Privacy Statement

Although Freedom members are free to share their email address, quitting date, and other membership application information as part of their Yuku Profile (Freedom's messageboard host site), Freedom's staff shall treat application information, including e-mail addresses as confidential. All e-mails or other correspondence containing any information of a personal nature shall be treated as confidential. Please be advised that Freedom's managers have a long standing policy of not sharing any member personal information with any other member, including not disclosing member e-mail addresses.

When posting messages please keep in mind that all Freedom message board posts are visible to all non-member site visitors as well as to members.  When posting messages take care and exercise sound judgment in disclosing personal identifying information as doing so immediately makes it public information.  The information on Freedom's message boards is permanently archived by Yuku and becomes a public treasure chest that helps aid future arrivals in breaking nicotine's grip upon their life.  From time to time old member posts should be expected to be posted to again and brought to the top where they'll become the focus of the entire group. Archived posts, including posts from our prior host (MSN Groups which closed February 2009) may also be used as a research tool to aid us in evaluating past performance and in improving the site.

Be advised that our information management policy allows all public forum resources to be used for worldwide smoking cessation and prevention purposes so long as there are no costs or charges ever associated with their use.  In theory this means that one or more of your thought provoking threads or posts could be used as a youth nicotine dependency prevention teaching tool in a Philippine classroom, as part of a free handout at an Africian smoking cessation seminar, or simply e-mailed and shared between Australian smoking friends.

Both WhyQuit.com and Freedom's Yuku forum collects IP address data that is made available to us, and allows us analyze trends, administer the site, track users' movement, and gather broad information for aggregate use. WhyQuit's IP address data is not linked to personally identifiable information but Yuku generated data from Freedom from Nicotine does associate member names and posts with IP addresses.

We have structured Yuku's Freedom platform controls so that IP addresses are hidden from visitors and only viewable by senior staff members. Although we have no control over Yuku's platform software, Freedom's staff treats all member IP address info as confidential. Obviously, we reserves the right to use IP address info if necessary to protect the forum's members from harrassment, solicitations and unlawful conduct.