Trove: Our Privacy Pledge

Why Facebook . . . and our Privacy Pledge

Why Facebook . . . and our Privacy Pledge

Welcome to Trove! Trove is a personalized news service, and we want to make sure we've got all the information we can to get you started. Connecting with the Likes and Interests in your Facebook profile will help us enhance your experience on Trove.

You will need to Facebook Connect in order to access Trove (we will have other authentication options available soon). We take your privacy very seriously and want to assure you that we will take great care in protecting your information. Taking a page from the playbook of our friends at Barcode Hero, we are adopting the following privacy pledge:

THE TROVE PRIVACY PLEDGE

• We will never post anything to your wall unless you give us permission.

• We will never contact your Facebook friends without your approval.

• We will never store your Facebook password.

• We will only use information you have made publicly available to the Facebook community.

• We encourage you to take control of how and what you share on Facebook by editing your privacy settings here.

Tell us what you think by emailing us at feedback@trove.com.

We wanted to cover the Facebook Connect stuff first; now here’s the rest of our Privacy Policy.

Trove is provided by WP Company LLC (The Washington Post) (“we” or “us”). We value your privacy. This Privacy Policy gives you information about our practices with respect to the personally identifiable information — information that could reasonably identify you — that we collect in connection with this website. Whenever you provide personally identifiable information to us, we will make an effort to link to our privacy policy.

I. Collection of Information

We may ask you to provide personally identifiable information for various reasons and at various times. For example, when you log in through Facebook Connect, we collect information about you as permitted by the Facebook Connect terms, which may include your first and last names, email address, date of birth, employment, education, profile picture, and interests. We may ask for information about users at other times, too, such as when they contact us with a question. We may combine this information with other information (including personally identifiable information) about users that we may have collected from other sources.

We may automatically collect information about you when you use this website. For instance, our web servers may automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits, where you click on this site, information about your specific interests and channels, the domain name, your IP address, Web browser software (such as Internet Explorer), and referring web site. In addition, we may place a “cookie” (a small, unique identifier text file) on your system to remember who you are. We also may include other information in our cookie files; for example, if you arrived at this site via a link from third-party site, we may include the URL of the linking page. You may opt out of the cookies delivered by us 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 us. We may combine all of this information with other information, including personally identifiable information we have collected about you.

II. Use of Information

We use the information, including personally identifiable information, that we have collected about you in several ways, including:

· To manage and administer your account, including to process and fulfill the transactions you initiate, to identify you on the site (e.g., when you post comments) to send you information related to this website or various service providers, to solicit or respond to your questions or comments, to inform you of material changes or additions to this Privacy Policy or our terms and conditions, or to contact you with legal notices.

· To send you offers and information from The Washington Post and its affiliates or from other companies whose products and services may be of interest to you.

· To provide you with a more personalized website experience by serving you more relevant content and advertising

· To conduct research on our customers’ demographics, interests and behavior, to analyze traffic patters, and generally for business analytics.

· In other ways as described to you at the point of collection or otherwise.

III. Sharing of Information

We may share the information, including personally identifiable information, that we collect about you in limited circumstances, including:

· With our parent company (The Washington Post Company) and our corporate affiliates.

· With vendors providing contractual services for The Washington Post (such as hosting vendors, list managers who facilitate or assist with communications on our behalf, companies that provide consulting or analytics services, and service providers who process payment information or transactions).

· 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 Terms and Conditions or may be causing injury to or interference with the rights or property of The Washington Post or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities; to respond to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process; in response to a request for cooperation from law enforcement or other government agency; and when we believe necessary to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, or otherwise required by law. .

· In the event that our ownership or ownership of Trove changes as a result of a merger, acquisition, or corporate transfer to another company.

· With a service provider with your permission (e.g., if you sign up as a lead).

· If you give us permission, with selected third parties for their direct marketing purposes.

· With other entities for business analytics.

· In other ways as described to you at the point of collection or otherwise.

IV. Access to Information

You can access and update personally identifiable information that you have provided to us by contacting us at feedback@trove.com

V. Data Security

We have in place administrative, technical, and physical measures to protect the information we collect online. However, 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.

VI. External Links

Many parts of this website link you to other news websites. Please note that those websites do not operate under this Privacy Policy. We recommend that you examine the privacy statements posted on those other sites to understand their procedures for collecting, using, disclosing, and protecting personal information.

VII. Persons Under Age 13

In general, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from individuals under the age of 13. Please do not send any information about yourself to us if you are under the age of 13. Should we learn that a person under 13 has provided us with personal information, we will delete that information from our database.

VIII. Content You Post and Other Public Forums

Whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information online in public forums, that information can be collected and used by others. This includes any information in comments that you post on our site or in your profile. For this reason, we encourage users not to post any sensitive information, including personal information, in any public forums.

IX. Preference-Based Advertising

Online advertising for this site 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.doubleclick.com/privacy/index.aspx.

In some cases, we and advertisers on the site 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 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.

X. Material Changes to This Privacy Policy

If we need to materially change this Privacy Policy in the future, we will notify you by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your account or by placing a prominent notice on this website. Please note that you are responsible for updating your information so that we have your current email address, and for checking the website and Privacy Policy periodically for notice of changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy may affect our use of personally identifiable information provided to us prior to our notification to you of the changes. Therefore, if you do not wish to permit changes in our use of your information, you must notify us prior to the effective date of the changes that you wish to terminate your account with us.

XI. Contacting Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at feedback@trove.com.

Effective date: August 25, 2011