We believe in your right to know what information is collected during your visit to our web site and how that information is used and safeguarded.
Information Automatically Gathered About All Visitors
We collect aggregate and user-specific information on which pages consumers access or visit. This information is used to generate reports that help us assess the value of and interest in the various types of content we provide and to improve the content of our web pages. We can build a better site and content strategy if we know which pages our users are visiting, how often they visit and how long they stay on a page.
Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer’s connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our site. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our site to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our site.
To help make our site more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we may utilize a standard feature of browser software called a “cookie.” A cookie is a small piece of computer code that is deposited on your hard drive by our site. Browsers typically recognize when a cookie has been sent to your computer and give you the option to refuse or allow it. A cookie does not actually identify you, just the computer that you are using to access our site. A cookie cannot read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers, content partners and sites that are reached from links on our site may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we cannot control.
We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs so we can deliver a better and more personalized service. It is a cookie, for example, that allows us to deliver to you any personalized information each time you visit a site.
In addition, we can access cookies later in your current session or in a later session on our site in order to improve your visit to our web site, as in the following examples:
Account Registration
If your use of a component of the site requires you to register, a cookie will be used to automatically identify you as a registered user when you are using our site. These cookies are known as persistent cookies and continue on your computer after the initial session in which they are created.
This cookie allows us to maintain information containing the products or services you are purchasing while you are online. To limit unauthorized access, this cookie, also called a session cookie, expires whenever you exit a browser session.
Like many other commercial sites, our site may utilize an electronic file called a web beacon to count users who have visited a page or to recognize users by accessing certain cookies. Our site and/or our partner web sites use web beacons for auditing purposes and to collect information from the websites of certain partners. Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report anonymous individual and/or aggregate information about our users from our partners. Aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners. To opt-out of a third parties’ use of web beacons please click here.
Third Party Advertising
We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web Site. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, e-mail address or telephone number) about your visits to this Web Site and to other web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. These companies may employ cookies and clear GIFs to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies and clear GIFs is generally not personally identifiable (unless, for example, you provide personally identifiable information to them through an ad or e-mail message). We encourage you to read these businesses’ privacy policies if you should have any concerns about how they will care for your personal information. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, see the Network Advertising Initiative’s consumer web site.
Yahoo! is an ad network partner that displays ads on our Web Site. To improve your ad experience on our Web Site and elsewhere on the Internet, we may send non-personal information to Yahoo! based on your browser’s activities, such as type of pages viewed and categories of interests, so that the advertising you see is relevant to you. Yahoo! also may use information regarding its own users to select which ads to display. Click here to learn more about Yahoo!’s ad practices, including how to opt out of using anonymous information to select which ads to show you.
Information Gathered by Voluntary Submission
To make use of certain features on our web site (such as contests, comments, and other interactive forums and blogs) visitors need to register and to provide certain information as part of the registration or participation process. We may ask, for example, for your name, e-mail address, and zip code, and we might request information on your interest in sports, personal finance, the performing arts, and the like.
The information you supply will help us offer you more personalized features, to tailor our sites to your interests and make them more useful to you. The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. But if you do not supply the information we need, we may be unable to provide you with services and content we make available to other visitors to our sites. Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous, you are still free to take advantage of the wealth of content that is otherwise available, without registration, on our sites.
What We Do With the Information We Gather About You
We or one of our owner or affiliated companies may perform statistical, marketing and demographic analyses of our delivery subscribers and their subscription patterns. In addition, we may generally inform our advertisers about our subscriber base. When we present information to our advertisers — to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our websites — it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our sites. We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.
In some cases, we contract with third parties to provide services on our behalf, including credit-card and bill processing, shipping, e-mail distribution, list processing and analytics or promotions management. We provide these third parties only with the information necessary for them to perform their specific services. These service providers are restricted from using this information in any way other than to provide services to us, and they may not share this information with any one else nor may they resell this data.
Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
A Final Note:
We are affiliated with other companies, some of which feature our branding; in addition there are links to third parties contained on our site. Our Privacy Policy does not apply to those companies’ web sites, so you should refer to each of those sites to obtain information on their privacy policies. If you cannot find the privacy policy on any of these sites once you have arrived at their site via a link from our site, you should contact that site directly for more information.
The web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our Privacy Policy at some point in the future, we will post the changes before they take effect if we believe that the change in the way we use your personal information is significant or material. Of course, our use of information gathered while the current policy is in effect will always be consistent with the current policy, even if we change that policy later.
If you have any questions about this policy, or anything not otherwise stated above, please contact us at any time.