Disclaimer

Statement of Disclosure and Privacy

Disclosure statement

This page applies to mgmtlaboratory.com.

Purpose

This site is committed to reader value, by providing valuable information and judgment calls to readers, to the best of our ability. Recommendations and advice are based on objective testing, subjective evaluations, and the sum total becomes the best advice we can offer.

While we can't spell out every possible scenario, our core principle is to offer our readers articles on good administration of agencies and businesses. We will tell it like it is, and under no circumstances are there any “paid reviews” of services from vendors or private organizations.

Service under review

It would be impractical and financially infeasible to engage service for fee offerings for review without free services, transportation, lodging and loaner equipment, especially high value equipment. Equipment loans are of a limited time-frame, typically 1-2 months, but occasionally longer to allow for comprehensive coverage, or longer-term usage conclusions.

Vendor services reviews are free

This site does not accept free services or equipment of any “substantial” value.

Substantial value is defined as approximately $1,000 or the lowest market price per item or higher. The time (especially) and cost of returning items takes away from our valuable workday, and costs money, hence such lower cost items might or might not be returned.

This site accepts free transportation, lodging and consumable items in quantities necessary for substantial evaluation over time.

Under no circumstances do we accept services and products for review that involve a quid-pro-quo understanding. Vendors that propose such an arrangement are blacklisted.

Any unusual situations will be disclosed at the time of the first substantial coverage of that service. Continued coverage of a service previously reviewed or discussed is not grounds for a fresh disclosure.

Advertisers and discounts

This site accepts compensation from general advertisers because that's inherent to the business relationship: this site charges for ads like any other publication; commissions, product discounts, free shipping or anything similar are all forms of compensation and are mandatory for financially viable operation. Readers should assume that if an advertisement is presented, that there it is an ad paid for by the vendor.

We avail ourselves of any discount available to at least some segment of the buying public.

We avail ourselves of any reasonable discount when purchasing equipment for purpose of reviewing a service, because this expands the variety and range of our review— this site cannot operate by paying full cost for every service reviewed, as well, many services practically cannot be obtained for evaluation, and therefore must be purchased or not reviewed. We accept like-value equipment exchanges and updates of older models when it serves long-term testing purposes in the interests of readers.

Articles and Reviews

We choose what we want to review or subject we write about. This site has never, nor will it ever accept payment for review of any product, equipment or service. This does not rule out a consulting arrangement (real work) where we use our expertise to provide services to a vendor; a service review might later ensure as a natural consequence. Such arrangements will be disclosed, should they ever occur; we cannot work for free.

Advertisers and links

Click-through commissions for sales made through this site are implicitly assumed. Such links are a part of the financial support of this site.

It is the policy of this site that “commission” links are provided only on a win/win basis: your price is no different than if you visited that site directly, bypassing the links provided by this site.

This site accepts advertisements from a very small number of vendors, hand-selected selected for service, reliability and value, and based on our own satisfied customer relationship.

This site is compensated for advertisements by general vendors, just as any magazine or other web site or publication would be. This income makes the site financially viable.

Software

This site accepts free software regardless of cost (though we cannot always get it), because wide-ranging testing is often performed, sometimes on a sporadic or ongoing basis. Our general policy is to never buy software when it can be obtained free of charge.

We deem free software a win/win for readers because it allows exploring much more than otherwise financially feasible. Software is deemed to have no significant value, because we can't possibly use but fraction of the software we review, plus it's just about impossible to buy and return software that has been opened and installed (unlike hardware). The ongoing upgrade costs would also be financially untenable.

Software is not returned; manufacturers don't want it "back". That said, the software this site uses heavily has long since been paid for and paid-upgraded many times over, at the usual street prices.

Our products

This site charges for various subscriptions, software, etc. We recommend our service unabashedly.

Consulting, lecturing, trouble-shooting

We charge for our time. Consulting and lecturing and trouble-shooting and the like that consume time or effort on behalf of another party constitutes a work for hire arrangement. We charge for this.

Content Copyright If you want to use any image from this website you have to ask for permission. You cannot copy more than 20 words from any of our posts. And you have to define the source with "Source:

Background

Here's an article on the new FTC requirement for bloggers, social media, etc to disclose their relationships. Here's the FTC site itself. Guidelines are vague, and mean whatever someone wants them to mean, so we'll do our best to spell out what this site actually does.

This policy is effective September 1, 2017. Our intent is the highest ethical standards.

Any questions?

Please use this form to get in touch with me if you are interested in being a contributor and adding posts to the blog. You can contact us.

Site Privacy Policy

Effective, September 1, 2017, non-personally identifiable information may be collected by third-party advertisers.

Who We Are

This privacy policy applies to (“we”, “us”, “our”) that post this policy, namely mgmtlaboratory.com, , and related sites (collectively, “Sites”). This policy does not apply to any website that posts a different statement.

Your use of any of these Sites or email contact with us constitutes your acceptance of the terms of this privacy policy as revised from time to time.

How to Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy policy or your personally identifiable information, please contact us here.

What Information We Collect, How We Get It and How We Use It

User Entry—Most of the information we collect that could personally identify you (“Personally Identifiable Information” as the lawyers call it) is voluntarily entered by you when you request services from our Site. Examples may include name, username, e-mail address(es), mailing address, phone number or similar information. You may provide us this information when you create a subscription account, sign-up for our newsletter, order a product, engage our consulting services, request a quote or advice, send us a question via email or otherwise contact us. We use this information to respond to your request and/or to provide services to you.

If you are entering another person’s personally identifiable information (e.g., you are purchasing a subscription for your spouse), by doing so you represent and warrant that you have the authority or permission to do so. If someone other than you has entered your personally identifiable information and you wish for us to delete it, please contact us at the address provided above.

For requests where a third-party vendor will provide the requested services or products, we may share this information with the relevant vendor(s) in order to respond to your request (e.g., a quote for a computer upgrade or similar multi-party arrangement).

General email policy

We send email in response to email sent to us and/or to follow up on prior emails. We usually retain all emails received in order to respond appropriately and in context, to interact over time, to better respond to inquiries, etcetera, but reserve the right to delete them at our sole discretion as our business needs and data retention policies may evolve. We do not accept “delete” requests for emails sent to us, for technical reasons.

We reserve the right and will use discretion in quoting email messages, e.g. when we deem it of general interest to readers of the Sites. We may quote some or all the contents of email messages sent by you to us, using your name (as best we can determine, typically first name and last initial) and general location unless the email specifically states “DO NOT QUOTE” in all-caps in the first line of the email body. We may make minor edits to emails for better readability, clarity, or similar reasons. To these ends, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual and transferable license under all rights of intellectual property, privacy, publicity and otherwise to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works from, publicly display and perform and otherwise use any material you submit to us. We DO NOT “unpublish” emails once quoted.

From time to time we might offer discounts, coupons or similar offers via email. Prior to initiating such activity, we will send you email notifying you of your option to opt out.

We may send you email notifying you of changes to this privacy policy, but we are not necessarily required to do so.

Subscriber email policy

“Subscriber” means anyone who purchases or utilizes any of our products or services.

We send email to subscribers in order to provide current and/or updated site access credentials and/or periodic courtesy emails for current or revised site credentials. We do not offer “opt out” for email involving site access credentials because access to subscription content necessarily requires this information.

We send courtesy renewal notices to subscribers on or around and before and after the expiration date of each subscription, generally more than one (typically 2 or 3). Users may “opt-out” of these courtesy email renewal notices by contacting us.

Subscribers may request that a particular contact email be used for these purposes, and may request an alternative username, so long as such requests are reasonable and infrequent. We reserve the right to reject inappropriate requests, e.g., technical limitations, profanity or anything we deem offensive, at our sole discretion.

Site access information

We log and collect and retain technical information such as IP address(es), date and time of access, browser type, login username, page viewing history and similar information via cookies and other automated mechanisms. This information usually does not personally identify you, but it is possible that it could at some point be linked with other personally identifiable information. We use this information for analysis of web site usage patterns, bandwidth utilization and similar analysis, and/or to identify violation of Sites terms of service (e.g. bulk downloading, unauthorized access, inappropriate linking, and similar activities that we deem at our sole discretion to be inappropriate or unwanted).

We also use this information to enhance your user experience, such as display preferences for images, site readability options and similar site options and behaviors.

Sharing Information with Others

We utilize certain third-party entities to help us provide our products and services to you, for processing payments, for managing our newsletter, Twitter for our information feed, and we may provide your information to these or similar entities (for example, a data storage facility) as reasonably necessary to provide such products and services to you. Some third-party companies will ask you to enter your personally identifiable information directly with them and may provide some or all of that information back to us which we may combine with the information you directly provided us. All third-party use of your information is governed by the privacy policy of the applicable third-party, and we disclaim any and all liability for a third-party’s actions, links, services and products.

Should we undergo a change to our corporate organization (for example, merger, acquisition, financing or other corporate event), we may provide your relevant information to the relevant entity and reserve the right to do so. In rare circumstances, we may need to disclose your information (a) in response to a subpoena or law-enforcement procedure or as we otherwise reasonably believe we are required to do so by law, regulation or governmental authority, (b) to preserve our rights or property, or (c) to protect the personal safety of someone in an emergency, and we reserve the right to do so.

How We Protect Your Personally Identifiable Information

We take reasonable steps to protect your personally identifiable information from loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction. No measure of security is full-proof, so please keep this in mind when deciding the information you choose to provide to us.

We do not encrypt access to Sites.

We do not collect or receive or request or have any visibility to your credit card information. We use third party services for payment processing, and such information resides with those service(s).

We expressly disclaim responsibility for personal information transmitted to us via email or other mechanism while in transit and otherwise (e.g. a pending email for a subscription or any similar activity), including information transmitted to us by third parties.

It is our intent to minimize the personally identifiable information contained on the web server(s) and email server(s) servicing our Sites to that necessary for the user experience on the Site (name, email, login username, subscription status and similar information we deem important to the Site experience). Additional personal information transmitted to us may reside on our servers for a reasonable duration for business purposes in our discretion (e.g., an email notification for a subscription).

We do not encrypt your personal information.

Display of Personally Identifiable Information

Logged-in users have name and username and email displayed on various Site pages, and we reserve the right to display similar information deemed of value to the user experience on Sites.

Users are strongly discouraged from logging in using a public computer, and are advised to promptly erase web browser history and caches, and to quit any and all program(s) used on such computers. We accept no responsibility for such uses.

How to Update, Correct and Manage your Personally Identifiable Information

As part of our security procedures, we do not permit users to access our database, and we minimize the personally identifiable information in it, so we do not offer “change forms” or similar mechanisms. Should you wish to update, correct or otherwise manage any personally identifiable information you have provided through the Sites, please email us at the address listed above.

We do not offer the option to delete or alter any personally identifiable information deemed by us to be reasonably necessary to maintaining a transaction history (e.g., payment for subscriptions). We do not offer the option of deleting emails or similar communications.

Do Not Track Signals

The Sites currently do not support the ability to respond to “Do Not Track” signals that may be emitted from a user’s device.

Third-Party Collection of Personally Identifiable Information

Our Site does not knowingly permit or facilitate any third-party to collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time via the Site. However, Site use page-hit tracking services, and it is possible that such services could obtain information about which we are unaware and/or associate it with other information. We do not control this activity, and we direct you to the privacy controls at those services. Advertisers on this site may collect non-personally identifiable visitation information through ad links or ad clicks (text or images or both) on this site.

Web analytics

We use web analytics in order to track information on the Site for the purpose of website optimization and assessing general Site usage patterns, areas of interest, etc.

Web analytics uses cookies and JavaScript code to collect information about visitors and they offer an opt-out provision for website visitors who do not want their data to be collected.

Web analytics collects general information about user activity including network location and IP address, type of web browser, software manufacture and version number, type of operating system, screen colors and screen resolution, JavaScript support, Adobe Flash version, country, city, state, region, county, or geographic area, hostname and connect speed, time of visit, time spent on each page of the website, pages visited, referring site, website the user came through, search engine query and which links were clicked on.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Should we decide it is useful or helpful to make changes to this privacy policy, a revised version of the policy will be posted at this location indicating a new effective date. Your continued use of any of the Sites will constitute your acceptance of the revised policy.

Governing Law

We are located in Minnesota, U.S.A., we process personally identifiable information within the U.S.A. and this privacy policy will be governed by Minnesota law without regard to any conflict of law principles. By using the Site, you consent and submit to the jurisdiction of and within the State of Minnesota. To the extent that any term of this privacy policy conflicts with the terms of a written (including electronic) agreement expressly entered into by you and mgmtlaboratory.com (e.g., product license or consulting agreement), the terms of such agreement shall govern.