Privacy policy

Effective Date: August 8, 2022

Updated: August 8, 2020

Thank you for visiting The Load Screen website! The Load Screen and our staff respect your privacy and your privacy rights. We believe in being transparent, especially with your personal information. We will not collect any personal information from you without your consent. If you do choose to support The Load Screen, here is a list of what personal information we collect, what we do with it, who we share it with, and your choices and rights.

If you choose to share your personal information with The Load Screen, you confirm your agreement to our Terms of Service and that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy.

1. How does this Privacy Policy apply?

This Privacy Policy describes what we do with the personal information that we collect through Squarespace and Google, how we collect it, and what we do with it.

We use cookies and similar technologies through Squarespace and Google. Here is a link for the Squarespace Cookie Policy and how the Squarespace cookies work on our website. Since we also use Google, here is a link to how Google uses cookies on our website.

2. Personal information we collect

If you choose to share your personal information with us, we will collect various personal information regarding you and your device. This includes the following:

  • IP Address

  • Preferences

  • Web pages visited prior to our website

  • Network information, such as:

    • Browser type and version

    • Operating system

    • Internet service provider

    • Preference settings

    • Unique device IDs

    • Language settings

  • Information on how you interact with our website, such as:

    • Timestamps

    • Clicks

    • Scrolling

    • Browsing times

    • Searched

    • Referral pages

    • Load times

    • Problems you may encounter while using our website, such as:

      • Loading errors

3. How we collect personal information

If you choose to share your personal information with us, we obtain information from various sources. We do this through Google and Squarespace by recording some information when you visit our website, but only after you have agreed to sharing data with our website. When you use our website, we collect information about your activity and interactions with our website, such as your IP address, your device and browser type, the web page you visited before coming to our website, what pages on our website you visit, how long you visit each page on our website, and identifiers associated with your device.

We use this in anonymous, aggregated or pseudonymized form which does not focus on you individually. We use this data to evaluate, provide, protect, or improve our website. We also use some of this data to advertise on our website.

Some of this information is collected using cookies and similar technologies when you use our website. We only use cookies on your device with your permission. You can read more about Squarespace’s Cookie Policy or how Google uses cookies on our website.

4. How we use your personal information

We use the personal information we obtain about you for the following purposes, after you agree to sharing your data with The Load Screen:

  • Advertising: Analyze your interactions with our website and third parties’ online services so we can tailor our advertising to what we think will interest you. We may choose to serve you an advertisement based on what we think may interest you based on other information we hold about you.

  • Customizing our website: Customize our website to provide you with an experience built better for you. We strive to be accessible to any visitor of The Load Screen and we use your information to do that. One way we do that is to use your location information to determine your language preferences. We use cookies and similar technologies for this purpose.

  • Improving our website: Analyze and learn about how our website is accessed and used. We then use that information to evaluate and improve our website. We do this based on anonymous, pseudonymized, or aggregated information which does not focus on you individually.

  • Security: Ensure the security and integrity of our website.

  • Third party relationships: Manage our vendor and partner relationships including Google.

  • Protection: Protect our and others’ interests, rights, and property.

We process your personal information for the above purposes when:

  • Consent: You have granted your consent to the use of your personal information according to this Privacy Policy. Even after you consent, you can change your mind at any time. See Section 7 Changing Consent, for how you can reset or block your consent once given.

  • Legitimate interests: We have a legitimate interest in using your personal information. We have legitimate interests in the following areas:

    • To operate The Load Screen website and provide you with tailored advertising to develop and promote our business.

    • To provide and improve our website.

    • To anonymize and subsequently use anonymized information.

  • Others’ legitimate interests: Where necessary for the purposes of a third party’s legitimate interests, such as Google, who have a legitimate interest in delivering tailored advertising to you and measuring that advertising’s effectiveness through monitoring and analysis.

5. How we use your personal information

We share your information in the following ways after you agree to share your information with us:

  • Affiliates: We share your personal information with our affiliates only when it is necessary and reasonable to help provide services to you.

  • Service Providers: We share your personal information with our service providers on your behalf. We use Squarespace as our service provider for our website and share data with Squarespace for analytics, site hosting, and assisting with data storage. We use Google as a service provider to manage advertisements on our site and for analytics.

  • Following the law or protecting rights and interests: We disclose your personal information if it is reasonably necessary to comply with the law, protect our rights or others’ rights, property, or interests. We may disclose your personal information in response to lawful requests by public authorities, such as to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.

  • Advertising: We share your personal information with Google so that Google can provide you with tailored advertising on our behalf. Google will also measure and monitor the effectiveness of the advertisements that Google provides to you.

6. Your rights and choices

Where applicable law requires, you may have the right to access, update, change or delete personal information. We only gather personal information once you have agreed to share your personal information with us, and we anonymize our data so there will be little personal information held for all users of The Load Screen website.

You can make a request to access, update, change or delete personal information by contacting us at theloadscreendotcom@gmail.com. Please note that we may need more personal information from you including your IP address or physical address of residence, to verify your identity in connection with your requests. If we are unable to verify your identity, we may be unable to process your request.

You may have the right to restrict to the processing of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal information, or exercise a right to data portability under applicable law.

7. changing consent

Consent to track your personal data must first be given before we start using your personal data. Every 30 days our website’s Cookie Banner will ask for your consent, unless you reset the browser you use to access our website. If you want to start or stop sharing your personal information with us but you already closed our Cookie Banner:

  1. Clear your browser cookies for our website.

  2. Refresh The Load Screen website on your browser.

  3. Accept or decline the option in the Cookie Banner to share your personal data or not.

8. How we protect your personal information

We protect your personal information in several ways:

  • We only gather personal information once you have consented.

  • We use data that has been de-personalized or anonymized.

  • We use Squarespace for:

    • Firewalls - to protect against intruders.

    • Data redundancies – our website can stay up even if some servers go down.

9. how we retain your personal information

We retain personal information for as long as necessary to achieve the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. This includes purposes such as complying with our legal obligations, protecting us in the event of disputes, and to protecting our interests as well as others’ interests.

Please note that while providing our website, we collect and maintain aggregated, anonymized or de-personalized information which we may retain indefinitely.

10. data transfers

We use our Service Providers to transfer your data on our behalf. Our service providers our Squarespace and Google, each of which have their own data transfer policies, that can be found in the Squarespace Privacy Policy and the Google Privacy Policy.

After you agree to share your personal information, that information may be transferred to countries other than where you live. Our website is operated through the United States of America, so if you are visiting our website from any other country, your personal information will be transferred there. We also store personal information locally on your device that you use to access our website.

Your personal information may be transferred to countries that have different data protection laws as the country in which you initially provided your information. If we receive a formal complaint, we will respond by contacting the person who made the complaint. We will then work with the appropriate regulatory authorities including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of your data that we cannot resolve directly with you.

11. privacy shield

We use Service Providers to process and transfer data on our behalf. Those Service Providers are Squarespace and Google, and each comply with the Privacy Shield framework. Google’s Privacy Shield Certification and Squarespace’s Privacy Shield Certification show each company’s commitment to the Privacy Shield framework. You can learn more about the Privacy Shield framework by visiting the Privacy Shield website.

12. california residents

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requires specific disclosures for California residents. This Privacy Policy is designed to show you how The Load Screen website handles your information.

a.      Categories, business and commercial purposes, sources and third parties

The CCPA requires us to disclose certain information regarding the categories of personal information which we collect from California residents from the 12 months prior to the effective date of this Privacy Policy. We only collect data from those that agree to share their data with us, but if a California resident decides to share their personal data, here are the categories of personal information we will collect, the sources of that personal information, and the third parties with whom we share that category of personal data with:

  • Identifiers: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Commercial information: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our business partners and our service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Internet activity: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Network activity: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Device activity: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Location information: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers.  We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Sensory information: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), and our service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

  • Other information that identifies or can be reasonably associated with you: The sources of this category are you (directly or indirectly through a Third-Party Service), collected by our website, business partners, and service providers. We share this category of information with third parties that are either our business partners or our service providers.

Each category of personal data collected is for the business purposes of providing The Load Screen Website, customizing our website, securing our website, protecting our website, enforcing our terms and policies, complying with law, verifying your identity, and other business purposes about which we may notify you of on our website about such changes.

b.     Your Requests

The CCPA provides California Residents the right to submit requests to a business which has collected their personal information, with some limitations and exceptions. Californians have the right to be provided with access to the specific pieces and categories of sources for such information about them, as well as the categories of sources for such information, the business or commercial purposes for collecting such information, and the categories of third parties with which such information was shared. A California resident also has the right to delete such personal information, however we may need additional information to process your request.

If you are a California resident looking to use your personal data rights, please email theloadscreendotcom@gmail.com with  “California Resident” in either the title or body of the email being sent on your behalf. As a California resident, one may choose to designate an authorized agent to make a California Request on your behalf, but we will need you to provide a valid power of attorney, your valid government issued identification, and the authorized agent’s valid government issued identification.

c.      We do not sell your personal information

We do not sell your personal information and we have not sold any personal information to third parties for business or commercial purposes in the last 12 months prior to the effective date of this Privacy Policy. We do share your personal information with third parties for the business and commercial purposes described in Section 11. This includes advertising and marketing based on your online activities over time and across our different pages.

d.      We do not discriminate against you

If you choose to use any of your rights regarding your data, The Load Screen will not discriminate you and your future visits to our website. We respect your rights, your privacy, and will not discriminate against those who choose to use their rights.

13. Google Fonts Used on this website

Our website uses Fonts from Google on our website. To properly display these fonts and our website to you, servers where the font files are stored may receive personal information about you, including:

  • Information about your browser

  • Information about your network

  • Information about your device

  • Your IP address

Remember that The Load Screen website will only track data once you consent, see Section 7 for how we obtain your consent and how to change your settings at any time.

14. Minors under the age of 18

While The Load Screen website contains news and reviews of video games across multiple platforms, we do not market our website to those under the age of 18. Also, we do not knowingly collect, maintain, or use personal information from children under 13 years old.

We are family friendly in nature, but most of the games we review contain strong adult content that generates ESRB ratings of Teen to Mature (17+), see the ESRB’s website for more video game rating details. We will never rate an Adult Only 18+ game because the content of the game would be too graphic for display and marketing purposes.

If a user between the ages of 13 and 17 wants to support our website, you are required to get consent from a parent or guardian to share your personal data with our website. You can do this by having that parent or legal guardian send an email to theloadscreendotcom@gmail.com, with the heading “Teen Data Sharing Permission” please.

Again, no personal data will be tracked until you grant your consent.

15. updates to this Privacy Policy

Since internet privacy laws are constantly being updated in most countries around the world, so must our Privacy Policy. We strive for transparency as a business practice, so as we add partners and additional services to our website, we will update our Privacy Policy. If we do update the Privacy Policy, the Effective Date of the Privacy Policy will be changed to reflect the date the update was implemented. We will notify you of any Privacy Policy updates by prominently posting a notice of the changes on our pages before they take effect.

We encourage you to check our Privacy Policy occasionally to review our policy, especially if it has been a while since your last visit. This will keep you informed of your rights and privacy, and how we handle and share your data.

16. How to contact the load screen

If you have questions, comments, or complaints about this Privacy Policy or if you would like to exercise your rights and choices, please email us at theloadscreendotcom@gmail.com.