Privacy Policy »

What is Skimlinks?
Skimlinks is a service used by publishers to help them earn an income. It is intended to be unobtrusive and seamless to your user experience, and works by creating/tagging links to where products can be purchased online within the content you are reading. If you buy something as a result of clicking on these links, the publisher is paid a referral fee by the merchant through us. This referral fee does not come out of your pocket, nor does it affect the price you pay or the experience you have on the merchant site.

What does Skimlinks know about me through the sites I visit?
We do not know anything about you personally at all. We do not capture any personally identifiable data like your name or email address or contact details, nor do we know your age, gender, or anything else about you personally.

We do store your IP address, from which we can determine your geography. We need this information to ensure the links we create are to merchants in your country. We do not use this information to identify who you are as an individual.

We also store information about the device you use to access the internet, such as the browser type, browser version, and device you use to access sites within our publisher network. This helps us ensure we can diagnose and fix browser compatibility issues more swiftly, and optimize our service to suit the preferred browsing environments.

What information does Skimlinks collect about me through your technology and how do you use this information?
We aim to be a useful service to you, providing you with relevant and useful links to products you are likely to be interested in, and to merchants that you are likely to want to buy from. To achieve this, we collect anonymous information, using cookies, about the websites within our publisher network that you visit, which of our links you click on, and whether you make a purchase (although we do not always know this). 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 you arrived at the current website page you are on. However, at no time do we know who ‘you’ are, nor is there any way for us to identify you. We don’t combine any information we store with outside sources to find out anything personal or identifiable about you. 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 they browse that site and other sites within our publisher network.

If you are browsing on any secure, private or password-protected sites, we do not know about, collect or store content from the sites you visit. We only know about the content (i.e. words and links) on websites that you visit that are publicly accessible to anyone on the web. We use this information to identify if 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.

There is no other information that we collect on publisher sites, for example, we do not store or record any content users enter into forms on a website, or any data about advertisements and other services that the publisher runs on their site.

We use our cookies to collect the information we need to optimize the product/merchant links we monetize/show, and improve the service we provide to publishers and to end-users. However, we do not ever drop any third-party cookie within our own javascript, so you can be certain that your data and privacy is being protected in the manner we describe within this policy.

How can I disable the display of Skimlinks personalized links?
If you no longer want Skimlinks to store data about the websites you visit, the links you click and the merchants you buy from, simply opt-out here. This will mean Skimlinks will not drop cookies as you browse websites in our publisher network.

However, Skimlinks will still operate on pages that you visit, and still create links in content if the publisher or service has chosen to install Skimlinks on their website. We just won’t optimize these links based on your preferences and behaviours, nor will we associate the websites you visit and shop from to a specific cookie.

Also, in order for referral fees and commissions to be paid by merchants to publishers, Skimlinks works with affiliate networks and other ad networks that manage the direct merchant relationships. These affiliate and ad networks will use their own cookies in order to track if a sale has occurred, as most of these parties will only pay publishers when a referral has been successful, i.e. a sale was completed. These cookies will continue to be dropped by the affiliate and ad networks.

What is my opt-out status?
You can find out your current opt-out status with Skimlinks’ technology, as well as opt-out or opt-in again, on our opt-out page.

Please note: This opt-out service relies on a cookie being set on your browser. We must maintain the cookie on your browser in order to recognize you as an opted-out visitor. You must opt-out again if you clear that cookie from your browser, use a different internet browser, or use a new computer to access the internet.

Contacting Skimlinks
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, our practices, or your dealings with Skimlinks, you can contact us here or on privacy@skimlinks.com.

You have certain rights under the Data Protection Act 1998, including the right to be told what personal information we hold about you on our database. Should you wish to exercise that right, or if you have any questions concerning the Skimlinks privacy policy please contact us via the following channels:

Skimbit Ltd
3rd Floor, Transworld House
100 City Road
London
EC1Y 2BP
skimlinks.com/contact
(Please note that by English law we are entitled to charge you a small sum for providing this information)

Data Protection Information
You can obtain further information about data protection laws by visiting the Information Commissioner’s web site at:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public.aspx