Privacy Policy – Sharp Moon Inc.

Last modified May 1, 2021

This privacy policy explains how our organization may use personal data when you use our public website or contact us through other channels. Note that a more detailed explanation of how we also protect the privacy of subscribing users and institutions within our Callisto service is embedded within the Callisto Terms of Service.

We value privacy

Our founding team considers privacy more important than most companies and many individuals do. We support organizations and projects including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the TOR Project, and ProtonMail.com that advocate for strong privacy rules in governments and corporations, support and facilitate much-needed secure communications for investigative journalists, dissidents, citizens of all countries subjected to censorship and all other forms of oppression.

What data do we collect?

Personal identification (email address, name, library/institutional affiliation). Visitors/users apparent IP address and web browser type may be recorded.

How do we collect your data?

You directly and optionally provide us with the data we have about you. We may collect your data when you:

  • Sign up to request our services, our announcements & marketing emailing list
  • Register an account in our Callisto service, or log in to use the service.
  • Contact our sales department
  • Complete a customer survey or provide feedback to us via email, message boards, or social media
  • Contact us, connect with us, or follow our Company Profile or Product Page(s) in any social media network (currently only LinkedIn).
  • Our website(s) also has the minimal features of Google Analytics enabled, but are fully functional for browsers configured to ignore or block Google Analytics. We intend to phase Google Analytics out to further improve privacy.

How will we use your personal data?

We use it to process subscription orders to our services, to provide technical support or training to you, to reply to sales inquiries, and to update you about service changes, new features, and special offers directly related to Sharp Moon Inc. services (e.g. Callisto).

We never sell, rent, or lend personal data about you to anyone. Thus, contacting or working with Sharp Moon Inc. will not cause you to receive any solicitations (“spam”, “junk mail”, etc.) from any other companies. We may use your name and email address within a 3rd party system, but only when it’s for delivery of our own aforementioned messages and their privacy policy similarly protects against misuse of those names/addresses.

We do not publish names or other personal information about any of our customers or prospects. Occasionally, prospective customers (librarians at research institutions) will request to contact existing customers of ours (e.g. librarians at other research institutions). We only do so with express permission.

How do we use web cookies?

Our public website and the Callisto service’s web interface use cookies to enable stateful web sessions. In Callisto, this is critical for maintaining your logged-in status while in use, and for persisting selected options or data and enabling certain JavaScript dynamic features during that session. Our systems are fully compliant with web browsers configured to purge all cookies on exit and to block all third-party cookies.

We do not make use of third-party cookies, nor use any tricks like “Facebook Pixels” or similar mechanisms to track or identify or track your online activities subversively, or to facilitate such behaviors by others. The prevalence of such unethical tools shows society needs stronger enforcement of privacy and consumer advocacy.

GDPR and Data Protection Rights

Most of the GDPR-specified “Data Protection Rights” are irrelevant to our existing operations because we have very little data about individual people and it’s never published. So most of the protection rights simply don’t apply. But you may contact us by email to request the right of erasure (for former Callisto users). For European institutions intending to subscribe to our Callisto service, we will address any GDPR-related questions you may have.

COPPA Compliance

Our business is completely focused on services for the Higher Education and Research Library market. As such, there is no case where we would collect any personal data regarding a minor, especially under 13. Further, even in cases like a public library system subscribing to Callisto, we would still have no data about the library’s patrons, users, or students. Our system’s login accounts are only for employees at libraries or consortia involved in the management and troubleshooting of their institutional subscriptions.

Location & Legal Context

Sharp Moon Inc. is incorporated in Illinois, USA.