The News-Gazette Online Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 20, 2006

Web sites of The News-Gazette Inc., including but not limited to, news-gazette.com, wdws.com and whms.com take your privacy concerns seriously. The following policy explains our position on information gathering and how we intend to use any user data we may collect from our users. 

Please note that this policy applies only to information collected by news-gazette.com and affiliated Web sites.  It does not apply to information obtained or used by The News-Gazette or its affiliates through other means.

Understanding that Internet technologies change rapidly, we reserve the right to change this policy at any time. Changes to this policy will be posted online promptly, with an updated effective date at the top of the policy.  Your use of this Web site means you accept this policy and any of its changes.

You can visit many pages on our site without providing any information.  You may provide personal information when you participate in contests, sign up for restricted content, such as SportsFacts, register for interactive areas of our site, such as photo galleries, comments, weblogs, etc.

We will not give your phone number to our telemarketing department or sell your e-mail address to any company, for any mailing list, no matter how noble the cause unless you specifically give us consent to do so.  We will use your information only as permitted by law.

Information about you specifically:

You can access our Web site home page and browse most of our sites without disclosing personal data.  We may collect and store personal data or other information that you voluntarily supply to us online while using our Web site.

When you fill out a form on our site, we ask for this information: name, address, daytime phone, e-mail address and age. We use names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to notify contest winners or to contact Illini SportsFacts subscribers to verify subscription information. We use some of the information in aggregate form to learn more about our visitors.

We do not sell or use any of this personal information outside of our company.  We do not disclose your personal information to any third party unless compelled by law. All of our employees who have access to your personal information are obliged to keep it confidential.

We only send e-mail to you if you have provided information to us regarding your e-mail address.  For example, there is an option on contest entry forms to choose to be notified of future contests by e-mail.  If you click "yes," we may e-mail you when we begin a new contest. If you click "no," we'll leave you alone.  If you don't want to receive these e-mails any more, simply reply to the message with the word "remove" in either the subject line or the message or, if it makes you feel better, both.

If you wish to forward the link to an article online to a friend, we will ask that you give us your friend’s name and e-mail address. While we collect this information, we do not sell, rent or market your friend’s personal information.  We use this information only to provide this service.

Information about you in general:

We do collect statistics about our readers. For example, our statistical logs identify the browsers people use to get to our pages; (e.g. Netscape Navigator, Firefox or Internet Explorer), the IP addresses of the computers used to access our pages and the computers' operating systems (e.g., Windows XP or Mac OSX).  It does not gather visitors’ e-mail addresses or their identities. These are only collected in aggregate; we cannot identify individuals who simply look at our pages.

We may share aggregate information with advertisers or business partners. For example, an advertiser may want to know the age breakdown of the people who enter our contests or whether the people who visit our calendar are coming from local Internet service providers.

Children's privacy:

We are particularly concerned with providing a safe online environment for children.  We do not knowingly collect or solicit personally identifiable information from or about children under the age of 13 except when permitted by law.

We also do not allow anyone under the age of 13 to register for contest notification unless that contest is directed specifically at children. Then, that information is used only to award prizes. In those cases, we specifically limit the information we ask to just what is needed to contact contest winners, and we ask for parental information as well for that reason. We strongly recommend parental supervision when a child uses the Internet, particularly when a child uses e-mail. We also encourage parents to instruct their children not to give out personal information over the Internet.

If we discover that we have received any information from a child under 13 in violation of this policy, we will delete that information immediately. If you believe The News-Gazette Online has any information from or about anyone under 13, please contact us at our feedback form.

Cookies

We may use a standard feature found in browser software called a “cookie” to enhance your experience on the Web site.  Cookies are small files  that your Web browser places on your hard drive for record-keeping purposes.  Cookies, by themselves, do not tell us your e-mail address or other personally identifiable information.

We use cookies in a variety of ways.  For example, cookies are implemented in order to save passwords so they do not have to be re-entered. For example, we use cookies on our subscription-based SportsFacts pages so that subscribers do not have to re-enter names and passwords for each story that is read. With cookies, you only have to enter your name and password when you first log in.  We do not collect any information from this limited use of cookies. We may also use it to track the number of entries in some of our contests or features.  Advertising vendors that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies.

You can "turn off" cookies in the preferences section of your browser or set it so that you will see a warning dialog box every time a site tries to place a cookie on your hard drive.  This will limit what you can view on the site, however.

Information collection by other people:

Our Web site may allow you to communicate with other site visitors or to post information to be accessed by others. When you use these services, your data may be collected by other visitors.

In addition, we occasionally have banner advertising from advertising networks or providers that use cookies.  For more on those advertisers’ approach to privacy, you need to go to their policies.

We strongly advise that individuals be careful and responsible when online.  You should take care when voluntarily disclosing personal information in such areas of the Web site as comments areas, weblogs, etc.  Such information can be viewed publicly and collected for use by parties not associated with The News-Gazette without our knowledge.  This may result in unsolicited e-mail and other contacts from individuals not employed by The News-Gazette.  Such activities are beyond the control of The News-Gazette and this policy.

Credit Card information and secure transmission:

If you use a credit card to pay for subscriptions or merchandise, we will not keep your credit card information on any of our computers, once the transaction has been processed. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology from Verisign is used to encrypt and protect your credit card account information, and transactions are carried out on a secure server (please be sure that your own Web browser  is able to handle secure transactions).

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure, especially, unencrypted information. We do our best to protect your personal information, but we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.

For more information about Internet privacy, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation at   http://www.eff.org/.

If you have questions about our privacy policy, please contact The News-Gazette’s Electronic Publishing Department by using our feedback form.