Our Privacty and Data Security Statement

Words we live by

We value our own privacy and the security of our personal information — we'll take no less care of information you provide to us in the course of doing business with us. The following outlines our privacy policies.

Unless we're required by law [1] to do so, or to defend against or mitigate fraud or other wrongdoing [2], or as exempted elsewhere in this document, we will not knowingly disclose your e-mail address or any other personal information you provide to us to any third party, even if the party in question claims to be God and can produce three pieces of photo-ID to prove it.

We will not rent or sell our customer database under any circumstances.

We will not add your e-mail address to our update mailing list unless you give us explicit permission to do so by selecting the E-Mail Update List option when you place an order with us, or by using the E-Mail Update List option at our web page. You can also use this feature to remove your e-mail address from the list at any time.

Alchemy Mindworks does not distribute aggregate statistics about its customers or users.

None of the web pages at the mindworkshop.com domain use cookies or tracer tags, and no unauthorized information will be written to or retrieved from your hard drive by any of these pages. Third-party advertising links at our pages, if they're present, may use cookies or other comparable technologies.

If you provide us with your e-mail address at such time as you place an order for Alchemy Mindworks products, you will be sent confirmation of your order and any applicable software registration keys when your order is processed. This will be the only message you'll receive from us unless you contact us with questions or sign up for the mailing list.

We urge you not to send your credit card number or other sensitive information in e-mail messages. While we maintain pretty air-tight security, be aware that all e-mail potentially passes through numerous intermediate relays as it moves across the internet. Not all of them can be assumed to be secure.

Alchemy Mindworks maintains a Secure Socket Layer (secure server) page to place credit card orders. As we understand it, if all the computers in the known universe were to devote themselves to the task of cracking a secure order from this server, it would require 260 times longer than the interval between now and when our sun is expected to go nova to complete the task. It's a safe bet that by then, any credit cards at risk of being compromised would have expired.

For your security, credit card transactions placed through Alchemy Mindworks are cleared directly by Stripe Inc. of San Francisco, California. Founded in 2009, Stripe is one of the most extensive financial service providers on Earth.

We do not maintain any unencrypted credit card or customer information (aside from information required to establish and maintain software registration keys) on an internet-accessible file server.

No one from Alchemy Mindworks will ever contact you by e-mail and request that you disclose your credit card number or other sensitive information.

Alchemy Mindworks reserves the right to disclose as it sees fit credit card information and related details which have been used to complete fraudulent transactions.

If you place an order with Alchemy Mindworks, your ordering information — including your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address — will remain in the Alchemy Mindworks database for at least the active life of the product you have purchased. We maintain this information so we can provide you with replacement registration keys and product support if you require them.

The Alchemy Mindworks database is never shared with third parties, and except as stated elsewhere in this document, its contents will never be disclosed to anyone outside Alchemy Mindworks.

Alchemy Mindworks will not contact you by telephone to solicit business, nor will we provide your telephone number to third parties to permit them to do so.

Alchemy Mindworks reserves the right to transfer any information we have about you in the event we sell or transfer all or a portion of our business or assets to a third party acquirer. We also reserve the right to disclose any information we have about you to assist us in collecting a debt owed by you.

Except as exempted elsewhere in this document, all e-mail communications between you and Alchemy Mindworks are deemed to be in confidence. We will not knowingly disclose to third parties the e-mail addresses, personal information or attributable contents of e-mail sent to us unless we are required by law to do so, or we believe that the nature of the message in question may be illegal, or you explicitly grant us permission to do so, or you tacitly grant us permission to do so under terms stated elsewhere in this document. E-mail sent to you by Alchemy Mindworks is deemed to be sent under the same conditions. By sending us e-mail, you agree that all information sent to you by Alchemy Mindworks is confidential, and may not be disclosed to third parties without our express written permission. You further agree that your e-mail constitutes a secure and private medium of communication. Alchemy Mindworks reserves the right to disclose unattributed e-mail contents or edited portions thereof as we see fit.

In the event that you use our e-mail facilities in a manner contrary to the stated restrictions thereof — for example, to send us spam — you grant Alchemy Mindworks permission to disclose the complete attributed contents of your e-mail and your identity to any third parties we choose, including but not exclusive to your Internet service provider, your employer, government and law enforcement. You absolve and hold harmless Alchemy Mindworks, its stockholders, employees and suppliers for any loss, damage or expense arising out of said disclosures.

If you disclose to third parties all or part of our confidential communications with you, you absolve us from any responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of your communications with us, and grant us permission to disclose to third parties any and all communications between you and Alchemy Mindworks as we see fit. You absolve and hold harmless Alchemy Mindworks, its stockholders, employees and suppliers for any loss, damage or expense arising out of said disclosures.

Data Security

When you interact with the Alchemy Mindworks web page and/or our staff through other media, we may collect and retain the following information about you:

Purchasing our products: If you enter into a transaction to purchase licenses for Alchemy Mindworks' software products, we will create a database record on a non-internet-accessible server which will include your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, a redacted credit card number (the first digit and the final four digits of the credit card number used to complete the transaction) and a list of the licenses you have purchased. Except as noted elsewhere in this document, this information will be retained for at least the life of the product licenses you have purchased, to allow us to provide you with support and to determine your later eligibility for reduced-price upgrades.

Your name and your e-mail address will be added to the software validation database on our internet-accessible web server, to allow the software you have purchased licenses for to be enabled over the Internet.

Non-redacted credit card information will not be stored on any of our servers. Note that because on-line credit card transactions are processed by a payment page hosted by our bank, rather than communicated to and submitted for processing by us, we will at no time have or have access to your credit card number and related information for orders placed on line.

Contacting us with questions or for support: In order to communicate with us by e-mail, you will need to provide us with your name and your e-mail address. Doing so will not result in your e-mail address being added to any databases. However, a copy of the e-mail messages in question may be retained for our mutual protection for at least the life of the software products involved.

Subscribing to our e-mail update list: If you subscribe to the Alchemy Mindworks e-mail update list, your e-mail address will be added to the database for the list so we can send you postings. No other personal information is required to subscribe to the list.

All of the foregoing databases are subject to our privacy policies, as described elsewhere in this document. They will not be disclosed to third parties except as required by law.

Requests to remove your information from our records: If you wish to have your personal information removed from our records, as noted above, please contact us to request that we do so. We will undertake due diligence to ensure that you are in fact the person requesting removal, and at such time as we are satisfied that you are who you claim to be, we will immediately and irrevocably remove your information from all the relevant databases.

Please note that once we remove your personal information from our databases, it will be gone forever and it will not be recoverable should you subsequently change your mind.

If you instruct us to remove your software license purchase and registration information for the aforementioned databases:

1. Any software licenses which you have purchased from Alchemy Mindworks will cease to function, and will no longer be installable or re-installable. (In that the information required to identify your licenses in our software validation database will no longer be present, our server will not recognize your licenses.)
   
   
2. We will not be able to offer you reduced-priced software upgrades based on your earlier purchases, as we will have no way to verify what you have purchased. Your earlier purchase records will have been removed from our customer database.
   
   
3. We will not be able to provide you with software support, as we will be unable to verify which if any of our software products you have purchased licenses for.

If you request that we remove your personal information from our records, we will bring the foregoing to your attention and require that you agree to these conditions.

You will not be entitled to a refund or any other form of compensation for software licenses that cease to function due to your request for your personal information to be removed from our records.

We will not reinstate removed personal information after it has been removed, for any reason.

You can remove your e-mail address from the Alchemy Mindworks update mailing list at the list's web page any time you like. If you do so, you will be sent a confirmation message to the address you have requested to remove. Reply to the message or click on the link therein and your address will be removed from the mailing lists database immediately.

This Document

All of the information in this document is subject to change without notice. This page constitutes the stated intent of Alchemy Mindworks to protect the privacy of its users. It is not a contractual undertaking to do so. Alchemy Mindworks will not be liable for any breaches of privacy resulting from error, omission, third-party activities or acts of God, or for any loss, damage or expense caused thereby — the lawyers would have complained if we hadn't said that.

If you have any questions, please send us some e-mail.

All the information at this page is as accurate as we can make it. Neither Alchemy Mindworks nor the author of this page accepts any responsibility for any loss, damage or expense caused by your use of these pages, however it happens. If you can figure out a way for any of this to cause you loss, damage or expense you have a sneakier mind than any of us. This page and all dependent pages are copyright © 1994 — 2024 Alchemy Mindworks. No portion of this page may be reproduced in any form without the explicit written permission of the author and copyright holder.

[1] Alchemy Mindworks must provide your personal information in response to a search warrant or other legally valid inquiry or order, or to an investigative body in the case of a breach of an agreement or contravention of law, or as otherwise required by law.

[2] We will share personal information with parties outside Alchemy Mindworks if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

1. Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request.
2. Enforce applicable terms of service, including investigation of potential violations.
3. Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
4. Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Alchemy Mindworks, our users, our employees, our stockholders or our suppliers as required or permitted by law.