The Internet, Privacy, and .com

The Internet contains a wealth of information; unfortunately, it may also contain personal details about you that you don't want everyone to know. For example, your real name (lots of people on the Internet use aliases, alter egos or nicknames), street address, phone number, or e-mail address. When you go online, sites you visit may be gathering information about you without your knowledge. At .com we strive to help our customers protect their privacy while using our services.

.com Privacy Policy

.com's policy is to respect and protect the privacy of our users. This policy statement tells you how we collect information from you and how we use it. Using the Internet should be a fun experience and we want to help you make it so.

The information you provide for your personal .com account is shared among the .com affiliated sites, as it is our goal to make your visits to our sites easy and enjoyable. However, be assured that .com will not disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent. .com may disclose user information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) .com's rights or property, other .com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities. .com may disclose user information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it.

.com shares aggregate information about our users with advertisers, business partners, sponsors and other third parties. For example, we will say .com's audience is x percent females and y percent males. This data is used to customize .com content and advertising to deliver a better experience for our users.

There are cases where .com may ask you for personal information such as your name, email address, and birth date. For example, we request personal information when you register for a .com account, for transactions, or for services that require registration or subscription. .com needs to collect this information for fulfilling prizes, tracking/verifying compliance with .com policies as well as federal, state and local laws and/or for editorial and feedback solicitation purposes.

In case you change your mind or some personal information may change (such as your zip code), we will endeavor to provide a way to correct, update or remove the personal data you give us. You can do this at the member information page or by contacting our Customer Support organization at support@.com.

Opting-Out

Information provided at the time of Registration or submission from a guest who is 13 years of age or over may be used for marketing and promotional purposes by .com and our affiliates or companies that have been prescreened by .com. To keep you in control of your personal information and the communications directed to you, we allow you to opt-out of the following services: sharing your information in our member directory, receiving communications from .com about new features or services, and receiving communications about offers from third-party companies that offer a product or service that we think would be of value to you. If a guest objects to such use for any reason, he/she may stop that use -- either by e-mail request to support@.com or by modifying his/her member information online.

Policies for Kids (Individuals Under 13 years of Age)

.com encourages parents and guardians to spend time online with their children and to participate in the activities offered on the sites. No information should be submitted to or posted at .com by guests under 13 years of age without the consent of their parent or guardian.

Unless otherwise disclosed during collection, .com does not provide any personally identifying information, regardless of its source, to any third party for any purpose whatsoever from our guests under 13 years of age. All registrants receive an e-mail confirming their Registration. In addition, when a guest under 13 registers, he/she is required to provide the e-mail address of his/her parent or guardian and that parent or guardian receives an e-mail alerting them to that Registration. The parent or guardian must validate the account, as described in the e-mail, in order for the potential member to use most .com interactive services. No information collected from guests under 13 years of age is used for any marketing or promotional purposes whatsoever, either inside or outside .com except as explicitly stated during registration for contests or promotions (and in that case, the information collected is used only for the specific contest or promotion).

Although guests under 13 years of age may be allowed to participate in some contests and promotions, if such a guest wins, notification and prizes are sent to the parents or guardians identified in the initial registration process. Publication of contest winners names, ages, or images for individuals under 13 require parental or guardian consent.

We do not allow guests under 13 years of age to be listed in our member directory or to receive direct marketing communications from .com or to be sent our third-party offers.

Policies for Teens (Individuals 13-17 Years of Age)

Teens are required to provide the e-mail address of a parent or guardian and a notification message is sent to the parent or guardian of all guests who are 13 to 17 years of age which identifies the information supplied at registration and allows the parent or guardian to be aware of and participate in the guest's online experience.

Use of IP Addresses

An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web. Web servers -- the big computers that "serve up" Web pages -- automatically identify your computer by its IP address.

.com collects IP addresses for the purposes of system administration, to report aggregate information to our advertisers, and to audit the use of our site. When guests request pages from .com sites, our servers log the guests' IP addresses. We do not normally link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that a user's session will be logged, but the user remains anonymous to us. We can and will use IP addresses to identify a user when we feel it is necessary to enforce compliance with our house rules or terms of service or to protect our service, site, customers or others.

Some services within .com, such as certain message boards, may display IP addresses along with the message poster's name and message. Please review each service prior to use and only uses those that disclose information you are comfortable with sharing.

Use of Cookies

What are cookies? Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site transfers to an individual's hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies make Web-surfing easier for you by saving your preferences while you're at our site. We never save passwords or credit card information in cookies. The use of cookies is an industry standard -- you will find them at most major Web sites.

By showing how and when guests use a site, cookies help us see which areas are popular and which are not. Many improvements and updates to the site are based on such data as total number of visitors and pages viewed. This information is most easily tracked with cookies. We use the information from cookies to provide services better tailored to our users needs.

Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, note that some parts of the .com service will not function properly or may be considerably slower if you refuse cookies. For example, without cookies, you will not be able to set personalized news preferences or you may have difficulty completing shopping transactions, entering contests, or playing games.

You may occasionally get cookies from our advertisers. .com does not control these cookies. The use of advertising cookies sent by third-party servers is standard in the Internet industry.