THE TRAVELS’s Privacy Policy
Date of last revision: February 2, 2010.
We want to earn your trust by being transparent about how THE TRAVELS works. You should read this policy in its entirety, but should pay particular attention to these four highlights:
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This policy contains eight sections listed below:
1. Introduction
2. Information We Receive
3. Information You Share With Third Parties
4. How We Use Your Information
5. How We Share Information
6. How You Can View, Change, or Remove Information
7. How We Protect Information
8. Other Terms
1. Introduction
Questions. If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy, contact us by mail listed in the section Contact Us.
Scope. This privacy policy covers all of THE TRAVELS. It does not, however, apply to entities that THE TRAVELS does not own or control, such as THE TRAVELS-enhanced applications and websites. By using or accessing THE TRAVELS, you agree to our privacy practices.
No information from people under age 18. If you are under age 18, please do not attempt to register for THE TRAVELS or provide any personal information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a person under age 18, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from a person under age 18, please contact us.
2. Information We Receive
Information you provide to us:
Personal information. When you sign up for THE TRAVELS you provide us with your name, email, gender, and birth date. During the registration process we give you the opportunity to provide additional profile information, such as where you work, and to add a picture of yourself, to help the community connect with you. In some cases we may ask for additional information for security reasons or to provide specific services to you. Once you register you can visit your profile at any time to add or remove personal information about yourself. You can add basic information about yourself, such as information about your hometown. You can also add other information about yourself including your activities, interests, contact information, as well as more information about your education and job history.
Content. One of the primary reasons people use THE TRAVELS is to share content with others. Examples include when you upload or take a photo, upload or record a video, share a link, create an article, make a comment, write something on the forum, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on THE TRAVELS (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.
Transactional Information. We may retain the details of transactions or payments you make on THE TRAVELS. However, we will only keep your payment source account number with your consent.
Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your profile). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.
Information we collect when you interact with THE TRAVELS:
Site activity information. We keep track of the actions you take on THE TRAVELS, such as adding a contact, becoming a fan of a THE TRAVELS Page, joining a group at the forum, sending pictures. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact you shared it.
Access Device and Browser Information. When you access THE TRAVELS from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit.
Cookie Information. We use "cookies" (small pieces of data we store for an extended period of time on your computer, mobile phone, or other device) to make THE TRAVELS easier to use, to make our advertising better, and to protect both you and THE TRAVELS. For example, we use them to store your login ID (but never your password) to make it easier for you to login whenever you come back to THE TRAVELS. We also use them to confirm that you are logged into THE TRAVELS, and to know when you are interacting with THE TRAVELS Platform applications and websites, our widgets and Share buttons, and our advertisements. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser, but in some cases that may impact your ability to use THE TRAVELS.
Information we receive from third parties:
Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:
- We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
- We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.
If in any of these cases we receive data that we do not already have, we will “anonymize” it within 180 days, meaning we will stop associating the information with any particular user. If we institute these programs, we will only use the information in the ways we explain in the “How We Use Your Information” section below.
3. Information You Share With Third Parties
We take steps to ensure that others use information that you share on THE TRAVELS in a manner consistent with your profile, but we cannot guarantee that they will follow our rules. Read the following section to learn more about how you can protect yourself when you share information with third parties.
Sharing information on THE TRAVELS. We designed our privacy settings to enable you to control how you share your information on THE TRAVELS. You should review the default profile to make sure they reflect your preferences. Here are some specific things to remember:
- You can control the visibility of most of the information you share on THE TRAVELS through the profile you select.
- Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of contacts, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings.
- Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.
- You understand that information might be re-shared or copied by other users.
- Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.
- When you post information on another user’s profile or comment on another user’s post, that information will be subject to the other user’s privacy settings.
- If you use an external source to publish information to THE TRAVELS (such as a mobile application or a Connect site), you should check the privacy setting for that post, as it is set by that external source.
“Everyone” Privacy Setting. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into THE TRAVELS), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of THE TRAVELS (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on THE TRAVELS is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on THE TRAVELS, we will remove it from your THE TRAVELS profile, but have no control over its use outside of THE TRAVELS.
You can use your privacy settings to limit which of your information is available to “everyone” (by default, every website, including those you have not connected with, can access “everyone” and other publicly available content)
You can use your application settings to limit which of your information your friends can make available to applications and websites.
We may make information about the location of your computer or access device and your age available to THE TRAVELS enhanced applications (such as location world map) and websites in order to help them implement appropriate security measures and control the distribution of age-appropriate content.
Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds or copy and paste functions, to capture and export information from THE TRAVELS, including your information and information about you.
Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on THE TRAVELS use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers. You may use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.
Links. When you click on links on THE TRAVELS you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.
4. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customized experience. Here are some of the details on how we do that:
To manage the service. We use the information we collect to provide our services and features to you, to measure and improve those services and features, and to provide you with customer support. We use the information to prevent potentially illegal activities, and to enforce our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. For example, we ask for your date of birth to verify that you are over age 18 and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate. These efforts may on occasion result in a temporary or permanent suspension or termination of some functions for some users.
To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time. We may include content you see on THE TRAVELS in the emails we send to you.
To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) We allow advertisers post their ads and reach users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.
5. How We Share Information
THE TRAVELS is about sharing information with others while providing you with privacy settings that you can use to restrict other users from accessing your information. We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you, reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. For example:
When you make a payment. When you enter into transactions with others or make payments on THE TRAVELS, we will only share transaction information with those third parties necessary to complete the transaction and will require those third parties to agree to respect the privacy of your information.
When you invite a contact to join. When you ask us to invite a friend/colleague to join THE TRAVELS, we will send your friend/colleague a message on your behalf using your name. We may also send up to two reminders to them in your name. If your friend does not want us to keep their information, we will remove it at their request.
When you choose to share your information with marketers. You may choose to share information with marketers or electronic commerce providers that are not associated with THE TRAVELS through on-site offers. This is entirely at your discretion and we will not provide your information to these marketers without your consent.
To give search engines access to publicly available information. We generally limit search engines’ access to our site. We may allow them to access information set to the “everyone” setting and your public search listing (but you can turn off your public search listing in your privacy settings).
To help improve or promote our service. Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.
To provide you with services. We may provide information to service providers that help us bring you the services we offer. For example, we may use third parties to help host our website, send out email updates about THE TRAVELS, remove repetitive information from our user lists, process payments, or provide search results or links (including sponsored links). These service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time, but when this occurs we implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to limit their use of that information to helping us provide the service.
To advertise our services. We may ask advertisers outside of THE TRAVELS to display ads promoting our services. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie, but in doing so will not share any other information with the advertiser.
To offer joint services. We may provide services jointly with other companies. If you use these services, we may share your information to facilitate that service. However, we will identify the partner and present the joint service provider’s privacy policy to you before you use that service.
To respond to legal requests and prevent harm. We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.
Transfer in the Event of Sale or Change of Control. If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.
6. How You Can View, Change, or Remove Information
Viewing and editing your profile. You may change or delete your profile information at any time by going to your profile page and clicking “Update Your Profile.” Information will be updated immediately.
Deactivating or deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to THE TRAVELS. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may deactivate your account by sending us an email.
Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on THE TRAVELS. (For example, if you post something to another user’s profile, and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an “Anonymous THE TRAVELS User.”) Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested.
Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.
7. How We Protect Information
We do our best to keep your information secure, but we need your help. For more detailed information about staying safe on THE TRAVELS.
Steps we take to keep your information secure. We keep your account information on a secured server behind a firewall. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card numbers and passwords), we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). We also use automated and social measures to enhance security, such as analyzing account behavior for fraudulent or otherwise anomalous behavior, may limit use of site features in response to possible signs of abuse, may remove inappropriate content or links to illegal content, and may suspend or disable accounts for violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
Risks inherent in sharing information. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your information, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you share your information. We cannot guarantee that only authorized persons will view your information. We cannot ensure that information you share on THE TRAVELS will not become publicly available. We are not responsible for third party circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures on THE TRAVELS. You can reduce these risks by using common sense security practices such as choosing a strong password, using different passwords for different services, and using up to date antivirus software.
Report Violations. You should report any security violations to us via email.
8. Other Terms
Changes. We may change this Privacy Policy pursuant to the procedures outlined in the THE TRAVELS Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account. If we make changes to this Privacy Policy we will notify you by publication here and on the THE TRAVELS Site . You can make sure that you receive notice directly by becoming a fan of the Page http://www.facebook.com/thetravels
Consent to Collection and Processing in the United States. By using THE TRAVELS, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.
Defined Terms. "Us," "we," "our," "Platform" and "THE TRAVELS" mean the same as they do in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. “Information” and “content” are used more generally and interchangeably here than in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities unless otherwise limited by the context.
Helpful links
http://www.facebook.com/thetravels
