What personally identifiable information do I provide to washingtonpost.com?
Washingtonpost.com asks you to provide various types of personally identifiable information to enhance your experience on our site. During registration, washingtonpost.com asks for information such as your name, e-mail address, year of birth, gender, Zip code, country, street address, Job Title, Primary Responsibility, Job Industry and Company Size. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times - such as when you enter a contest or participate in a promotion, when you post an online ad, when you participate in our message boards, or when you order products from us. Whenever you provide personally identifiable information to us, we will make an effort to link to our privacy policy. See below about “cookies” and what other information is collected.
How does washingtonpost.com use my personally identifiable information?
Our primary goal in collecting personally identifiable information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our network of sites. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping and many other types of services, most of which are completely free to you.
Washingtonpost.com uses the personally identifiable information you provide to us in several ways. Some examples follow.
A user’s personally identifiable information may be used by washingtonpost.com for editorial purposes such as to contact you as part of an online survey. Additionally, we may also use the information provided by you to: 1) contact you with legal notices, 2) to advise you of any changes or additions to our Service or terms and conditions, and 3) account status (including confirmation of registrations). If you do not wish to receive the foregoing and therefore unregister from the site, please contact Customer Care and ask to have your registration account deleted. Once your account has been deleted, you will no longer have access to washingtonpost.com, however, you may reregister at any time.
We may also use information about our users and their activities on our site to send offers and information about The Washington Post Company and its affiliates. However, if you no longer wish to receive the foregoing, please contact Customer Care to request removal from this list.
Further, if you told us in your account preferences that you would be interested in receiving certain e-mail newsletters from us, we will send you those e-mail subscriptions. Please note that regardless of those subscription preferences, we may contact you by e-mail as described elsewhere in this privacy policy (e.g., to notify you about changes or additions to our Service, such as new features). However, if you no longer wish to receive any of the foregoing, you may change your preferences for the future at any time by clicking on the following link: https://ssl.washingtonpost.com/actmgmt/registration/addnewsletter/long
In order to provide services free of charge, we display advertisements. washingtonpost.com delivers targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, females over 25 years old). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting those criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to you washingtonpost.com account.
Washingtonpost.com also does research on our users’ demographics, interests and behavior based on the information you provide to us including upon registration, on order forms, during a promotion, as well as from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed and washingtonpost.com may share aggregated versions of this data with advertisers or other businesses. In addition, under confidentiality agreements, washingtonpost.com may match user information with third party data.
Do other companies or people have access to personally identifiable information I provide to washingtonpost.com?
When you are on an area of washingtonpost.com and are asked for personally identifiable information, you are providing that information to The Washington Post Company, its divisions or affiliates, or vendors providing contractual services for washingtonpost.com (such as hosting vendors and list managers). If personally identifiable information is being provided to and/or maintained by any company other than these, our policy is that we will not transfer that personally identifiable information unless notice is given prior to transfer. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service or by expressing this preference, if requested. Additional information about personally identifiable information follows.
Promotions: Promotions that run on washingtonpost.com may be sponsored by companies other than washingtonpost.com or may be co-sponsored by washingtonpost.com and another company. Some or all personally identifiable information provided by you during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If information will be shared, we will disclose such sharing prior to the transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don’t want your personally identifiable information to be shared. In certain circumstances, you may not be able to participate in a particular promotion if you chose not to share personally identifiable information. Currently, most washingtonpost.com promotions are limited to U.S. or North American residents.
Advertisers and Links: washingtonpost.com advertisers, or Web sites that have links on our site, may also collect personally identifiable information directly from you, and these parties may collect such information over time and across different websites. The information practices of companies collecting data on our site or Web sites linked to washingtonpost.com are not covered by this privacy statement.
Marketplace: If you make a purchase or request a service from a business in Marketplace, the information you provide for that transaction (as well as tracking information and cookies as described below) is provided directly to the Marketplace business. Businesses listed in washingtonpost.com Marketplace have separate privacy and data collection practices. washingtonpost.com has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding the business and its privacy policy, go to that business’ home page and click on the appropriate link.
Other: If we run competitions or contests on the site, you may be required to provide additional information such as your telephone number and address in order to participate. The exact rules may vary in each case but the specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used. If you told us in your account preferences that you would be interested in receiving e-mail from us, we may send you e-mails about washingtonpost.com products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies. You can change your account preferences at any time. In addition, in each advertising email you will be provided an ability to opt-out of receiving future emails from the advertiser.
We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies.
Washingtonpost.com users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.
Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, a user’s personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside The Washington Post Company, its divisions or affiliates, or its service vendors unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. washingtonpost.com may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information may be necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement, may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) washingtonpost.com’s rights or property, other washingtonpost.com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities, pursuant to a request from law enforcement, a subpoena, or a court order, or when otherwise may be required by law.
Data Security: We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.
What information do web servers collect?
Web servers serving washingtonpost.com automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits and the domain name of visitors. This information is used for various purposes including internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors and other users, for traffic audits, and as described elsewhere in this privacy policy. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers.
What are cookies and how does washingtonpost.com use them?
Washingtonpost.com places a “cookie” on the browser of a washingtonpost.com user’s computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we may also use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don’t see the same ad too many times in a single session and that you do not have to reenter your login name or password during your visit. We may also use cookies to understand your use of the Service. Advertising service vendors that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies. You may opt out of those cookies as described below. You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by washingtonpost.com by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by washingtonpost.com.
How can I opt out of online advertising cookies?
Online advertising for washingtonpost.com is delivered by the vendor DoubleClick. DoubleClick places cookies on your browser to facilitate serving particular ads – for instance, to help determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before, to tailor ads to you if you have visited our site before, and to avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. You can opt out of DoubleClick’s use of cookies for these purposes by visiting http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/.
In some cases, we and advertisers on washingtonpost.com and other sites work with other third-party vendors to help deliver advertisements tailored to your interests. These vendors include ad networks and audience segment providers, and they place cookies on your browser to collect information about your online activity (e.g., the sites and pages you have visited) in order to help advertisers deliver particular ads on our site and other sites that they believe you would find most relevant. You can opt out of those vendors’ use of cookies to tailor advertising to you by visiting http://www.aboutads.info/.
Often our advertisers contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In this case, an ad serving vendor contacts the advertisers’ hosting service for a particular advertisement. In that case, an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt-out of cookies from vendors with whom we do not have a contractual relationship.
Do-Not-Track Signals and Similar Mechanisms. Some web browsers may transmit “do-not-track” signals to the websites with which the user communicates. Because of differences in how web browsers incorporate and activate this feature, it is not always clear whether users intend for these signals to be transmitted, and there currently is disagreement, including among participants in the leading Internet standards-setting organization, concerning what, if anything, websites should do when they receive such signals. Washingtonpost.com currently does not take action in response to these signals, although, if and when a final standard is established and accepted, washingtonpost.com may reassess how to respond to these signals. In the meantime, and as described above, you can opt out of DoubleClick’s use of cookies to tailor advertising to you by visiting http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ , and you can opt out of certain other vendors’ use of cookies to tailor advertising to you by visiting http://www.aboutads.info/.”
Kids under 13: Do not send any information about yourself to us - including information like your name, address or e-mail address. In general, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. If, in limited circumstances, we do knowingly collect personally identifiable information from a child under the age of 13, we will do so only with verified parental consent prior to collection. In the event that we learn that we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.
Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.
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