We are in business to help people and make money, which we do by selling stuff, which means we're going to try to sell you stuff, duh. Helpful stuff, and in a hopefully-not-too-annoying way, but yeah.
But here's the thing: you should be happy about that, because it means we're not in the business of selling or renting your personal information -- unlike big G and little f!
Anyway, the point here is that means your email and social accounts are a first and foremost a login and account recovery mechanism for our sites: we don't spam your timelines or send you emails you've indicated you don't want. (Either explicitly by clicking opt-out links, or implicitly by you not opening or clicking stuff in them!)
And we want you to be able to have an account, because it helps you track your progress and learning, and also because it helps us know what kind of stuff you might actually be interested in buying. (We do understand that some percentage of people will only ever use the free stuff we provide, and that's okay, too.)
But whether you buy our stuff or not, we don't intentionally pass on any of this information we collect, not even by selling targeted advertising, or allowing other sites to track you for pay.
All that being said, we are a business and businesses have to deal with a lot of contingencies in a document like this one. So, rather than try to weasel-word our way around every possible contingency in fifty pages of unreadable bullshit, we'd like to instead take this opportunity to spell out as many of our policies in as plain and simple language as we can.
We will generally try to be nicer and more helpful than what we're saying here, but that won't always be possible or practical. So this document exists (in part) to clarify our complete lack of obligation to be any nicer than what we disclaim here -- even if we happen to be nicer in some or most cases.
(Basically, we're not trying to be evil, but like all corporations, we have to reserve the right to be evil, so we can protect ourselves from That Guy (or Gal) who decides to be a dick and screw everyone over by getting lawyers involved in things. Sorry, that's just life.)
This is the internet. Nobody knows you're a dog, but everybody's tracking which dog-related websites you visit, and how much dog food you're buying. So if you care what big companies know about you, use protection... or get off the internet.
If you care what we know about you, then don't give us information you don't want us to have (or share), because even if we don't intend to share or disclose it, shit can still happen. Remember the Cloudbleed bug? Or any number of internet security scares-of-the-month? Yeah. Shit happens, and if it happens to us, your data is at risk... just like it is with every other company you give it to, whether they mention that risk in their fifty-page privacy policy or not.
If you send us any kind of personal information, including emails, audio, video, comments, forum posts participation in online events/chats/workshops/whatever, you're granting us an irrevocable and completely unrestricted license to do with that content as we please, including but not limited to editing it, combining it with other people's content, and publishing it with or without attribution to you -- at no cost to us, ever... even if we were to say, sell the rights to some publisher to print a book consisting entirely of material you wrote, and keep all the money ourselves!
(In other words, we can pass on or share our rights with anybody we please, for any reason or purpose whatsoever. We have to insist on terms like these so that somebody can't come around in ten years to demand royalties for a paragraph that got quoted in something that later turned out a best-seller. Sorry, but some people are dicks.)
Of course, we're happy to try to anonymize, pseudonymize, or otherwise obscure personal details at your request -- or even possibly agree not to publish something at all! -- but if we fail to do so for any reason whatsoever, well... sorry, you're out of luck. Our attempting to be nice by offering these and other ways to protect your privacy (such as privacy settings, display names, avatar settings, etc.) should not be confused with any warranty or obligation to actually protect your privacy, because again, this is the internet, and God himself could therefore not guarantee your privacy. So again, don't put information on the internet you don't want people to have!
Except as may be noted on any individual product information, nothing we sell is warrantied or guaranteed to do anything except cost you money... and even that depends on everything on the internet working correctly! (That doesn't mean we're not going to try to be nice and helpful if we can, just that we're not obligated to be nice or helpful in any particular way.)
If anything in this document conflicts with what your local laws say, or if you lack the ability to legally agree to our terms (e.g. due to your age, competency, or any other reason), you can't use our sites and services. (It's bad enough that we have to do what our idiot politicians say, so we're not going to also bend over for your idiot politicians if we can avoid it.) And if you can't make this agreement with us, we can't offer you our information or services.